enabling knowledge

The following is an enhanced transcript of a keynote address presented at the ‘sensuous knowledge’ conference in Solstrand, Norway, in November 2006. To maintain the character of a live presentation, the transcript has been kept in the first person singular and some of the image material used has been inserted. The presentation tried to introduce a new dimension into the discussion about where knowledge is located in relation to artworks and artistic production. It is based upon semi-structured interviews with three artists – whose production appears disparate, but who nonetheless share a fundamental interest for learning – which will be taken in conjunction with a consideration of some aspects of my own production as an artist in relation to knowledge and supported by a brief analysis of some of the positions adopted in relation to art and research that were published in the UK between 2000 and 2004.
Introduction
I am a practising artist who has been working in art schools now for eighteen years, and I still think they are fantastic, vibrant places. My aim – and I presume the aim of all my colleagues worldwide – is to make them even better. However, this cannot happen in isolation from our professional context – the art world. We certainly provide a service to this professional context, as we try to equip students to be successful in it, but it is also our role to challenge, question and criticise it. Here, research comes into the picture, as the bridge between our schools and the world around us.
It can be asked, however, whether artists and art schools have a common starting point when it comes to research. At the time of writing, the art schools) enter into this relationship and demand academic credit. The general tenor in the German-speaking countries, for example – where art education is focused on feedback between a student and, in most cases, only one professor, – is that whatever enquiry takes place should only manifest itself in artistic production. The goal is acceptance in the professional world of art, which is generally understood as the top level of the art market and the publicly-funded institutions. In this context, academic recognition is of lesser importance, and it is not considered necessary to add a research dimension to individual artistic production.  
While this might make sense for art careers as they are commonly understood, it differs in the institutions of higher art education in the UK and for the artists working in them as all publicly-funded educational institutions are expected to contribute to the sustainability of our future. I propose that higher art education institutions should examine the conditions for artistic production and its influence on the development of our societies. Furthermore, this important task should be underpinned by research which is intentionally conducted by practising artists and manifested in artworks. As this suggestion risks the danger of alienating research from artistic practice, the reconciliation of these two seemingly disparate approaches remains a primary concern. 

Background: Reasons to Research
I first became involved in the discussions around research in and through the arts, in Bergen [1], about ten years ago, when we began to consider research and artistic development at Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen (KHiB). In 1998, a report on research conducted by the Norwegian government included a comparison between artists and researchers [2]. It said that creativity and innovation are the result of a fruitful correlation between inspiration, hard work, broad knowledge and often a lot of time. This would be the case for successful artists and for good researchers [3]. 
The rector-director team at KHiB picked up on this and asked for equivalent support for the arts as was being granted to science-based subjects. As a result, the Norwegian Ministry of Education granted KHiB seed funding for research and development, which was the first time that such funding had been made available to an art school in Norway. This has led to much more substantial support, including ‘stipendiatstillinger’ earmarked for the arts, fully-funded places (including bursaries) for three years of study at the same level as a PhD and with the same financial support, but without the title. 
When our team presented these initiatives in European forums in the late 1990s, some of our colleagues in the UK wondered why we would engage with research in the absence of any financial need [4]. Since arriving in the UK in 2002 [5], the predominance of this type of argument has faded as it has become increasingly clear that an involvement with research can substantially strengthen the arts and its institutions.
Prompted by the Bergen/Glasgow experience, I began to follow international discussions around research in the arts, and – through an involvement with the European League of Institutes of the Arts (ELIA) – I represented Glasgow School of Art as a partner in the ‘re:search in and through the arts’ [6] project, which began to chart the differences in approaches to artistic research in Europe. At the 9th biannual ELIA conference in 2006, research was top of the agenda and, as a consequence, I was asked to draft a paper outlining ELIA’s position on the relationship between higher art education and research, which is currently being finalised by the ELIA executive group.[7] One of the points I make in this document is that there is an obvious need for a European and international exchange of experience with research in art schools. This should ideally lead to an international pool of knowledge being developed, which will enable us to learn from mistakes and provide the opportunity to develop – on our own terms – criteria for quality in artistic research. It should also help us to position artistic research in terms of the contribution it makes to our societies. 
