Local, Polylocal, — Keynote Address by Michael Schwab at the 2nd General Meeting of Artistic Intelligence

Since its beginning, the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) has proposed the concept of exposition as central to the publication and dissemination of artistic research. Something akin to "artistic intelligence" has been implied in this process without, however, being grounded in a strong ontological framework. Polylocality emerges as a framework potentially able to address this gap — one triggered by developments in machine learning and AI yet reaching well beyond them. Polylocality proposes a reconfiguration of the order of things: the relevance of artistic research registers not at the level of specific outputs or cases of best practice, but in the kind of knowledge operations it sustains.

This lecture does not present to the COST action a set of achievements but a highly speculative perspective through which to approach artistic intelligence in its various contexts. Central is the role of locals — knowledge assemblages that do not share a common ground outside of what is established through consultation and articulation as central event structure. The lecture hypothesises that context-density gradients between locals might be quantified as a means to explain knowledge creation, preservation, and extraction. It suggests that artistic research, like many other societal and cultural activities, requires high context-density operations to meaningfully exist — operations that representational and propositional approaches continuously exploit without acknowledging. At the horizon appears Europe caught between polylocal and monolocal global tendencies.

Michael Schwab is a London-based artist and artistic researcher who investigates postconceptual uses of technology in a variety of media including photography, drawing, printmaking, and installation art. He holds a M.A. in philosophy (Hamburg University) and a PhD in photography (Royal College of Art, London) that focuses on post-conceptual post-photography and artistic research methodology. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR), co-editor of Intellectual Birdhouse. Artistic Practice as Research. (2012), co-editor of The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia (2013), editor of the book Experimental Systems. Future Knowledge in Artistic Research (2015) as well as the editor of Transpositions. Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research (2018) and co-editor of Futures of the Contemporary. Contemporaneity, Untimeliness, and Artistic Research (2019). Through a focus on experimentation and the exposition of practice as research, Schwab has developed a conceptual approach that links artistic freedom with academic criticality.