The third Harvard/PSL workshop, held at Harvard on 26 and 27 February 2020 was part of an exchange between Harvard University and the SACRe laboratory of PSL University (Paris), and aimed at questioning the process of practice-based research in the context of research-creation.

We do not intend to report here the detailed interventions of the four Harvard doctoral students (Amanda Gann, Seiyoun Jang, Julia Sharp, Javier Nueno) and the three PSL doctoral students (Léandre Bernard-Brunel, Joseph Minster, Geoffrey Rouge-Cassarat): each of us was invited to present his or her work, and for several of us, the work presented was at a relatively early stage.

However, we can draw some lessons from the discussions we had about the questions raised by research-creation – questions that the workshop was not, of course, intended to answer, but rather to identify, in order to guide our reflection in the years to come.

1/ The singular and hybrid nature of research-creation forces artist-researchers to invent a third way between two poles of attraction: on the one hand research, and on the other artistic creation. In a more or less explicit way, we can consider that any research-creation project is located at the intersection of these two poles of attraction, or even between these two poles – if that is possible. Each artist-researcher must therefore constantly compromise between the methods and processes suggested to him or her by the creative tradition in which he or she is involved, and those, often different, that belong to the research disciplines in which he or she intends to situate his or her work.

2/ The consequences of this tension are multiple: a basic question such as the relationship to objectivity or subjectivity, for example, must be rethought for each new research object. If the idea of objectivity makes little sense when applied to a personal creative process, it is nevertheless necessary to invent theoretical devices that allow us not to give up this requirement so that this creative work can be considered as research. This can be done by clearly and rigorously explaining the adopted approach, for example this objectified approach becomes the point at which academic exchange can take place. In this way, a possible solution can be found for another consequence of the tension that creative research produces: the difficulty of including personal creative work in the collective work of a team, a laboratory, etc…

3/ This methodological approach does not allow us to clearly define the nature of the works that we can and should aim to produce in the university context. Do we necessarily have to aim to conceive works whose production would be impossible in any other context than research and creation – and if so, how should they be defined? Or can we end up with works whose production could be considered in other contexts than that of university research – but then, what are the necessary conditions for these works to answer the questions an artist-researcher is asking himself or herself? The answer to this issue cannot be univocal, all the more so as it also depends on the specific organization of the artistic production system to each country. The example of cinema is rather eloquent in this regard: in France, the Centre National de la Cinématographie and its system of public subsidies allow a research cinema to exist on the margins of the industry, without the producers and filmmakers involved in the making of this cinema feeling themselves to be researchers. The production system balance in the United States is a little different, and it is rather the universities that allow this research cinema to exist.

4/ This observation on the organization of production systems finally leads to the question of the public to which research-creation works are addressed. Who are these works intended for? To whom should they be addressed? Creation in a vacuum, made by artist-researchers for artist-researchers, is of little interest. But the presentation of research work in its totality can not always interest a larger public. The various projects presented by doctoral students have made us understand, once again, how complex the answer to this question is. Where a performance, whether theatrical or musical, is always adjusted to a context, a place and an audience by the performer/musician, a film is a more inert object, which allows less this type of adaptative variation. The solution may lie in the careful and adequate presentation of the production context of the works to the viewer – whoever he or she may be. By preparing the spectator to consider the works he or she is about to see and/or hear as objects of research-creation, as part of a conceptual and theoretical approach that is wider than the representation he or she is attending, it even becomes possible to hope to mobilize his or her expertise to make him or her a partner in the conducted research. After all, isn’t the public the best expert in regard to the reception of a work?