In Glasgow, I have been involved in shaping the research culture of the School of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art. Among other things, we have established studio55, a research centre for artistic practice. Taking its name from the physical location of the office within the School and referencing Barnett Newman’s studio 35 project [8], the centre provides the infrastructure to support individual researchers and to encourage colleagues who are new to research. It is also a vehicle for stimulating and evidencing the Fine Art-specific research culture in Glasgow, with a focus on knowledge arising from the ongoing dialogue between artists, while seeking to include international partners in our locally-generated discourse. The centre also produces a peer-reviewed journal in electronic form, which is completely devoted to research in and through the arts, with an emphasis on critically-engaged practice [9]

I base my engagement with research in Higher Art Education and as an artist, on the understanding that artistic approaches may be edgy and full of contradictions. They may seemingly embrace too many risks or have an excessive sense of the essential, by constantly shifting focus from details to the bigger picture. Reconciled with intuition – sometimes painstakingly simple and methodical, sometimes rather non-scientific and complex – artistic practice aims to grasp, rather than analyse and understand.  It is my long-term goal to provide new insights in the ongoing investigation into whether artistic approaches produce knowledge. With this in mind, it must be in our own interest as artists and as art schools to place artistic practice right in the centre of our social communities, rather than on the fringes, in a distanced – though highly cultivated – orbit [10]. This necessitates an engagement with research and, while it may be uncomfortable to broaden our artistic horizons and allow research-equivalent thinking into our discourse, avoiding doing so, or even resisting it, could prove to be fighting the wrong windmills.
We should not forget that advocating art in the context of research is an area of potential conflict and that the borders between research and practice remain blurred. From artists studying anatomy – to inform their representation of the human figure – to artists collaborating with scientists and technology experts, research is a common and well-established procedure, informing artists in the preparatory phase of making works of art. To claim a unique and original contribution to knowledge, however, it is necessary to understand that artistic praxis in itself can be a powerful method through which to undertake research. While this does not necessarily imply that all art-making is research, this paper argues that an explicit examination of the relationship between art and learning might help to clarify what kind of contribution this is.
As a starting point, this paper proposes the following sequential arguments:
Art is about learning
Learning is linked to knowledge
Knowledge is the aim of research
Ergo: art itself has a strong research potential
To inform the development of this argument and to clarify definitions of research in relation to artistic practice, this paper is divided into three chapters: 1. Indirect knowledge: By reflecting on the work of three artists, this chapter investigates the relationship between artwork and knowledge. 2. Three directions: This chapter asks whether research should be considered as leading up to artworks, or as coming from them. It also tries to give a brief summary of how academics in the field – specifically Brown/Gough/Roddis [11], McCleod [12] and Biggs [13] – attempt to define typologies of research in art and design and attempt to locate knowledge in relation to artistic production. 3. Knowledge trigger: Using my own work as an example, this chapter investigates how an artist’s preferences and curiosity might trigger a research chain. This falls under the headings ‘unforeseen knowledge’ and ‘released knowledge’. 4. Enabling knowledge: The concluding chapter considers the social dimension of knowledge and invites the inclusion of ‘enabling to know’ in all discussions of practice-led research in and through the arts.

Indirect knowledge 
Every year, in early October, the School of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art stages a staff exhibition. This coincides with the start of the academic year and gives students the opportunity to learn how some of their tutors enrich the art sector of their culture. In 2005, we linked the exhibition to the launch of our studio55 research centre. Three colleagues with a distinct approach to research – Christine Borland, Professor Thomas Joshua Cooper and Peter McCaughey – were selected for the exhibition with the aim of clearly demonstrating how these three regard their work as artists in relation to research. 
During individual conversations with the three artists, I posed the following questions:
What position does research occupy in your practice? How important is practice in your concept of research? When does your research take place? Before: i.e. underpinning your practice, as something that happens in advance? In parallel: i.e. as an integral part of your practice? Afterwards: i.e. as a spin-off from your practice? As a result of your research/practice, what do you know now that you did not know before you undertook it? What would others encountering your research/practice know that they did not know before?

Of course, being typical artists, we digressed and all three conversations were very different. From them, I formulated a small paper which was presented at a seminar and launch event prior to the exhibition opening. I will attempt to summarise my findings here, with direct quotations from the artists interspersing the text throughout.

Peter McCaughey
Peter McCaughey has recently been drawn into collaborations with designers and architects. He has found himself working with teams of master-planners, not necessarily to develop a product – rather to make proposals for contextual enhancements within areas ear-marked for regeneration. Central to these projects is communication with specific communities with a vested interest in the site, identifying key values that should be maintained throughout the forthcoming period of dramatic change, on the understanding that simply erasing the past can lead to a sterile future. Thus, research takes place in advance, forming a preparatory phase after which an artwork will be distilled from the accumulated information, either in the form of a physical contribution to the site or as a concept, feeding into the architectural and social planning process.
