Glossary of Artistic Research Terms

Adventure constitutes a leap into the unknown and the forging of a pathway hitherto unforged. All research is a kind of adventure, and artistic research offers a particular type of adventure in which the form of the articulation is also the locus of adventure, in addition to the overall research journey of discovery. Research questions are posed through creative expressions such as fiction or poetry.

Investigation is derived from Latin investigatus, past participle of investigare "to trace out, search after," figuratively "search into". Vestigare in turn relates to vestigium: "footprint, track". Genetic Criticism, the study of literary writing processes, offers unique possibilities to investigate how leaving written traces, or vestiges, on paper or screen, can be considered an act of aesthetic investigation.  (See Adventure, Artistic Research, Genetic Criticism).

As the literary construction of the self, autofiction adds a varying degree of fictional elements to the narration of an aspect of themselves or their life. The myriad ways in which this can be done represents the spectrum of autofictional texts that have spawned in 21st-century literature, but there are examples from earlier times to be found as well.

Originally, character (Old French "caratere," Latin "character," and Greek "kharaktēr") means a "symbol marked or branded on the body" and evolved through various meanings, including "alphabetic letter" and "graphic symbol" in the late 15th century. The specific sense of "character" as a "person in a play or novel" first appeared in the 1660s, referring to the defining qualities assigned to a person by an author. This usage reflects the broader meaning of character as the "sum of qualities that define a person or thing," which dates back to the 1640s.

Literary Characters are in other words intimately connected to the process of leaving symbols on a surface, a practice usually known as writing. Genetic Criticism, the study of literary writing processes, allows us to follow the network of traces that results in the production of "interiorities" and "psyches" endowed with some material reality (Latour). At the same time, reading the writing processes of authors can encourage us to reflect about why we so much like to understand literary characters as native, autochthonous, primordial, authentic, aboriginal, individuals. (See Heros/Heroines, In-divduals).

The creation of a persona to act, enact or somehow embody a concept is a gesture drawn from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In What Is Philosophy (1991) Deleuze and Guattari discuss a number of philosophers who have created characters who illuminate an aspect of their thought. These personae operate by breathing life into the philosophers’ concepts; by fleshing them out and dramatising them. (See Heteronym).

Combining critique with creative figurations, as outlined by philosopher Rosi Braidotti in The Posthuman (2013) and many other of her texts, is a way of inspiring the humanities with transdisciplinary thought. Artistic Research constitutes the combination of these approaches to produce new and different texts, looking both into past versions of texts (see Genetic Criticism) and creating entirely new texts that spring from the original text of study (see Xenogenetic Writing).

The process of defamiliarisation can be described as a shift in perception so that objects are apprehended not through regular recognition and understanding but through a fresh and different lens. This alternative mode of perception can be utilised in artistic research as a tool to present information differently, to ‘tell the truth, but tell it slant’, in the words of poet Emily Dickinson.

Our research focus of Genetic Criticism studies early drafts, different versions and rewritings of a literary text, uncovering implicit patterns and developments, and illuminating the text with theories of aesthetic production. This research highlights the significance of the writing process in the development and meaning-making of a literary text. (See Xenogenetic Writing).

With the appearance of the literary heroes and heroines of Greco-Roman antiquity, Hannah Arendt has pointed out, the meaning of 'epiphany' was expanded from the appearance (epipháneia/adventus) of a god to the immanent features of "andres epiphaneis, that is, heroic humans who are fully manifest, highly conspicuous" and immediately present (Life, 172f.).

In what is often seen as the first adventure story in literary history, Homer's Odyssey, the word 'hero' is "a name given each free man who participated in the Trojan enterprise and about whom a story could be told." (Arendt, Condition). Studying the adventure of writing thus makes tangible and memorable the appearance or epiphany of characters.

The heroines and heroes of modern literature, from Shakespeare to Wool, are radically permeable to the world. The way in which modern writers expose their characters to the absolute particularity of their surroundings provides these characters with the flair of radical incalculability. It makes of them, in other words, often enough, strictly ungovernable in-dividuals. (See Adventure, Character, Conceptual Persona, Heteronym, In-dividuals).

