Many of today’s challenges that confront society are complex and dynamic and require new perspectives, new ways of looking at problems and issues, in order to be able to come to solutions that could not be found before. This process is called reframing and we suggest that one of the key stages in this process is thematic research, the search for themes that underlie these complex challenges. These themes generally turn out to be human themes, related to socio-emotional aspects of life. In this paper we report our experiences and lessons learned from a series of cases in which we experimented with various approaches to do this thematic research.
The concept of biodiversity, which usually serves as a shorthand to refer to the diversity of life on Earth at different levels (ecosystems, species, genes), was coined in the 1980s by conservation biologists worried over the degradation of ecosystems and the loss of species, and willing to make a case for the protection of nature – while avoiding this “politically loaded” term (Takacs, 1996). Since then, the concept has been embedded in the work of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, established in 1992) and of the Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES, aka ‘the IPCC for biodiversity’, established in 2012). While the concept has gained policy traction, it is still unclear to which extent it has captured the public imagination. Biodiversity loss has not triggered the same amount of attention or controversy as climate change globally (with some exceptions). This project, titled Prompting for biodiversity, investigates how this issue is mediated by generative visual AI, directing attention to both how ‘biodiversity’ is known and imagined by AI and to how this may shape public ideas around biodiversity loss and living with other species.
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For the past decade I have, as an artist/researcher, investigated the uses of photographic pictures in East African country Uganda. The relation between photographic pictures and memory have been well researched and argued. But this is often done from a rather one sided Eurocentric perspective on photographic pictures. Over the past decades its universality has been questioned.A rather hybrid artistic practice, in which my role shifts from maker to curator to analyst and back again, provides the method to enter correspondences [Ingold, 2012] on (photographic) pictures with their Ugandan makers and users. Together we explore the continuously changing situated knowledge [harraway, 1988] embedded in photographic pictures in Uganda.One of the case studies in my PhD research is the cultural biography of one of the first photographs made in the kingdom of Buganda. Explorer Henry Morton Stanley produced it in 1875. Three vintage prints of this picture, depicting the Kabaka (King) and some of his chiefs are part of a collection of material related to the colonial past of Belgium. The photograph was hardly known in Uganda when I started showing it around. Interpretations of it were known, but not connected to their source. Together with Ugandan artists I explored and commented on the past that was, is and could remembered through the availability of the photograph and both its historical and newly made interpretations. Visuals and spoken word have equal weight and are woven into an argument in the proposed presentation.
PRICCAPractice (Photographic Research in Cross-disciplinary and Cross-cultural Artistic Practices) is an online platform aimed at the artistic research practices of artists, designers and photographers into the status of photography in our society. The focus lies on newly developed methods concerning photography as part of an interdisciplinary artistic (and critical) research practice. PRICCAPractice’s objective is to examine how photography as a means of research can make reality visible again, and wants to investigate various photographic dimensions of reality in images that are not merely representations but also a commentary on photography itself and that, at the same time, explore the narrative and communicative possibilities and limitations of the photographic image. We are looking for artistic research practices in which a new, authentic relationship between the photographic image and reality will be researched. Our aim is to give photography a new position within art education and the artistic practice. Next to photography’s representational power we want to focus on its numerous research possibilities.