For McCaughey, as all work is born on site, an ability to adapt is vital to the process of constant negotiation between all the determining factors.
Peter: ‘What’s interesting about the experience of working with architects, designers and planners is the difference in approach to deadlines. They don’t want to keep things open for too long; they want to close things down early.’
Do artists innovate too much? Is the constant oscillation between the useful and the playful an internal closed circuit, which narrows down the options too early? A possible answer could be that what has been made might only be the second priority, but the fact that it has been made at all might be a higher priority.
Peter: ‘Work is the explanation of an idea. Making might be the excuse. The process around the work is in the foreground.’

In relation to urban regeneration, McCaughey mentioned phantom pains, or the memory of something long gone. A pertinent local example is a part of Glasgow called the Gorbals, which has long had a reputation as a gritty and rough area that has been erased and rebuilt twice in this century alone. As part of an attempt to clear the slum tenements (originally attempted by the City Improvement Trust in 1866), the Glasgow Corporation replaced them with new high-rise housing in the 1960s. The poor design and low-quality construction of twenty-storey concrete flats meant that many of the blocks developed damp and structural problems, which led to innumerable health and social problems in the area. Throughout the 1980s, the Gorbals was often referred to as the most dangerous place in the UK, as street gangs and casual violence were rife. The most infamous of these schemes, Queen Elizabeth Square, was demolished in 1993 to make way for a new generation of housing development. In 2004, Glasgow City Council announced plans to demolish yet more of the decaying high-rise blocks and to comprehensively refurbish and re-clad others. Much of the area has now been comprehensively redeveloped for the third time, to provide a mix of private and social housing [14]. Memory is an important aspect of the work McCaughey selected for the staff exhibition. The Barr Project, brought his father’s siblings – now scattered all over the world – back to the house in rural Ireland in which they grew up sixty years ago. Each member of the family was asked to position themselves in the landscape, at a location that was important to them. They were then interviewed and filmed on site, in the place of their memories. 
In talking about the work, McCaughey mentioned many different types of memory – collective memory, memory triggered by the site, borrowed memory (in the form of records of tradition), mis-memory, spontaneous memory and even collective epiphany – but it was always confined to those participating in the project, as a form of private knowledge. Being part of this project will certainly have an effect on the participants, but will it also affect others? Questions remain as to whether this is relevant for people beyond the immediate family; at which point would these memories become knowledge? 
This understanding of research, as preparatory work leading to self-contained knowledge, seems to contradict one of the definitions offered by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [15]:
The key requirement is that the work should bring about enhancements in knowledge and understanding in the discipline, or in related disciplinary areas. It must be pointed out that this requirement excludes research to provide content.  For example, if a film-maker wanted to make a film about refugees, the research questions should be about the process of making the film, not the experience of the refugees.   
McCaughey argued that, in this example, ‘the value might not be making the film, but the impact on the life of the refugees.’ This points to the perpetual dilemma faced by social scientists undertaking field research, which will be influenced by their mere presence. Indeed, closer parallels can be drawn between the arts and social sciences with respect to methodology and knowledge-generation than are possible between the arts and the more empirical natural sciences.
So, should we test the impact of our work and, if so, how? How do we understand what we have done? How do we know what it has done to others?
McCaughey elaborated on his conception of learning – his own learning as well as his interest in teaching. A typical way in which artists might learn would be to make something that appears simple, simultaneously open and concise, which provides both distant and close involvement for the learner including a consideration of its failures. Would a good researcher do the same?
Peter: ‘Do not live your life to make art; make art to live your life.’
Could we say that this approach produced an indirect knowledge – that is, knowledge indirectly transferred to an audience?

Thomas Joshua Cooper began our conversation by claiming that the content of his work is more important than the research that informs it. Practice leads the research, which necessitates further practice. 
Thomas: ‘I do not take photographs; I make photographs.’
He is currently in the middle of a very extensive project – making pictures at the outermost edges of the global landmasses, offering a view out to the sea. The photographs themselves do not reveal the location at which they are made; they could be from anywhere. In order to carry out this project, Cooper has to undertake research in the fields of geography, geology and history. So, is this about how to make better pictures or about how to make better geology? 
