Practice (as research)

The Art and Science of a Narrative: Narrative as a Ground for Hybrid Practice (essay)

2019

archival research

multidisciplinary forms of inquiry

storytelling

This paper explores how artistic agency can contribute to the multidisciplinary discourse on preserving and re-reading histories — how artists and designers produce new visual, performative and structural tools while working with archives as sources of historical narratives. The context for the paper is the research programme Memories of the Future, which emerged from a collaboration between the Open Set Foundation and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision Archive. The programme brought together a group of designers, filmmakers, archivists and digital humanities scholars to discuss subjects of shared concern: the accessibility and distribution of heritage, alternative historical narratives, and the algorithmic nature of archives. Artistic experiments during the programme allowed for “foreign” ways of encountering histories. The focus of the paper is on the facilitation and process of “hybrid” research that took place here: the importance of shared lexicons; artistic and scientific methods of relating to the material, and of creating meaning; and the study of narrative as a territory for hybrid practice.

Related projects: Memories of the Future