Practice as Method: Why Artistic Research Matters More Than Ever

For much of the 20th century, the academy drew a sharp line between doing and thinking. The artist created; the scholar interpreted. But over the past two decades, that boundary has not only blurred — it has begun to dissolve entirely. At the vanguard of this shift is artistic research: a mode of inquiry where the creative act itself becomes the primary site of knowledge production.

In Norway, this paradigm has found a particularly fertile home. The Norwegian Film School at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences now offers a dedicated PhD programme in Artistic Research in Film and Related Audiovisual Art Forms — one of the first of its kind in Scandinavia. Rooted firmly in artistic practice, the programme is designed for filmmakers, visual artists, and media practitioners who want to treat their craft as a research methodology. As the school puts it, the artistic practice "shall form the core of the artistic doctoral outcome," accompanied by "explicit reflection" that allows others to engage with the insights generated through the creative process.

This is not theory applied to art. It is art as theory — a distinction with profound implications for how we understand knowledge itself.

Why Now? The Digital Acceleration

The timing is no coincidence. As the Norwegian Film School observes, "new technologies are transforming work processes in audio-visual productions and allow for new formats on new platforms." The digital shift has collapsed traditional production cycles, democratised access to high-end tools, and opened up entirely new aesthetic territories. Generative AI, real-time rendering, networked installations, virtual production — these are not merely technical novelties. They fundamentally reshape what it means to make, and therefore what it means to know.

Consider the Nordic Film Market, held annually at the Göteborg Film Festival. In 2026, a record 700 delegates from 35 countries gathered to showcase over 70 projects. The market now includes works-in-progress sessions, international co-financing pitches, and deep conversations about creative survival in a shrinking theatrical market. One session, titled "Wonderful Things That Work," brought together filmmakers Isabella Eklöf, Milad Alami, and Benedikt Erlingsson to discuss how creative integrity and structural savvy can coexist. This is artistic research in the wild — practitioners reflecting publicly on the conditions of their practice, generating knowledge that travels.

The Norwegian Context: A Quiet Lab

Norway occupies a unique position in this landscape. It has generous public funding for the arts, a strong tradition of documentary and experimental film, and institutions that are increasingly willing to certify artistic practice as research. The Artistic Research Forum, now in its seventh year, brings together practitioners from across the country to share methodologies, present works, and debate standards of evaluation. These forums happen both physically and digitally — a hybrid model that mirrors the very themes they explore.

At the same time, the Research Catalogue, maintained by the Society for Artistic Research, has become an indispensable international database for sharing practice-based work in formats that go beyond the traditional text. Video essays, interactive documentation, annotated portfolios — these are the genres through which artistic research finds its public.

What Artistic Research Offers Academia

For too long, the humanities have operated within a linguistic and textual cage. We write about paintings, analyse films frame by frame, and produce meta-commentary on cultural phenomena. Artistic research offers a way out — not by abandoning analysis, but by making the act of making central to the analytical process.

When a filmmaker makes a documentary about Sámi land rights, the choices she makes — about framing, about access, about narrative structure — are not merely aesthetic decisions. They are epistemological ones. They encode assumptions about whose story matters, how truth is constructed, and what visual evidence can and cannot convey. A peer-reviewed article can describe these choices. But the film itself, as a made object, can enact them. This is the core insight of practice-based research: that the knowledge is in the doing.

A Challenge to the Metrics Regime

Artistic research also offers a quiet but powerful critique of the audit culture that has overtaken higher education. Where traditional research is measured in citation counts and impact factors, artistic research insists on other kinds of value: aesthetic resonance, public engagement, emotional truth, formal innovation. These are harder to quantify, but they are no less real — and arguably more durable.

In the Nordic countries, where trust in public institutions remains high, there is room to advocate for a more generous definition of research impact. The challenge ahead is to build evaluation frameworks that do not force artistic research into the mould of the social sciences, but recognise it on its own terms.

Looking Ahead

As we move deeper into the 2020s, artistic research will only grow in importance. The digital transformation of creative industries demands practitioners who can think critically about their tools. The climate crisis demands new forms of storytelling that move beyond information delivery into genuine emotional engagement. And a cultural landscape fractured by algorithmic distribution demands artists who can reflect on — and push back against — the systems they work within.

The Norwegian Film School's PhD programme, the Nordic Film Market's record attendance, and the growing network of practice-based researchers across Scandinavia are all signs that this mode of inquiry has arrived. Not as a niche subfield, but as a serious, rigorous, and urgently needed way of understanding the world through making.

The question is no longer whether artistic research belongs in the academy. It is whether the academy is willing to be reshaped by what artistic research has to teach it.