7 formats of meeting. Situation, presence and performativity

The project analyses various formats commonly used in relation to art as a form of knowledge production in the present day: publication, performance, exhibition, story- telling, symposium, screening, workshop. We observe in the emerging and still changing field of artistic research (in our own projects and those of others) certain ideas of and expectations towards a production of knowledge, outcomes, values, that privilege ways of doing things that are not necessarily fully aligned with, or suited to, precisely those unpredictable, processual and open qualities that make up the specificity and the potential of artistic knowledge production. Meeting is a notion we develop to understand art as such a specific space of openness, where new relations and resonances can be formed. The project aims to try out and analyze specific constellations of artworks, researchers and audience in the 7 formats to see how they can enable such spaces of `meeting`. We propose to do this with a set of tools or terms, that we call filters situation, presence, and performativity and that help us foreground the conditions of our working processes in the 7 formats. By constantly shifting between the what and the how of doing things together in art, the work with the filters allows for a specific economy of attention and time around the formal and backstage aspects of each format, and facilitates a closer look at specific details and elements. The aim of the project is to work towards the articulation of our filters as a shared terminology, to develop and test them in the formats and discuss them in an on-going exchange with the international networks of artistic research and education, that is, to put them at the disposal of the wider community of artists, curators, theorists as working tools or terms. The project shifts between different circles of individual, collaborative, and public ways of working in/on the formats across a time-span of three years. It is based at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, from where it will move across different contexts (fields of artistic production/ international locations) and circulate between over 30 participants and diverse audiences. We want to contribute to sustaining art as a place of meeting situated outside, but in close relation to the everyday, to the political, that allows changes to appear, sometimes barely perceptible, sometimes as a shower of sparks.

The arts-based research project Six Formats built on six selected formats commonly used in relation to the presentation, communication, and circulation of knowledge in arts-based research. Publication, Exhibition, Symposium, Lecture-Performance, Screening, and Workshop are notions that activate representations, perceptions, understandings, behaviors, and expectations. They come from/are developed/can be found/perform in various fields of activities, also other than art. Six Formats responded to the increasingly academized field of arts-based research with practices that are/can be process-oriented. With a multi-layered research, Six Formats aimed to bring and keep focus on the ways in which arts-based related knowledge performs and is performed. Six Formats questioned format as tool, format as meeting, and format as event. More than considering a format as a tool for the communication of particular content, it is crucial to look at a formats particularitiesthe kinds of associations and circulations it may generate, allow, or disavowwithin the very moment of meeting with an audience. What is the practical knowledge that comes into play? The Object of Communication was materialized to facilitate the practice and the circulation of Six Formats knowledges. The Object of Communication is a tool, an artwork, and a publication that aims at going further than a book. It invites to the mise-en-jeu of its components and the manipulation of their relations. A series of three booklets on transversal themes that appeared to be central, CO-, Moments of, and Tension Elasticity Suspension, are published in For and By Six Formats (ISBN 978- 3200-05803-3). CO- wants to be thought as a potentiality instead as a fixed concept, from co-researching to co-imagining outside and beyond generalizations that limit its potentialities. Moments of is a diagram that searches for spaces of (re-, dis-, inter-, mis-) articulations. Moments of disposes and composes with a set of 38 cards to practice Present(ific)ation. Tension Elasticity Suspension addresses the position of knowledge and articulates the practices, tactics, and strategies between Six Formats, knowledge, and movement. The main statement of the arts-based research Six Formats is "Format is Knowledge"with a particular attention to the relation context content format. Six Formats portfolio is accessible online: http://ingridcogne.net/6Fportfolio