FilmEU opportunities and challenges:

Mapping a Sustainable Support Model for Practice-based Researchers, Supervisors and Examiners

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2022.10 | Issue 9 | Oct 2022

Érica Faleiro Rodrigues (CICANT, Lusófona University/FILMEU), Deidre O´Toole (IADT/FILMEU) and Manuel José Damásio (CICANT, Lusófona University/FILMEU)

Abstract

This research statement complements the podcast with the same title and is construed as a stepping stone towards a sustainable support model for practice based researchers, supervisors and examiners within the FilmEU alliance and, most importantly, beyond it, opening up the debate on the opportunities and challenges facing the topic. For this task, four relevant players from the artistic research arena were interviewed: Till Ansgar Baumhauer, Nico Carpentier, Michelle Teran and Florian Cramer. FilmEU includes Lusófona University, Portugal, Baltic Film and Media School, Estonia, LUCA, Belgium, and IADT, Ireland. In order to create a model with long-term impact for practice and artistic-based research, the alliance is pursuing a common and transdisciplinary research culture on artistic research within the field of Film and Media Arts. A major hurdle identified by the alliance is the upskilling of practitioners to ensure they have the skills and knowledge necessary to perform and supervise practice-based research. Many potential candidates and supervisors are already distinguished within the worlds of practice or academia; hence, the next step will be creating a bridge between practitioners and researchers. FilmEU will have to provide the adequate technical resources and expertise to guide researchers through this transition from practitioner to practitioner-researcher and to ensure that the work created achieves a professional standard.

Introduction and Context

FilmEU – The European University for Film and Media Arts (Project: 101004047, EPP-EUR-UNIV-2020 — European Universities, EPLUS2020 Action Grant), includes four European higher education institutions: Lusófona University, from Portugal; BFM - Baltic Film Media and Arts - Tallinn University, from Estonia; LUCA School of Arts, from Belgium; and IADT - Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art Design and Technology, from Ireland. These institutions collaborate around the common objective of jointly promoting high-level education, innovation and research activities in the multidisciplinary field of Film and Media Arts and, through this cooperation, consolidate the central role Europe plays as a world leader in the creative fields, promoting the relevance of culture and aesthetic values for our social empowerment. In order to pursue its objectives, FilmEU will promote the expansion and improvement of the joint research capacity of the partner institutions and their ability to disseminate with greater impact the creative outcomes resulting from the education and research endeavours they support, further reinforcing the prominence of artistic research in the European higher education area.

In order to attain such objectives, FilmEU will nourish the implementation of a common model for practice and artistic based research that consolidates alternative paths for PhDs in this field and reinforces the social impact of the knowledge produced in the institutions that integrate the alliance. All this will be grounded in a common research agenda focusing on artistic research that will nurture joint research clusters and groups. In order to facilitate this, initial work was conducted with the objective of situating artistic research in the context of other disciplines. It started by questioning what the role of artistic research may be in meeting contemporary global and social challenges, while surveying existing theories, methodologies and approaches in artistic research. The outcome of this work is being developed under its Work Package 6 - Research and Innovation. FilmEU’s Work Package 6 produced outputs such as the Report on Artistic Research: Opportunities and Challenges and the report Supervision Models in Film and Media PhD Education. The first report encompasses a written report and a video, the second a written report, all materials are publicly available on FilmEU’s website for open consultation and are the background for the podcast linked to this report.

In its quest to create a sustainable support model for artistic practice-based researchers, supervisors and examiners, the FilmEU team is consistently striving to acquire knowledge by promoting prominent debates with proven scholars in the field of contemporary artistic research supervision. These specialists have a birds-eye-view of the status quo and enable team learning from solid academic and artistic experiences. What has been made clear so far is the importance of artistic research being discussed at an institutional level but also that cross-pollination of methodologies and proven best pedagogical practices be encouraged, as this is fundamental for the impact and innovative relevance of the work undertaken - communication and dissemination are key.

