In December 2011, dOCUMENTA (13) and EARN (European Artistic Research Network) started to develop a collaborative project. These discussions indicated that the way the notion of research is used today might also produce a confusion of concepts. Is research merely conducted within institutional environments or does it have a broader—connotative—scope? What does it mean for the self-awareness of artists to understand and present their practice as research-based? And last but not least, does the concept of research lead to an expansion of artistic practices or does it restrict them?

To evaluate the concept of research, we thus chose two perspectives: the perspective of artists who contributed “activated” research projects to dOCUMENTA (13) and the perspective of artists who are engaged in a Doctoral Fine Art programme within the various academic environments of the art school—specifically at institutes participating in the EARN network. As an introduction to the research workshops and the Doing Research symposium, thirteen artists working on “activated research” and thirteen doctoral researchers were invited to respond to a series of questions on artistic research.