“Communicating a Listening”: an Artistic Research Model for Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Currently, various universities, institutes and research centers related to the arts, express their interest in Artistic Research, an approach that employs artistic practice as the main method of generating data, and whose results are exhibited both in the form of artistic productions as well as written communications of an academic nature. A difficulty that arises in these contexts lies in generating pedagogical resources that offer undergraduate students the knowledge necessary to carry out research activities from this perspective. 

This article presents the results of a PIADT-Iniciales project (UNTREF, 2022-2023), focused on providing a solution to this problem. This project consisted in the critical review of an Artistic Research experience that we have been practicing with music students since 2019. It exposes, first of all, the experience under review, developed from the proposal of a heuristic device —which we call “Communicate a Listening”— for the production of artistic pieces based on the compilation and analysis of an archive of materials with transtextual relationships with a pre-existing work. According to the corresponding instructions, the activity is completed with a writing assignment referring to the resolution process. Secondly, it presents the results of the critical review and exposes its impact on a reformulation of the instructions aimed at facilitating its insertion in other contexts. The experience is thus proposed as a suitable model to introduce artistic career students to Artistic Research and to strengthen their ability to build arguments about the legitimacy of artistic practice as a form of knowledge production.