Thomas: ‘More the former, but with an impact on the latter.’ 
In talking to people from the Times World Atlas, Cooper discovered that even most cartographers have not been to these places. 
Thomas: ‘No one experiences these places anymore; they might even disappear under water because of global warming.’
After the groundwork comes the actual field trip; they are solid expeditions, investigative in themselves, involving guides and other local expertise. Often, after a long time spent travelling, only a few hours are available to make the work, with important decisions being made on site. While Global Positioning Systems are essential in identifying and finding each location, even with the help of satellite pictures the work could not be based on decisions made in advance. Construction and decision-making on site are essential.
Thomas: ‘Nowadays urban centres are the source for culture. I am more indifferent to it.As much as I am interested in the cultural edge (geographically), I am also not a mainstream maker, as I am not working with an urban context and I am not doing urban things. My view of landscape is not about how it is built, but how it is seen. I don’t want to know what somebody else thinks something would look like.’
Cooper points out that meteorologists are sent for basic observational studies for up to six years, spending six months, studying weather patterns at each different site. Cooper takes a similar, though slightly less time-consuming, approach and calls this act of cherishing the consequence of looking ‘primary observation’. In the end, his photographs have a deliberate quality of looking alike. Although so much effort has been invested in getting to those very different and remote places, everything looks familiar, ordinary and simple.
Thomas: ‘The reason for that is it takes the threat out of diversity and differences. We are hostile to the unfamiliar, so I want to make what seems to be so different look similar. The practice is private; the research is public. The private is about my own learning; I have to know things in order to try making.’
But how does that private knowledge become public knowledge?
Thomas: ‘First: there is nothing new under the sun, but none of us have seen everything. Are we even capable of recognising new knowledge? Maybe we can talk about additional knowledge.’
Thomas: ‘But, what is useful about art is that it begins to tell us more about how we are at the time of making the work, registering the state of the person in the moment of being.’ 
This means that the audience sees artists doing these things. Is this ‘primary observation’ in a double sense: the primary observation of the artist and the primary observation of the viewer seeing the artist at work? Whereas a theoretical text is constructed with the purpose of bringing the researcher’s knowledge to the reader, a piece of poetic writing or a work of art relies on the primary experience of the viewer her/himself. Rather than a collective construct or an empirical externality, this kind of knowledge is constructed in the minds of individuals. This is a subjective knowledge, which opens itself up to a debate about the nature of reality, arguably a precondition for the ‘ability’ to know.
Thomas: ‘The work not so much transmits what I have learnt, but that I have learned it and how I got there. In that sense, it is a constant investigation of the human capacity to learn.’
Is that something like indirect knowledge?
Thomas: ‘First, there is an intuitive approach at the outset. Then there is learning how to think, without compromising the power of intuition.’
Do you see a contradiction between thinking and intuition?
Thomas: ‘In the artist’s approach lies an attempt to reconcile logical processes and intuition, in order to enable thinking. Art accepts intuition, uses intuition, trusts intuition.’
As we spoke about the reconciliation between intuitive triggers and intellectual reflection, I remembered how I learned to understand Hegel’s definition of the aesthetic experience as Durchgang durch den Geist, or transition through spirit. Seeing (which is external), is taken into the mills of individual reflection, and brought out in the form of an aesthetic product, which needs to be reflected upon again.

Christine Borland has had an interest in, and curiosity for, research and scientific methods that predates them becoming one of the priorities in art schools. This has been part of, and context for, her work for a long time, providing a free way of using structures borrowed from science but with a degree of autonomy and control in an art context.
Christine: ‘Now research has become mainstream. It suited me better when it was an outsider position. It was interesting, because it was new, and not everybody would have considered it.’
Borland’s work often investigates medical research, the history of medicine and genetic research, particularly the point at which it intersects with ethical dilemmas.
Christine: ‘Usually theses issues provoke heated discussion. Often they are communicated through sensationalist journalism. This is not always the best territory for answers to these dilemmas.’
Borland wants to counteract the sensationalism and tries to slow down the dilemma-solving process.
Christine: ‘I want to cool down the hot discussions, by bringing it into a different territory. This means that the artwork is produced to give more space and more time. This creates a greater critical distance and allows more individual proximity at the same time. Applying experience in a very simplistic way can help bring a sense of complexity back into the overheated discussion. Medical researchers will look for logical purity, uncluttered by real life. But artists are not that pure, so they can create new openings for a personal approach.’ 
