The starting point for this original interdisciplinary dialogue was to bring together a group of experts from different disciplines to reflect on the theme of “research”. The goal was to help understand how scholars can learn from artists, considering intuition, unexpected events, and experimentation as part of the creative and cognitive process.
Although it unites scientists, artists, and humanists, the theme of research is rarely explored in these terms. Historians, academics, scientists, artists, and writers are therefore called upon to reflect on research understood not only as preparation for a finished work, but as an autonomous form of expression.
Approaches to the concept of research are naturally diverse. For the artistic world, the key word is subjectivity, and some artists focus their reasoning on the difference between research and investigation: research in the artistic world is not a rigid academic process, but an open path, more exploratory than structured. That is, closer to an investigation. Often, the artist produces not objects, but situations and experiences that emerge without following standard models of academic research. Such an approach allows them to develop their work more freely than more traditional methods of applying knowledge.
In a certain sense, the artist’s work questions not only the boundaries between art and knowledge, but also the very modes of knowledge production within the artistic field. The idea of investigation thus becomes a working method that favors process over result, experience over form, and openness over a predetermined method.
“Artistic research” thus differs from “scientific research,” which is instead based on the concept of objectivity. Producing knowledge goes hand in hand with the ability to understand phenomena which, in turn, recalls an experiential approach. In the scientific field, experimenting and knowing means asking new questions. This means continuing the process of understanding, which requires a method – often rigorous – determined by the need for order and control. Experience – putting into practice what one seeks to understand – therefore produces knowledge. And knowledge will generate new questions, which will produce new research. Such reasoning refers to “free” research and the freedom of research: that is, research in and of itself (pure research) and not aimed at an applicative or technological result (applied research).
In “humanistic research,” on the other hand, the concept of counternarrative prevails, making particular reference to writing, understood both as fiction and historical writing, or to poetry. A counternarrative is a story that challenges, analyzes, deconstructs, or rethinks a dominant or guiding narrative. Therefore, counternarratives, in different ways, must be held up against the observation of reality.
Stories created in a counternarrative often draw upon key moments and specific, real figures who have been socially, politically, and economically marginalized, bringing them back to light; such stories deal with broader currents of ideas, discourses, social structures, and movements. Counternarratives do not describe heroes, but rather complex people who shape and are shaped by the times in which they live, and are immersed in the environment that slowly takes shape in the public imagination.
Through “research,” understood in a broad sense, an environment is therefore reconstructed. This method of valorizing a path, an evolution, or a “journey” through time, is what can be observed when visiting a museum—a place where a context is constructed, in a bond between visual arts, writing, and poetry – one that manifests itself in all its facets, research included. In the exhibition, nothing is left to chance, and the context is underpinned by scrupulous research.
This fascinating path demonstrates an interconnection of the concept of research across artistic, scientific, and humanistic disciplines, with knowledge as its cornerstone. It links the creation of knowledge – derived from a somewhat performative situation – to a consequent process of experience and understanding of knowledge itself.
At the end of the journey, a reflection remains: in the world of research, understanding is oriented toward the production of knowledge and not toward the production of the experience of understanding. Another major question remains open: what will the role of artificial intelligence be in the world of research? What advantages and disadvantages might AI bring? Today’s AI reorganizes data and available evidence, but it is still the human mind that goes beyond. In this sense, there is a future for research that is still to be built.