Abstract:
Smashing Eggs reflects on a classic irony – where you destroy the thing you intend to care for, where love and destruction, friendship and cruelty, creativity and control fluidly substitute each other. It seems that artistic research might be prone to such quirks of substitution – potentially demanding forms of surveillance, regulation, report and writing that actually prevent many forms of artistic practice. This chapter engages with philosopher and scientist Andrew Pickering’s concept of the mangle of practice as a way to frame and better understand the complex and often contradictory processes of knowledge production in artistic research. I will discuss strategies to actively engage with the mangle as an inevitable, unpredictable and often ironic force in artistic research.
