How Art and Research Inform One Another, or Choose Your Own Adventure

Abstract

Conventional artist statements and scholarly method statements can be inadequate for representing the intersections and overlaps of art practice and research. This essay employs autobiography to narrate relationships between the author’s art practice and scholarly research, and draws on feminist methods and histories of technology to assess the usefulness of this exercise. In contrast to modes of writing in the arts and humanities that emphasize clear outcomes and the production of single-authored works, the author documents how ideas and projects are collectively shaped, and how failures and socially-situated turning points inform the trajectory of any given work.