PRACTICE BASED RESEARCH

In the creative arts, practice based research is a branch of qualitative research that incorporates creative practice as a part of the research process and/or as a means of communicating results and new knowledge.

“Within creative practice, the role of research is first to enhance personal effectiveness through conscious individual reflection and second, to provide a more systematic understanding of how people interact with artworks.” (Candy

& Edmonds, 2011)

Following the model of Candy and Edmonds, this research is conducted through practice for two key reasons;

• Firstly, the research direction and the propositions raised inherently call for creative practice. As the aim of the research is to illuminate specific opportunities in processes and practices related to animation, it is not possible to conduct adequate experiments nor document the more successful of these new approaches to practice without actually engaging in, and reflecting on these practices.

• Secondly, creative practice and the artworks produced are required to make the findings and new knowledge available to an audience. There are aspects of the findings that can not be described in text.

As described by Chris Rust, "there can be valid research whose contribution to knowledge cannot be stated fully or precisely by the researcher. This is particularly relevant to research by creative artists," (Rust, 2007). It is therefore necessary for the experimental practices, documentation of the experiments and workflow and appraisal of the created artefacts to be taken as collectively constituting the contribution to knowledge under the practice based research methodology.

Plasmatic: Improvising Animated Metamorphosis 52 The creative works presented are required for establishing claims about the ability of the

metamorphic image to represent a unique behaviour of interior experience. The audiences for these artefacts are likely to have experience beyond what can be predicted in their making. Newly generated knowledge in the form of these experiences is thus disseminated through the

exhibition and viewing of the artworks created.

Practice based research does not always proceed from origins that can be clearly articulated as traditionally formatted questions. As explained in section two, this research extends from what Haseman calls “’an enthusiasm of practice’: something which is exciting, something which may be just becoming possible as new technology or networks allow (but of which they cannot be

certain)” (Haseman, 2006). This is a fitting description for the motivation and emergent process of this research where initial ideas about improvisation and animation were accelerated towards outcomes and findings by excitement at the discovery of the possibilities of executing this work in new mediums and software solutions.

3.1.1 PRACTICE BASED AND PRACTICE LED RESEARCH

There is some minor terminological confusion amongst the range of disciplines that employ practice as part of a research methodology. In the creative arts, the terms used most widely are

‘practice based research’ and ‘practice led research’.

It is generally accepted that practitioner research can fall into two broad areas:

• research that utilises the production of artefacts and the pursuit of practice as a means of uncovering new knowledge, and

• research that has findings and ramifications that are of importance to a specific domain of practice (Candy & Edmonds, 2011; Haseman, 2006; Niedderer & Roworth-Stokes, 2007;

Nimkulrat, 2007).

This could be summarised as a distinction between research by practice, and research for practice, a separation for which there is substantial natural overlap. There is a mixture of application of the terms practice-based and practice-led to these two types of research, which may arise from the fact that these terms are often applied interchangeably. For clarity, in this dissertation, the definition provided by Linda Candy is adopted: “If the research process is primarily based on the making of an artefact, the research could be said to be practice based. If the research leads primarily to new understandings about practice, it is practice led” (Candy & Edmonds, 2011).

Plasmatic: Improvising Animated Metamorphosis 53 This research project fits both of these definitions, so identifying as practice based or practice led

is not of high importance. For example, in the following section describing the use of the research model called the iterative cyclic web, the terms practice-led research (and research-led practice) are used by the architects of that model, where the term practice based could just have usefully applied under the description above.

3.2 EXPERIMENTS

The experimental nature of this research should not be seen as empirical, or as implying a scientific process or approach. The word experiment derives from the Latin ‘experiri’, meaning to

‘try’. Both linguistically and as a process, this experiri, or trying, leads to ‘experience’ and

‘expertise’. Though this is not implied by the term itself, the word ‘experiment’ has a popular connotation with the sciences, and in using the term in artistic areas, we adopt both explicit and implicit suggestions about process and outcome from scientific disciplines. Through language, these connotations may infect the activities of experimentation and experimentalism in animation.

Both artists and scientists conducting experiments may begin with a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a proposition that is made without an assumption of truth. In science, it is usually a proposed explanation of a phenomenon, or a proposition that describes a relationship between variables.

Hypotheses are based on limited evidence but rely on underlying paradigmatic assumptions that emerge as a result of previous accumulated knowledge gathering cycles. One of Aristotle’s conditions for the demonstrative capabilities of ‘Scientia’ is that the validity of the premises must be known (or they would themselves require prior demonstration) (Kochiras, 2014).

Hypotheses are generated in science by inductive or abductive reasoning, meaning that they are often theories generalised from specific information, they are probabilistic, and arise from intuitions about explanations that seem most likely, given available evidence. These hypotheses are then used as the starting point and framing for the gathering of further demonstrative evidence that supports or disproves the proposed explanation.

This initial form of inductive hypothesis as emerging from an accumulated paradigm of knowledge certainly exists in artistic experimentation. The collected work of peers and precedents are our initial paradigms. The artist’s hypothesis however exists for a different purpose – the artist or animator doesn’t seek to explain a phenomenon. In my experience, an artistic hypothesis is instead a proposed expectation, or desire towards an anticipated visual phenomenon. In both cases, experiments are hopeful, but there is a contrast in the orientation of the practitioners

Plasmatic: Improvising Animated Metamorphosis 54 involved – one seeks support for a proposition, while one seeks to witness, and involve

themselves in the creation of a phenomenon.

There are a range of logical arrangements that formally govern how a scientific hypothesis can lead to an explanatory conclusion. To give a single example, the idealised 'deductive-nomological' model which grinds a hypothesis towards a conclusion of truth through a series of conditional propositions (if X then Y, then, and, if U equals W and so on) until these nested premises link together to form a reliable 'law' (Woodward, 2011). As a logical structure this can be applied much more widely than in science. But in the creative arts, this switch from the inductive or probabilistic to the deductive nested logic of proofs is usually unnecessary. It may even be counterproductive to rationally attend to the apparent successes or failures of predictions, because the unpredictable nature of the visual results over time makes them no less useful or interesting in animation experimentation. This is a key difference in the orientation of the practitioner – where the scientist scrutinises outcomes for confirmation of the hypothesis, in artistic cases, the animator is likely more open to consider all information and all results as potentially useful, whether or not they relate to the initiating ideas.

It is tempting to say art is inductive, rather than deductive as a way of describing this difference in experimental orientation, but actually the difference is often simply that artistic experimentation can be comfortably non-rational and that some forms of experimentation are non-rational activities^ix.