Is this about pedagogy? At least it informs Borland’s ambition to be actively involved in medical humanities. But has the overheated debate slowed down?
Christine: ‘There is anecdotal evidence that the approach works and that it had an effect on people: they slowed down. But there is no certain proof. Do I even want to test results? Is it our job to follow up?’
Here the play with scientific methodology ends. 
Christine: ‘This could be someone else’s research.’
As before with Cooper, learning through doing is crucial, with the experience gained through making individual work leading to new steps and decisions. In Borland’s case, this has led to work with medical students. Supported by a NESTA [16] fellowship, she will focus even more on setting up workshops at the medical faculty of Glasgow University in the field of medical humanities, which is part of the medical curriculum at Scottish universities. In these workshops medical students will have a chance to engage with contemporary fine art and become actively involved in some art projects themselves.
Christine: ‘The workshops will provide a period of time for med students to slow down and reflect from another perspective. Time is currently an unknown concept in medical education; there is no time.’
Christine: ‘My approach is open-ended. The outcome is not planned. The work is the sharing; it does not have over-ambitious objectives, and it is the propositions of the medical students that will be worked on. In this sense, it is a true collaboration and more equally Ausgleichd.’
Here, the testing itself gives rise to new work; it aims to encourage medical students to think through the eyes of an artist for a moment. Again, we seem to have touched upon indirect knowledge.
Three Directions
Based on the conversations with McCaughey, Cooper and Borland, I propose three directions in the relationship between artwork and research which can be used to structure artistic research, two of which lead to the work and one of which leads away from it. This formulation should be viewed in the context which others already have described.
In a paper published in March 2004 [17], Bruce Brown, Paul Gough and Jim Roddis asked whether introducing the term ‘practice-led research’ to replace ‘applied research’ has ‘diverted focus away from discussion on the complexity’ of art-related research [18]. Although the notion of practice-led research appears to advocate more confidence in the specific contribution of art and design as a form of research, it seems to anticipate that we have to be more rigorous about how we define its quality and measure its impact. Brown et al. propose a spectrum of four types of research in art and design, from scholarly research to applied research with pure and developmental researches in between.
Scholarly research is described as ‘aiming to map the fields in which issues, problems, or questions are located.’ Perhaps we could describe this as staking out the context for the other three types of research, doing the dirty work needed as a condition for the others. Next, pure research is described as ‘searching for pure knowledge that may uncover issues, theories, laws or metaphors that may help explain why things operate as they do, why they are as they are, or, why they appear to look the ways they do.’ Could we see this as the ultimate type of research, unconcerned with the dirty abyss of reality? By contrast, developmental research ‘identifies the limitations of existing knowledge and it harnesses, tests and reworks existing knowledge.’ Could we say, then, that this functions as a quality assurance test for pure knowledge before it goes out into the production process? And, finally, applied research ‘aims to create new or improved systems, artefacts, products, processes, materials, devices, or services for long-term economic, social and/or cultural benefit.’ Could we say that this is the point at which we can play with research and make it useful?

While these four ‘ideal’ types of research provide useful categories, more clarification is needed in order to situate artwork in relation to them. Katie McLeod, artist and researcher at Plymouth University, seems to offer more in that regard, identifying three types of research with particular relevance to PhD studies: [19]   
Type A: positioning a practice 
As I understand it, this describes what other artists and/or researchers have already done in the field, in order to explain what particular contribution the practice of the researcher makes to the discussion.
Type B: theorising a practice
This goes a bit further, not only referring to the art context, but also providing a theory, with which to situate the practice of the researcher.
Type C: revealing practice
This takes things to the next level, as the engagement with theory impacts upon and alters the practice
Types A and B are close to what was described as Scholarly Research by Brown et al., while type C introduces the notion of application, which could be self-application and not necessarily to the direct benefit of others. McLeod makes a point of defining the relationship between text and artwork, promoting artwork as being better equipped to demonstrate intellectuality in a practice-based research project [20].
