Collateral Concepts: A Provisional Vocabulary for Artistic Research

Published by sternberg-press.com / Distributed by mitpress.mit.edu, ideabooks.nl,  artdata.co.uk, lespressesdureel.com.

What have been the key discussions, presentations, and publications that shaped the discourse—and potential paradigm formation—of artistic research? To answer that question, this book departs from twenty research projects that its author (co-) developed over the past decade at various venues, such as Bucharest Biennale, Guangzhou Triennial, Kuva/Tila Helsinki, Kuandu Biennale, ATM Manchester, Nottingham Contemporary, Research Pavilion Venice, Seoul Mediacity Biennale, BAK Utrecht, and On Curating Zurich. These projects all relate to different issues, problem statements, and urgencies that determine the emerging field of artistic research.

In artistic research practices, concepts play a decisive role. They paradigmatically relate to topical concerns: concepts are regularly expanded, often adjusted, and sometimes even novel concepts arise during the process of inquiry. And that is precisely the case in the twenty research projects discussed in this book. Each research project further articulates a distinct concept from within artistic practice. Thus, in the realization of these projects, a series of concepts appears that could provide an impetus for the development of a vocabulary for research-based artistic inquiries. With that aim in mind—and also to emphasize the provisional nature of such concepts—Collateral Concepts chooses to resituate the conceptual frameworks of the twenty research projects, strategically employing the critique of the alphabetical order as articulated in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.

Such an atypical form of charting fits seamlessly with an approach to artistic research as presented by the author in his seminal publication The Pleasure of Research. Roland Barthes’ thinking formed as well an important source of inspiration for this book which evaluates and situates the discussion on artistic research in the preceding decade. After all, it was Barthes who, in The Pleasure of the Text, drew attention to the disciplinary capacity of the academic order and how textuality—like artistic research today—confronts this as a “gaya scienza” with another mode of knowledge and meaning making insisting on incompleteness and non-closure.

A similar semiotic strategy could be noticed in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Alphabetical order, from Diderot's Encyclopedia to the current online lexicons and vocabularies, has long been a conventional form of organizing knowledge that pretended completeness. Barthes, however, shifted this mode of organizing knowledge entirely when he started to arrange his texts alphabetically based on concepts that emerged while rewriting them. And this is exactly the converse of the comprehensive logic of the dictionary, as for Barthes the concept arises from the utterance, rather than the utterance proceeding from the concept.

The emergence of concepts as collateral processes was also aptly expressed by Deleuze and Guattari; philosophers whose work has continued to be an important source of inspiration for situating artistic research over the past decades. When Deleuze and Guattari reflect on their own thinking processes in What is Philosophy?, they do so by questioning what oscillates in the space between ordinary words and condensed theories, namely the concept. A concept, both philosophers argue, is not the outcome of an ontological activity, but is rather an experimental, empiricist pursuit aimed at making urgent, constantly changing problems visible. As a result these tentative concepts are incessantly in flux: they appear and disappear.

This changing nature of the concept explains the provisional status of any encyclopedic order, says Roland Barthes in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. To radicalize this insight, Barthes’ publication presents the alphabetical order as an open register: a non-chronologizing anti-structure that prevents the different fragments from sliding into a single narrative of continuity and disciplinarity—“the order of things”—which would be the coherent structure of the book, its meaning.

The twenty concepts of Collateral Concepts—such as Care, Ecology, Knowledge, Method, and Value—adopt a similar, essayistic approach to the heteronomous practices of the as yet open and experimental domain that we nowadays refer to as artistic research. Thus, each text—each deployed concept—offers its own beginning and entrance to explore the ceaselessly evolving field of artistic research in a provisional way. That does not lead to definitive assertions, theories or conclusions, but rather to an assemblage of inspiring hints that invite the reader to co-reflect on the meaning, role, and position that concepts emerging from creative practices play in further articulating artistic research as an idiosyncratic mode of inquiry. 

Collateral Concepts: A Provisional Vocabulary for Artistic Research 
Access; Care; Curating; Ecology; Engagement; Exhaustion; Experimentality; Freedom; Imagination; Judgment; Knowledge; Method; Performative; Practice; Research; Seminar; Spatial Practice; Speculation; Time; Value.

The target audience includes Master and Doctoral students and educators from across the arts and humanities, and also artistic researchers both in formal (academy, university, research centers) and informal settings (independent practitioners).

2026, English/12x19 cm, 144 pages, softcover/ISBN 978-1-915609-94-6                      

Series: The Contemporary Condition, Sternberg Press / Series Editors: Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund / Author: Henk Slager / Design: Dexter Sinister / Final Editor: Annette W. Balkema / Copublishers: Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions at Aarhus University and HKU University of the Arts Utrecht.