We are a consortium of scholars and practitioners working at the interface of artistic research, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. Our shared objective is to examine artistic practice as a legitimate mode of knowledge production and to specify its epistemic profile in relation to contemporary accounts of cognition, perception, and inference.

Research focus

We investigate how artistic practices—understood as inquiry-driven, materially situated activities—yield forms of understanding that are (i) conceptually tractable, (ii) methodologically accountable, and (iii) transferable across domains. Central themes include:

• the status of artistic artefacts as vehicles of understanding;

• criteria for evidential adequacy in practice-led research;

• interfaces between first-person/phenomenological reports and third-person empirical data;

• models of aesthetic cognition relevant to practice (e.g., predictive processing, embodied and enactive accounts).

Epistemic commitments

Our work proceeds from the following commitments:

1. Pluralism about evidence: Artistic, conceptual, and empirical forms of evidence are mutually constraining rather than mutually exclusive.

2. Methodological transparency: Procedures, materials, and inferential steps are documented sufficiently to enable critique, iteration, and reuse.

3. Operationalization without reduction: Key constructs (e.g., expression, affordance, salience) are operationalized for study while preserving their domain-specific nuance.

4. Publicness of knowledge: Outputs are rendered citable, teachable, and reviewable within and beyond the arts.

Methodological orientation

We combine analytic and empirical approaches with practice-based inquiry. Typical formats include:

• Practice-led studies with explicit research questions, protocols, and reflective analysis;

• Experimental philosophy and design-based research to test conceptual claims against cases;

• Empirical interfaces (e.g., behavioural tasks, reception studies) where appropriate to the research question;

• Scholarly media (e.g., video essays) as argument-bearing artefacts with declared methods and evaluation criteria.