The third position I would like to mention briefly comes from Michael Biggs [21], artist, philosopher and research tutor at the University of Hertfordshire. In a paper for a national conference at the University of Bristol in 2003 [22], he spoke about the role of ‘the work’ in research. Referring to works of art and literature as well as music, drama and performance, he considered the point at which they gained cultural status, when value was conferred upon them by external agencies. Biggs argues that, as these values may change and can be manipulated through the context in which the works are presented, interpretation is necessary in order to perceive the work. This means that a given work does not embody fixed knowledge, and a research outcome cannot consist of works alone. Works need to be contextualised and this, he says, is most likely to happen through words. This does not give words, or text, a higher status than works – and words alone would not be enough – but words have thus far proven to be the most efficient way of describing context. Biggs also points out that traditional research leaves as little room for interpretation as possible, while artworks might attempt the opposite. In his paper, he makes a very clear distinction between the idea of art, as a tool for self-fulfilment or self-expression, and research, which can only be regarded as such when it has significance for others.
It appears to me, then, that while McLeod and Brown et al. promote a separation between research – as a theoretical aspect – and the work produced by an artist, Biggs brings them together again, but in a deeply inter-dependent relationship. I want to test a position which might help to reconcile this perceived conflict between research and Fine Art practice by considering the three phases, outlined earlier, during which research might take place: before, during and after an artwork is made.
As we have seen, research undertaken before the artwork is made generates the knowledge necessary to produce the work. Artist Stephan Dillemuth [23] calls this the ‘homework’ that every artist needs to do. This is primary knowledge, essential to the artist-researcher, which could also spin off and be picked up by other researchers. Research leads to artwork, which may also lead to new research, in turn leading to new work. 
Then, there is the research undertaken after the work has been executed. From the artist’s point of view, this is the reflection on what has been done. In a Hegelian sense, the result has become part of reality, which has been and will be reflected upon. Once again, this process normally leads to new work and possibly to new research, but it also offers the opportunity of situating the work in a wider context, after the event has taken place or the work has been realised. Responsibility for this form of a posteriori contextualisation is often taken by others – by art historians and those working in the field of art theory – but it may also be taken by the artist ‘theorising practice’ as Mcleod has called it. This can include an element of testing the effect an artwork has on an audience, as a sample of the wider public.
Between these two phases is the research undertaken during the course of making the work itself. This introduces the concept of indirect knowledge outlined above, which arises from the process of realising the artwork but was not necessarily intended at the outset. This might not be so much about what has been done, in the form of an artwork, or how it has been done, but rather that it has been done at all. This eventuality becomes the knowledge and – in an ideal setting – will contribute to the skills and methods necessary to investigate what lies outside the work itself, for the artist and her/his audience. Here, knowledge is not assembled logically from other pieces of knowledge, but one knowledge influences the generation of other knowledges. Such knowledge might no longer be a passive asset, but an active, complex organism; the loop closes. The trigger for work more often than not draws from experiences and observations beyond the art context; the artist’s methods bring them back in. Once ‘planted’, they become part of the exterior world and influence the next approach, which might not necessarily be an artistic one. 
Knowledge Trigger
In this final chapter, I would like to consider the research I am attempting to deal with as an artist. Since 1997, I have been working on a constantly-growing archive of photographs, made while travelling. They investigate landscapes – mostly urban ones – and the relationship between the elements which construct such landscapes. The primary aim is to make photographs which have a panoramic character. As a spin-off, a vast number of single pictures have found their way into the archive, which currently contains more than 10,000 images. Working with these images has left me with two questions, both relating to the involvement of artworks in generating knowledge: What drives us to make pictures in the first place? What criteria are used to select which of these images should be brought together?
Unforeseen Knowledge
The impetus to create images is often a curiosity for certain forms and particular phenomena in our visible world – that is to say an aesthetic interest. In my case, I could mention a fascination for the grid-like principles within architecture and city planning, which is mirrored in the window structure of buildings. Windows are also the interface to people’s lives, which happen behind the surface of panes, concealing vast diversity in the case of tower-blocks. In summer 2006, this aesthetic preference and curiosity made me revisit a site called Prora, on the island Rügen, in the North East of Germany. Here, the fascist regime in Germany planned a 5km-long holiday resort along the coast, to house up to 20,000 workers and party-members at any one time, as a reward for their contribution to the Reich. Only one third of it was ever finished and, after 1945, it became an army camp, first for the Soviet army and then for the East German army. When it opened to the public in 1990, the place had been erased from public consciousness for forty-five years; it remains largely empty and in decay, waiting for some party to make use of its enormous structure. 
