Marina Zurkow

Cultivating a “Research-based Practice” requires an artist/designer to be a pioneer, a
detective and a mystic all in one.
What does it look like to make work in, through and as research? How do you follow a
hunch? Engage experts and passersby to explore both legitimate AND preposterous
leads? Be expansive? How do you leave your own trail of documentation that can
contribute to a body of knowledge beyond the products of your own art? These forms
of research may mix a variety of scientific and intuitive methods. The artist/designer is
free to employ speculation, open-endedness, and irony; to use design as a way to
probe or even provoke the chosen fields of inquiry.
The class is devoted to the question of how to initiate and investigate research and
incorporate it intelligently and sensitively into your work. This class is about developing
your own idiosyncratic and well-documented means of pulling threads, following leads,
and becoming fearless about asking for help and others’ expertise. You become a
temporary expert.
Through experimentation, hands-on practice, case studies, guest speakers from both
art and science, and readings on ethnography, research, and the idea of a public, we
will explore method, documentation and presentation of your research, and the merits
of both success and failure.
Student work is divided into one 4-week research topic/prototype and one final 8-week
research topic/project. All topics will have historical, technological and social
components to explore. Research includes ethnography, interviews, published papers,
media, video, drawing, visiting archives, and at least three face-to-face meetings with
strangers for each of the assignments. We will look at artists and designers whose
work is based on research, and ones whose work IS the research (art in the form of
lecture, field notes, tours, experiments, etc).