A literary heteronym is a persona who is separate from the author but connected to them; a concrete but fictional alter-ego. This phenomenon might occur in autofiction (see Autofiction). Authors such as Fernando Pessoa created multiple heteronyms in their oeuvres; scores of alternative personae who both were and were not Pessoa himself. These characters had distinct biographies and characteristics.

Thinking of writers as individuals could mean that they exist in undivided, that is, in-dividual continuity with their writing environment. In the process of writing, there are phases when authors get fully entangled with their characters, storylines, made-up worlds, memories, and ideas. Thinking of writers as subjects, by contrast, highlights the infinite and potentially ineffable mystery of the self: the irreducible difference between social identity and personal identity (Goffman), "me" and "I" (Mead). The idea of writers as subjects emerged in the Romantic period.

In the coining of a new word, a new concept, thought and sensation is also coined. The gesture of neologism is widened out in artistic research to the level of the sentence, the paragraph or even the entire text. In artistic research, a new and different text is coined which separates it from the original text that inspired it (see Xenogenetic Writing).

Opacity, or the quality of impenetrability to radiation such as light, is used as a term when something is either partially or completely kept secret or difficult to understand. This concept has been used by writer Édouard Glissant in terms of political resistance and emancipation, whereby the right to opacity avoids an appeal to the ‘universal human’ and instead accepts that there are parts of us that cannot be understood completely. In artistic research, this can be understood as a variable property of the medium of writing with which we conduct our research: a material medium that displays degrees of thickness and impenetrability (see Translucency).

Originally, "scene" was used to refer to a hut or a tent behind the stage of ancient Greek theatre used for the changing of masks and costumes. Exploring the scene of writing through an author's letters, diaries, marked books, or other reading material we often discover a similar intermediary zone: between fictional and non-fictional discourse, between professional and private roles, between real-life persons and imagined characters, between art and life, life and work.

Fabulation comes from the Latin word ‘fabula’ or story and has been discussed by Ridvan Askin in his book Narrative and Becoming (2016) as an operation that is by definition creative and speculative. The explicit connection of speculation and fabulation appears in Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble (2016), where Haraway discusses speculative fabulation alongside science fiction as the kind of ‘worlding’ or world-building necessary to write posthuman futures.

Simulation, Friedrich Kittler has argued, needs to be distinguished from imitation (or mimesis). Often, literature imitates reality: especially, realist narratives manipulate symbols (signs) and their meanings in such a way that we think we see, or even inhabit, a world.

Simulation, by contrast, manipulates real data, events, or bodies. For example, the anti-aircraft gun developed by computer scientist Norbert Wiener during WW2 calculated the future position of German bombers by sampling and storing the past positions of the enemy aircraft: "Through the accumulation of these products, a new estimate is recursively generated, predicting the enemy's near future." (Kittler, Simulation und Fiktion, free translation).

The term Symulation brings these two ways of thinking about literary representation together (sym): symulation means to imitate the simulation of reality and to simulate the imitation of reality. For example, studying how the final episode of his novel Ulysses (1922) was written shows that James Joyce worked on simulating a literary imitation of a woman's stream of thought; and, at the same time, he imitated a literary simulation of a woman's stream of thought. (See Neologism).

Writing is a technique including certain methods and procedures, and it is a technology including different tools. Writing as technique and technology connects the writer with a complex field of power including economic interests (publishers), scientific discourses (medicine, psychology), and media control. By studying the technogenesis of literary works, we can therefore explore how processes of creativity are related to these technologies and techniques of power.  (See Xenogenesis).

When light passes through a medium and the photons are diffused or scattered, we call this phenomenon translucency. Rather than transparency whereby the light passes through as easily as through a glass window, or opacity whereby nothing at all can pass through the medium (see Opacity), a translucent medium adds its own colours and hues, so that the process of perception changes the essence of that which is being communicated.

The ‘mirror-image’ of genetic criticism, our research focus on Xenogenetic Writing begins with an existing literary text, then takes a leap into the unknown (see Adventure) through a creative and critical (see Creative-Critical Writing) engagement with that text, through the production of a new and different text. The ‘xeno-’ type of genesis occurs when the offspring is entirely ‘other’ than the parent, this concept is used in science fiction and speculative writing where new and alien species are created or born.