Research

With the centres of Pedagogy, Student Life and International Relations, it supplies the support, be it human, material, financial, technical, or institutional, that allows for putting into place research and works towards sharing, valuing and recognising research that takes place in art and design at the heart of the school.

Its members include all of the school’s teachers–artists, designers and theoreticians–who are engaged in research activities in parallel with their teaching duties and their individual and independent professional, artistic, design and theoretical practices. Research thus reflects the artistic media (design, drawing, painting, performance, photography, sound, video, volume, etc.) and forms of knowledge (art history, philosophy, aesthetics, cultural theory) practiced in the school.

Research in art schools: invention, experimentation, sharing

Although art and science–whether human and social sciences, formal sciences (logic, mathematics) and natural sciences (physics, biology, etc.) or engineering sciences–differ in their internal criteria and their own aims, they have never been alien to each other. Research is consubstantial with them, and both constitute activities that are based on the logic of experimentation and invention.

In the course of their history, art and science (and technology) have never ceased to be challenged or even provoked by each other: from geometry, physics or the theory of emotions, yesterday, to contemporary epistemologies stemming from environmental sciences (ecology), digital technologies and their anthropological stakes, such as those of gender studies and postcolonial approaches to theories of culture and domination.

Because the questioning of the forms of restitution of research belongs to the very process of research, and while today, in the scientific world, new forms of approaches and restitution of research are emerging (practice-based-research, etc.), the Research Unit “Research on the environment” is also concerned with the questioning of the forms of restitution of research. While relying on the established academic forms of sharing research results (colloquia, publications), the “Art and Society” Research Unit initiates, encourages and accompanies the invention of new, often hybrid, forms specific to art school research: exhibitions, devices, collective works, etc.

Axis Research

The research at the core of the research unit Art & Society is organised around two structural themes, transversal and multi-disciplinary. These axes, which are not mutually exclusive, allow for the identification the domains in which members of the RU situate their research activity.

→ Axis 1 – Materials, media, intermedialities
This axis questions the relations of media to their own specificity (procedures, methods, histories) and their own identity, as well as to the types of alterities that question them (hybrid forms and translatability of languages; relation of learned forms / popular forms, new technologies; relation of art / culture; autonomy and heteronomy of art; questions around exhibitions).

→ Axe 2 — Crises, contexts, combats
This axis addresses the question of art and design in light of their relations with knowledge and power, in as much as they interrogate practices and presentations of visibility and invisibility, eventually generators of violence. In that respect, artistic and design practices cross-reference forms of knowledge and militant practices (ecology, feminism). Hence this particular insistence on the question of inclusion, of place (urban spaces, rural worlds, the margins, migrations), and their contrary (non-places, uprooting etc).

At the core of both axes can be organised one-off events (publication, conferences, exhibition) or even research programmes on a larger scale.

1 • Urban Mutations

The transdisciplinary research programme Urban Mutations is an extension of the Bachelor and Masters teaching delivered by the ENSAD Dijon Design Option team (studio projects, classes, ARC, workshops). It brings together designers, architects, scenographers, landscape designers, artists and theoricians with all areas mixed up in communal space of thought and imagination, of proposition and urban experimentation strongly rooted in the ecological, political and social realities of cities in the anthropocene age.

Currently humanity is affected by an ecological crisis – pollution, dwindling natural resources, the destruction of ecosystems, the disappearance of biodiversity, climatic warming and disruption, proliferation of extreme episodes of drought and heatwaves – along with the economic, social and political consequences. These force us to radically rethink not only modes of production and consumption but also our way of living and especially living in a city, namely to produce and consume space and time. It questions our use of space and our daily choreographies.

Cities, particularly vulnerable to the effects of environmental crisis, are partly responsible for it. It means that cities can also be the place for local solutions to this global problem.

Design, for a long time confined to the sphere of marketing, today constitutes a collective open to thought, practices and mechanisms at the intersection of research and creation, working, with the same sensory perception (affordance), on the representations and uses of our environment, like vectors to transform urban space.

To think about and know a city as a completely separate ecosystem, to take care of the plant and animal biodiversity it shelters, to promote urban agriculture aimed at alimentary autonomy without endangering the environment, and more globally rethinking the relations between city/nature, that implies also thinking about the activities and socio-economic temporalities of a city. Like slow cities which are spreading all over the world, cities should also incorporate soft mobility (bicycles) and non-carbon ways of moving whose current growth is revealing.

Eco-design thinks about the environmental impact of the materials and forms it implements, extolling low-tech and DIY, self-help and reuse, in inspiring vernacular practices. This relation to the work of the material sustains a relation to space by its investment of zones left vacant or without quality by modernisation or economic crisis: industrial wastelands and urban interstices can be places of transitory urbanism where can be experimented other manners of living collectively in the city, and a parking lot or frontage becomes through a micro-intervention (urban acupuncture) spaces of urban tactics like so many gestures – light and joyous, temporary and festive –aiming to reconquer the streets.