Relevant is also not to fall into the trap that the Vienna declaration on artistic research and ELIA´s contributions are universally consensual. The contemporary debate is intense since, in artistic research, we are currently faced with two apparently contradictory pulsations: the need to set parameters and boundaries that grant artistic research the same level of precision and distinction in 3rd cycle studies that other disciplines have, and the space for artistic freedom.

Methodology and Research Questions

The format of the podcast is one that brings knowledge and experience in artistic research and PhD supervision models to the forefront and which, rather than making a judgement, rather leaves space for interpretation and the considerations of the listener. This podcast is the product of qualitative research and, therefore, it:

• produces findings that were not determined in advance.

• has research which is applicable beyond the immediate boundaries of the study.

Throughout, the researchers had an open-ended perspective:

• some aspects of the study were flexible, for example, the addition, exclusion, and or wording of particular interview questions.

• participant responses affected how and which questions researchers asked next.

• the process was iterative, that is, data collection and research questions were adjusted according to what was being learned.

The investigation into best practice in artistic research and PhD supervision models has, so far, led FilmEU researchers to conclude that the main predicaments, at this stage of the construction of the FilmEU project, can be institutional isolation and complacency in the reception of mainstream perspectives. The FilmEU project is in its infancy and, as such, it is paramount that it places questions that allow a steady learning curve in the field of artistic research. This can be achieved by having conversations and debates with actors outside the Alliance who may share insightful experience, creating a space for prolific exchange. Within FilmEU there is also an awareness that it is vital to ask questions now regardless of the fact that they may be difficult, lack a consensual status and/or deal with minority and apparently odd perspectives. What is fundamental is a space for the analysis of eclectic experiences and possibilities. Under the umbrella of these considerations, it is primordial for FilmEU that the scientific principle of continuous questioning remains at its heart, vis-à-vis the consideration that this will lead to a qualitative research environment that is dynamic and open to new perspectives.

Learning from what came before

To begin this journey the authors undertook a review of research on artistic research, white papers, journal articles and similar initiatives. There are many resources available that have been created to develop the sphere of artistic research’s research and supervision, including a toolkit by Sunil Manghani, which describes step by step how to undertake artistic research in a PhD context. As mentioned, there is also extensive work undertaken by ELIA including Mapping Research Supervision in Artistic Research PhDs, and The Salzburg Principles (2005) and Florence Principles (2016) which are aimed predominantly at supervisors and institutions. Other mappings of the field offer both broad and regional perspectives like the one which has been developed by Michelkevičius, which visually illustrates and documents his concepts of artistic research and represents them “as a tour of the diagrammatic world of knowing”.

Although there is an emerging wealth of research on artistic research, FilmEU is at an exciting point where the Alliance can construct a new research network, and paths for PhD candidates undertaking artistic research. As such, the authors reached out to leading academics who have insights into both the realm of AR and the practicalities of creating new pathways and structures. With this in mind, we devised three key questions for this podcast:

• How to reconcile notions of artistic freedom and academic boundaries in artistic research?

• What are the specific needs of PhD supervision in artistic research?

• What should be the framework for the evaluation of artistic research PhDs?

The pool of four interviewees was selected following the criteria that they had to:

• Be academic teachers with concluded PhDs in the field of arts.

• Have years of experience as academic 3rd cycle supervisors in artististic research.

• Have an understanding of European 3rd cycle academic procedures across various countries (to enjoy transnational knowledge in the field).

• Maintain a public career as an artist.

• Possess a career as an academic artistic researcher.

With this in mind, Florian Crammer, Michelle Teram, Nico Carpentier and Till Ansgar Baumhauer were selected to participate in this research project. Supplementary information on the interviewees selected will be provided in a further section of this work.

