I Experience as I Experiment – I Experiment as I Experience.Experience and experimentality in artistic work and research

Abstract

I Experience as I Experiment – I Experiment as I Experience brings together thoughts on the origin of an artwork and on the need for making it. In the 17 texts in this collection, the authors discuss how (or why) their artworks relate to their artistic re- search practice, and what roles experience and experimentality play in their artistic research. The texts address these issues by investigating both momentary experiences (elämykset, Erlebnisse) and experience as something accumulated over time (kokemus, Erfahrung) in the context of the everyday work of artists involved in art making, artistic research and teaching at the university level.

The artworks associated with the texts are on show in the Exhibition Laboratory gallery (Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki) from 27.11.–11.12.2019 and the texts and the works are both discussed by the artist researchers on 10 December 2019 at the KuvA research Days conference. I Experience as I Experiment – I Experiment as I Experience is an attempt to elucidate and communicate different strategies of implementing artistic research in 2019. The focus is on research in experience that is conducted through artistic practice. Experience-related issues are experimentally aggregated, collected, repositioned, restaged, linked and relinked. The empty pages between the chapters of this book are left there for you, dear reader, to make notes of thoughts or sketches of the artworks in the exhibition. If you get this book only after the exhibition, you can imagine the works and experience perhaps something of them through the texts. In any case, it is you who bring together the artworks and the texts.