Faced with the tendency to standardisation, functional uniformity, social homogeneity and in the end to the sterilisation of public privatised spaces increasingly devoted to commerce and to consumption under CCTV, it is necessary to imagine inventive forms to live in the city that are likely to revitalise it.

In addition, everywhere can be heard, increasingly loudly, the hopes of city dwellers for a renewed urban democracy – a right to the city – in which citizens, either with collaboration or participation, become actively implicated in projects implemented by private and/or public actors, concerning their living space, be it a street, place, neighbourhood, living place, or even a place which has not been assigned a function in advance and which is reinvented according to use.

The idea of a desirable city – where the notion of pleasure is not annexed to consumerism – because to be equal (open to all) requires in effect to take into account diversity and the unforeseeable uses and users, be it by age, gender or social and cultural origin. New urban design practices are nourished thus by the input of contemporary critical theories (feminist theories and gender criticism, post-colonial theories, care theories). The Urban Mutations programme follows in the wake of numerous multidisciplinary collectives reuniting urbanists, videomakers, designers, architects, philosophers, scenographers, sociologists and landscape architect (Bellastock, EXYZT, le Bruit du frigo, Encore heureux) with whom they will regularly work.

Experimentation in situ, workshops, conferences, publications – including original translations of inescapable Anglo-Saxon authors – will make up the research activities of this programme.

To de-focus the viewpoint and deepen the explorations, the Urban Mutations programme draws on the partnership between ENSAD Dijon and the School of Art and Design of the Technical University of Hubei in Wuhan, China, by putting in place cross-worshops.

2 • Painting and Colour

Starting out as a drawing school, ENSA Dijon has developed at its core a research programme centred on current painting practices.

This programme follows in the wake of teaching delivered to Bachelor and Masters students (theory and workshops, ARC and workshops). It draws on the spaces and structures that the school have devoted to painting and colour: The Painting Workshop, the European Colour Observatory (ECO), which maps the relation between scientific theory of colour and contemporary artistic practices.

Closely linking historical review, theoretical expression and experimental practice, the activities of the research programme “Painting and Colour” is open and multi-form: invitations of international artists in the presence of one of their works (Olivier Mosset, Pierre Mabille, Eva Nielsen, Philippe Mayaux and Yan-Pei Ming), talks and theory classes on the historical and current context of painting (Michèle Martel and Bernard Marcadé), workshops with invited artists (Amélie Bertrand, Christopher Cuzin or Elodie Boutry), student exhibitions in professional art venues.

3 • Residency programme for research and creation in sound arts

Founded on the partnership between ENSAD Dijon and the Centre de Création Musicale Ici l’onde (icilonde.whynote.com, dir. Nicolas Thirion), this residency programme for research and creation in sound arts continues the theoretical and practical teaching given to Bachelor and Masters students, as well as the ARC Sound Arts.

Drawing on the resources made available by both institutional partners, this programme gives an artist (musician or non-musician) and/ or a designer the possibility to develop and exhibit their research-creation work whose focal point is sound phenomenon, uniting artistic practices and theoretical know-how, favouring 3 perspectives narrowly defined from each other:

1. Questioning the genres of music, their specific characters and respective histories, but also and especially their porosity and reciprocal deconstructions. The reflexivity engendered by the confrontation between contemporary music (writing based), experimental music (based on sound manipulation, be it electronic or not) and pop music (not those from industrial production of mainstream hits), and the enriching theory of pop music studies, allows for a critical look at multiple genealogies of sound arts (John Cage to Pierre Schaeffer, the Fluxus field recordings to Alvin Lucier’s ambient, Max Neuhaus to La Monte Young, Karlheinz Stockhausen to Eliane Radigue, David Bowie to Aphex Twin, etc), and to renew questioning on the relation between writing, performance and recording, between professional and amateur practice, from high tech to low tech.

2. The Anthropology of Listening: Listening is physical attitude and social practice mediated by (sub)cultures and audiovisual technology. As the most important developments of sound studies indicate, listening constitutes a way of knowing the historical and technical structures of cultures in their aesthetic dimensions as much as social and political ones. Reconsidering what Jonathan Sterne called “audiovisual litany” (Une histoire de la modernité sonore), it is the relation between sound and visual (sound in plastic arts) that are probed in terms of not only the eyes but the ears.

3. Critique of sound design: Standardisation of feelings through the capitalism of record labels, and capturing attention through design sound, implied as much in trade issues as security ones, invites critical thinking about the manner in which artistic practices can restart our tools of perception: how to un-tame listening tamed by design conceived as product decoration?