Ethics

Ethics in Art, Ethics in Supervision, Ethics in Artistic Research.

Lead Partner: University of Bergen

This work package deals with questions related to the ethical and social values and conditions of art and research as well as the ethical and social responsibility of the artist and researcher:

• Can artistic research be an arena in which the ethics in art disciplines, practices, and projects come out as results of performative action?
• Can we claim a relation between ethical thinking and artistic practice, or vice versa?
• Can artistic research be situated in the realm where ethics is a positive driving force?
• Can artistic research be the place where articulated ethical thinking is being developed across disciplines?
• Can ethics in artistic practice be an answer to how artistic research contributes to society?

These questions are of particular importance when we deal with supervising doctoral projects in artistic research Doctoral projects are original and concrete artistic-research projects, involving the use of artistic methods and techniques and contributing new insights and knowledge within the artistic field. To expand the boundaries of the known certainly implies the questioning of existing norms, and these expansions need particular care when being accompanied by the supervisor (team).

How to handle questions of ethics in this relationship, and of course also how to act ethically as a supervisor towards the doctoral researcher, is a key issue in the project. The intellectual outcome will be represented in artistically based expositions (collections of positions). The artistic field may be considered as the place where mind and sensatory experience touch, thus it is crucial to communicate results by means of artistic practices and formats. The expositions will be developed on the basis of workshops and documented through video and sound recording. The recorded material will be combined with artistic material and verbal commentaries to compose the expositions. The ambition is to create basis material for the further development of doctoral projects where ethical influence and ethical potentials are being addressed. Furthermore, a goal is to contribute to the discourse on ethics in general and to research ethics.