OAR Issue Zero: Response
This prologue issue addresses the notion of response while being structured by a proposition to respond. At the centre of this publication is a lecture-performance by Adrian Rifkin, entitled ‘On Writing the Last Line First’. The entire issue is constituted by research-based responses to this initial prompt. These include essays, music, images, and a film program. Together, they instantiate modes and means of responding, manifesting the mechanisms of an essential yet diverse process, whereby new ideas and practices set out from previous ones.
OAR Issue 1: Sites of Research
This issue addresses the spaces and places, fields and edges of practice based and artistic research. Rather than treating the site of research as a pre-existing entity to be merely represented after observation, participation or data collection, the contributors to this issue are concerned with the generative possibilities of a wide variety of sites and their potential to enact borders, sustain or subvert existing practices, prompt new categories, or stimulate uncharted feelings within or between disciplines. Bringing together moving image works, sound-based projects, research papers, visual and textual interventions, this publication assembles a set of provocations about the conceptual and practical stakes of making site matter through research.
OAR Issue 2: Validity
This issue tackles reliability, effectiveness, correctness, plausibility, and the value of facts in practice based research across the disciplines. Inspired by Patti Lather's alternative criteria for judging research outputs - including ‘ironic’ and ‘voluptuous’ validity - this publication explores the practical manifestations of knowing and not knowing within research projects, the relations between soundness and affect, and current understandings of the maxim ‘truth to materials’. Combining research essays, fragmented narratives of research, moving image works, experimental translation, and proposals for linguistic method, the contributions gathered here at once address and test pressing considerations pertaining to validity.
OAR Issue 3: That’s All There Is
This issue addresses matters of finishing, remnants and re-visitation in practice-based projects. Contributors apply a variety of disciplinary approaches to the problems of ending and returning, touching on procedures of data collection, analysis, and output. Bringing together alternative conceptualisation and terminology, as well as more performative artistic research responses through moving image and other media, this issue offers a wide range of frameworks to address matters which otherwise might seem closed. Forms include creative writing, moving image art works, accounts of field encounters, as well as an interview with an artist who left artistic research. Contributions overwhelmingly focus on the generative possibilities of tackling ‘finishing’, rather than getting stuck in a sense of impossibility or finality.
OAR Issue 4: Working with you,
This issue tackles the way particular research contexts engender certain modes of working together and their associated processes, rituals, materials, and outcomes. Rather than preferring particular forms of collaboration, we argue our working relationships always need attention, wherever they may sit within any scale of autonomy and heteronomy.