Over the past two decades, "artistic research" has moved from a niche academic curiosity to a recognised field with its own journals, conferences, doctoral programmes and funding streams. Yet a basic question remains stubbornly open: what makes a creative project a piece of research, rather than simply a piece of art?
What Counts as Research in Art?
Traditional research is judged by its contribution to a body of knowledge, its methodology, and its capacity to be scrutinised and built upon by others. Artistic research borrows this framing but applies it to processes that are often intuitive, embodied and resistant to neat documentation. A painting, a performance or a sound installation can constitute a "finding" in itself — not merely an illustration of a finding written up elsewhere.
Knowledge Through Making
Proponents argue that making is itself a form of thinking. The studio, the rehearsal room and the editing suite become laboratories where questions are tested through material decisions rather than hypotheses and controlled variables. This is often described as "practice-based" or "practice-led" research — the artwork is both the process of inquiry and one of its outputs.
Where the Two Disciplines Diverge
Science prizes replicability and the isolation of variables; artistic research often embraces ambiguity, subjectivity and context-dependence as productive rather than as noise to be eliminated. Where a scientific paper aims to be generalisable, an artistic research project may be valued precisely for its specificity — the way a particular body, place or material shaped the outcome.
Why the Boundary Matters
How institutions define artistic research has real consequences: it determines which projects receive doctoral funding, how they are assessed, and whether practitioners are recognised within university systems built around conventional scholarship. Getting the definition right — or at least making space for multiple definitions — is essential if artistic research is to thrive on its own terms rather than being forced into a scientific mould it was never meant to fit.
About Dr. Mira Solheim
Dr. Mira Solheim is an art historian and writer focused on artistic research, Nordic visual culture and the intersection of art with technology and film. She writes for Artistic-Research.no on methodology, institutions and practice.