Digging deeper into the history of Prora, I was reminded of another symbol of the Nazis’ attempt to present their presumed superiority to the world: the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936. The stadium is now well preserved and still fulfils its function as a sports arena; less well known is the Olympic village, about thirty minutes west of the stadium. Planned as the happy site for the congregation of sporty youth from around the world, it was part of a wider effort to disguise the more destructive tendencies of the Nazi superiority complex. After the defeat of the fascist regime, the soviet army moved in and added many additional buildings to house staff and soldiers and, until it became accessible to the public in 1992, it was a forgotten site, comparable with the Prora project. Only the ruins of a theme park remain, leaving an unpleasant taste of the legacy of non-democratic political systems in Europe from the last century. As my investigation continued, I became aware of a further site in which twisted and arrogant ideology gave rise to an architectural monstrosity, which nevertheless has a strange appeal through its uncompromising presence. In a romantic landscape now close to the Belgian border, the Nazis built the NS Ordensburg Vogelsang – three castles deliberately playing with the symbols of medieval feudalism – as a training camp for the fascist elite. After World War II, it was the British, and then the Belgian, army which kept the site closed to the public for sixty years. The entire area, including the castle complex, has also been a training ground for UN forces. Only in January 2005 was the site abandoned as a military resource and handed back to the German government. Once again, we find that a manifestation of fascist ideology has inadvertently been amplified through its later military use, which rendered it a forgotten place for a long period, resurfacing now in decay and begging difficult questions about what is to be done with it.
My aesthetic drive triggered the need for specific knowledge, which lay outside the realm of my original impetus, but was nonetheless inseparably married to it. The hunt for such an aesthetic experience yielded wider reflections on the legacy of oppressive power and considerations of how to preserve the memories inscribed in these architectural manifestations in order to learn from them. By maintaining an openness to the generation of knowledge beyond the original artistic intention, this process has the potential to trigger new knowledge in conjunction with the works of art it will lead to and the thoughts they might provoke in others.

Released Knowledge
From the outset, the question about which images should be brought together from the archive is more distant from me as artist and it arises only when I begin to construct new images from individual pictures. I want to avoid obvious patterns – like places or a possible narrative – and, in order to achieve this, the basic principles of composition may be applied, by taking account of the qualities of a given picture and the ways in which it leads the viewer’s eye. But, I have also consistently sought other methods, in which my own power of choice is completely eliminated, which leads to random selection.
Digital technology provides applications with which to make arbitrary choices from a database. Most of us are, by now, familiar with the shuffle function of an iPod, which creates surprising new sequences from the well-trodden paths of our musical collections. This also works for pictures, but it only permits a sequence of one picture after another rather than creating a composite image. I have begun discussions with a programmer about the options for creating something more complex. A software tool will be developed which will continually construct random combinations of images, placing them in a changing selection of grids. The results will be published online with a high refresh rate, leading to new combinations being generated every ten to fifteen seconds. Users will be able to pause the process, determining for themselves how much time they want to spend reading a particular image combination. The software will also pave the way for the introduction of additional parameters – such as hue, saturation, major direction and perspective – to determine which composition will be triggered, based on the image that was chosen as a starting point.
The theoretical context for this experiment is the distinction between the German words Abbild and Bild. Here, the Ab-Bild is understood as the image of something, or someone, while Bild refers to the object of perception itself. For this research, both terms are used simultaneously, with several Abbilder being combined to be read as one Bild; this maintains the ‘reflection’ of each object, site or space as it is depicted, but offers them in an unanticipated and non-leading context. My working thesis is that the ‘seeing world’ – experienced either at first hand or through images [24]– requires skills that enable us to identify and interpret the context of various perceived elements within our surroundings. Rather than trying to align what we see with our own individual experience, knowledge and understanding, we tend to rely on mediated perceptions, especially when there is no map or plan to guide our perceptions. Our ability to learn through perception requires constant training and the ongoing evaluation of our individual interpretations against those of others.
In a narrative process, it is common to juxtapose images in order to illustrate or to provoke a specific ‘story’. While this adequately suits the purpose of putting a point across, it also exposes the process to the dangers of manipulation. By focusing on the still image, this research project seeks to discover whether there is a way of ‘emancipating’ or ‘liberating’ images by bringing them together without forcing them into a specific narrative context, allowing the viewer to ‘read’ stories which are not being deliberately communicated or pre-fabricated. This is more closely aligned with a model of reality perception in which individual experience with images and impressions forms our thinking and judgement, rather than allowing mediated images to prescribe a context.
