ACKnowledge
ACKnowledge
ACKnowledge ("Artists Community Knowledge") investigates art as alternative, embodied and situated knowledge and the ways in which artists create, organize and share this knowledge.
In three subprojects, we researched three specific artists' communal knowledge practices:
- 1.) art libraries and archives;
- 2.) artists' self-organizations and their concepts of autonomy
- 3.) artists' material craft practices
As artistic research in collaboration with these communities, our project tried to identify and develop:
- new concepts and practices of improved access to libraries and archives, using digital tools
- new concepts and practices of understanding autonomy in relation to the arts
- new concepts and practices of preserving the heritage and work with analogue media, such as print and film, in the digital age.
Often, these concepts and practices exist as implicit and tacit knowledge within their artists communities. With our project, we wanted to literally acknowledge this knowledge and help making it more explicit and accessible to larger publics.
Our research question was:
Which knowledge is embodied in contemporary arts practices, and how can we share it with a larger public?
For our three subprojects - on libraries, autonomy, crafts - this general question spawned the following more specific questions:
- Can data science and design approaches that, to date, are primarily being used for commercial purposes, also be used to make cultural libraries publicly accessible and provide them with new reading infrastructures that allow new forms of participation for user communities?
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Can new concepts of autonomy that artists use in their self-organized communities be explicated and inform art institutions and other areas of society?
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Can the individual and specific crafts knowledge of particular artists' communities be translated into more general knowledge on crafts and media for other groups of people?
All subprojects had as a goal to (a) help to strengthen the communities they are investigating and (b) make artists' new ideas on libraries, autonomy and crafts/media accessible to our external project partners (Kunstinstituut Melly, Het NIeuwe Instituut, ...), art schools and universities, and a general public.
Which forms of artist community knowledge we researched
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In the subproject on libraries and archives: data literacy, the use of semantic technologies to involve the community in labelling data. Making data models explicit and open for debate. The ways and the extent to which the body of knowledge in libraries can turn into machine readable data, and the collection as data ready for distribution and publishing.
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In the subproject on artist's autonomy: the way artists practice, create and understand autonomy, how they rethink and experimentally create autonomy outside art spaces (for example, in local community projects, Open Source social media, and in alternative economies), how this differs from traditional concepts of aesthetic and artistic autonomy, even changing the concept of autonomy as such, moving it away from its traditional Western history, semantics and terminology and contrasting it with non-Western concepts and terms ("mandiri", "自治 [zìzhì]" ).
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In the subproject on audiovisual craft practices, this concerns the extent to which these practices can help us rethink ways in which craft heritage may be recorded and accessed.
Questions that the project raised:
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digital visualization and communication tools need to be shared among several institutes.
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digital sustainability is an unsolved issue, for the archives that we created for this project, for the communication and publishing platforms we used for workshops and small publications, and for many of the artists community practices themselves.
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precarity and instability of the artists practices we are researching conversely affect our research and conclusions.
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much of our research is site/community/situation-specific and not always transferable
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not only are we addressing communities, but our project needed to address several communities; it can not only be created for a single institute but needs to be a public service.
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the art practices we research need to engage their chosen local communities while also needing to be institutionally, and structurally supported.
Our conclusions:
There is a common misunderstanding of artists' communal practices as being project-based. That misunderstanding even exists in the arts themselves and terms such as "project spaces", "artists projects" or "project art" in conjunction with multidisciplinary, collective and non-museum/non-gallery art practices. This is a problematic legacy of the Western conceptual arts of the 1970s and the critical perception of their work as mobile, temporary, and "dematerialized".^[Lippard, Lucy R. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972; Praeger, 1973.] In reality, the artist collectives we worked on, and with, do not merely create (temporary) projects, but do long-term community work. Unlike projects, they have no defined end. They are trajectories, not projects, or more precisely: (self-built) infrastructures into which most contributors have long-term (often lifelong) investments.
While the knowledge gathered and shared in this communal work can transcend generations of people, it typicall exists in alternative, non-public archives, depends on person-to-person sharing and transmission, and is therefore fragile and prone to loss.
Cultural heritage institutions, on the other hand, are often not equipped to host these communities and safeguard their knowledge, because of their often traditional ways of working, and because of cultural and organizational differences with artists' self-organization.
The misperception of artists' community knowledge as being project-based results in precarity of these practices; while they are long-term infrastructural endeavors, they typically live from no institutional support at all, or from temporary project funding to temporary project funding. A follow-up to our research could be to investigate how new infrastuctures and institutions could be built that do justice to artists' community knowledge and long-term community engagement.