Irit Rogoff, Professor of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths University in London, and Samuel Bianchini, artist and professor-researcher at EnsAD in Paris, were guest speakers of a research day on May 25th, 2018, organized by the CCC PhD-Forum at the HEAD in collaboration with the EPFL. Both speakers shared their experience and vision of what it means to undertake research in art and design. What do these processes activate? What are the long-term consequences of such researches as a network of practices?

Founder of three PhD programme at Goldsmiths, Irit Rogoff argues that the “research turn” is characterized by a shift from “inherited knowledge” to working “from conditions.” She advocates that one’s own vulnerability and instability must be the starting point of a research in constant dialogue with formal knowledge. Responding to the latter without adhering to it, as well as invoking the subjectivity without narrating it as such demands a new methodology and a new vocabulary in order to resist the bureaucratic and neoliberal agendas which force experimental research to be formatted along fixed pathways to employment.

For his part, Samuel Bianchini shows the intermingling of theory and practice, emphasizing the case of the collective research situation experienced during a workshop session. The empathy inspired by the failure of an engine built to perform an expected movement can—for example—prompt a reflection on the notion of disabled objects. His interactive apparatuses and behavioural objects are examples of a practice-oriented research at the crux of society, technic and aesthetic.