Several artists [25]  have taken this approach as the impetus for generating algorithms to computerise the production of images, primarily as a means of opening themselves up to audience participation[26]. Rather than providing an invitation to collaborate, my approach aims at the viewer’s ability to make up their own mind, referring more to surrealist collage or ‘automatic’ techniques for joint poetry writing [27]. But I am not attempting a psychological analysis of the subconscious; rather I would dare to claim the grand television screen installations of the late Nam Jun Paik as the artistic precursor to my research. I have always regarded each of his endless collages of video images as a giant still image, which just happens to flicker constantly on a vast amount of screens, refusing the help of a guiding thread and opening the viewer’s mind to what neither the spectator expected nor what Paik intended.
With this research project, I seek to discover whether the ability to perceive, without dependence on the guiding narration of an author can be ‘trained’. Can the random juxtaposition of images be the study material to provide such training? And, if so, would such a tool increase our ability to understand the world on our own, less vulnerable to manipulation? 

Enabling Knowledge
By way of conclusion, I hope to add an additional dimension to the discussions around knowledge in relation to research. We now generally accept that research should generate new knowledge; there is probably little doubt that this is both true and necessary. Our national governments have seized upon research as the key to survival in a globalised economy, stimulating innovation in order to compete with energetic levels of economic growth in countries like China and India. But, the conception of the ‘knowledge society’ has already been contested. Daniel Pink, a former speech writer for the White House during the Clinton administration, speaks of 
a seismic – though as yet undetected – shift now under way in much of the advanced world. We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computer-like capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathetic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age [28].  
After a century ‘dominated by a form of thinking and an approach to life that is narrowly reductive and deeply analytical,’ Pink says, the Conceptual Age requires aptitudes which involve the capacity ‘to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new.’ 
This proposes an interesting approach to learning, knowing and knowledge, with which we as artists might already have some experience. But the often-vaunted knowledge society is not just a conglomerate of well-informed individuals; knowledge has a shared social value, arising as it does from the contribution of many. Joseph Beuys declared, ‘Jeder Mensch ein Künstler’ [Everyone an Artist] [29], encapsulating his vision that the ultimate sculptural process is the shaping of our societies, a process in which everybody can, and should, participate.
Christine Borland, Thomas Joshua Cooper and Peter McCaughey mentioned in our conversations how much emphasis they put on learning. This echoes the thoughts of curator Okwui Enwezor:
Irrespective of its strict economic value, making art is about process more than product, about building social and intellectual capital and opening up new sites of inquiry. Gaining an art education, then, is an investment in social agency. The task I see for art schools lies in reconciling the experimental, radical practices of the individual artist with the unruly, unpredictable, asymmetrical relations that constitute the world in which such art is fashioned and realized. 
What seems apposite for me in this new context is the relation between art and education as two versions of a process of reaching awareness: self-discovery and self-emancipation. Both involve taking chances, opening oneself up to one’s limits, and being challenged by the labour of making obscure knowledge immanent and palpable [30].
From talking to the artist-researchers at Glasgow School of Art, I conclude that the knowledge their work releases is not a direct know how or know what; rather it lies in the fact that someone has done what they have done, possibly encouraging us to undertake steps to find out for ourselves, guided and triggered by their work.
In attempting to go deeper into what my work (and the work of others) does to the viewer, and what we would have to do in order to enrich artworks with the emancipatory effect Enwezor describes, more questions are provoked:
If we speak about knowledge, whose knowledge is it? 
Is it something that somebody has gained and is it so generous as to be shared with others?
Is knowledge really competitive – will those knowing most win and survive?
What will happen to those who do not know?
Is there something like a ‘responsibility to know’?
I want to end with the suggestion that we could try to consider knowledge as an active process, rather than as an objectified body. In order to benefit from such knowledge – which constantly shifts, grows and reviews itself – as many people as possible must be able to know. This could be seen as a step beyond learning, which usually has a finite and predetermined set of outcomes. By contrast, knowing exceeds all learning outcomes; while the excitement of getting to know is an individual experience, it is also necessary in order to participate in knowing as part of a contribution to society. On the basis of this, a new thesis might be derived: that the arts are well equipped to play a significant role in realising the national research agendas ahead of us, providing that the dimension of enabling knowledge is attributed to our definitions of research.

This is the transcript of a keynote-presentation at the "Sensuous knowledge" conference at Solstrand in 2006, initiated and organised by Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen. It is also published by KHiB. ISSN 1890-2154. At this time Klaus Jung was Professor and Head of School of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art.