FilmEU 2021 Report on Artistic Research: Opportunities and Challenges

For FilmEu Work Package 6 the purpose of the output Report on Artistic Research: Opportunities and Challenges was to present a contemporary mapping on the topic and, to achieve this, it includes a number of methodologies, from desk research to focus groups with external experts. The results obtained are always transient, as the Alliance continues to work on building up its agenda on artistic research and improving its capacity to intervene in this domain.

Fig 1. Research Design Task “Mapping Artistic Research”. Damásio, Manuel José., Érica Faleiro Rodrigues, Deirdre O’Toole and Maarten Coegnarts (2021). Mapping Artistic Research: Opportunities and Challenges. Reproduced by permission of FilmEU

The experts invited for this research work / mapping were:

• Jyoti Mistry (interview held on the 24 February 2021), Professor in Film at University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Mistry works with film both as a mode of research and artistic practice. Recent publications on artistic research: International Journal of Film and Media Arts “Mapping Artistic Research in Film” (2020). Journal of African Cinema “Film as Research Tool: Practice and Pedagogy” (2017), Places to Play (2017) and forthcoming Decolonial propositions in collaboration with OnCurating, Zurich (April 2021). Currently, she is editor in chief of PARSE (Platform of Artistic Research in Sweden).

• Susanna Helke (interview held on the 24 March 2021), Professor of Research and director of the Critical Cinema Lab at the Department of Film, Television and Scenography at Aalto University, Finland. Helke is an award-winning filmmaker and theorist whose films (American Vagabond 2013, Playground 2010, Along the Road Little Child 2005, The Idle Ones 2001, White Sky 1998, Sin 1995) received international recognition and have been screened in major international film festivals. Her work on the theory-praxis interface examines the intersection of the poetics and politics of documentary cinema in dialogue with, for example, contemporary political philosophy and critical theory.

• Stefan Gies (interview held on the 22nd April 202) is the Chief Executive of the Association Européenne des Conservatoires, Académies de Musique et Musikhochschulen (AEC), a position he has held since 2015. Gies looks back on a wide range of professional experiences as a performing musician, music teacher and researcher, in an academic career spanning more than 30 years as a scholar, professor of music education and principal at German Higher Music Education institutions. The key topics he is currently working on include: campaigning for the recognition of the specific features of artistic education; ensuring the long-term preservation of adequate framework conditions to maintain a musical life and cultural offers; promotion of musical education at all levels and according to diverse needs; establishing artistic research and facilitating cross-border mobility.

• Andrea B. Braidt (2021, April 28) ELIA president, Senior Scientist at the University of Vienna, Department for Theatre, Film and Media Studies. She previously served as Vice-Rector for Art and Research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 2011 to 2019. As a researcher with degrees in film studies and comparative literature, her research focus and publication activity lie on narratology, genre theory and gender/queer studies. International fellowships and appointments brought her to the USA (UC Berkeley), Canada (University of Toronto) and Budapest where she was a guest professor for gender studies at CEU Central European University. From 2004-2011 she was Senior Scientist at the TFM Department for Theatre, Film, and Media Studies at Vienna University, leading numerous research projects in arts-based research, organising international conferences, and teaching extensively. She has been a member of the board of the Association of Media Studies GfM e.V. and is a founding member and former president of the Austrian Association for Gender Studies. She is vice-chair of the “Forum Research and Artistic Research” of the Austrian Association of Universities (uniko).

• Elena Rusinova (2021, May 5), PhD in Arts, Associate Professor, Vice-Rector for Research and Science, Head of Sound Department at VGIK (Russian State Institute of Cinematography named after S. Gerasimov). She studied music and later graduated in sound design from VGIK, where she has been teaching since 1993. She is a member of the European Film Academy, the Russian Television Academy, the Film Arts Academy of Russia. She has published on the aesthetics of sound and film sound dramaturgy.

With the methodologies presented earlier, we attempted to address a number of key questions concerning artistic research which we may articulate as follows:

• What are the existing research structures and resources in the four higher education institutions that integrate the Alliance and are there any common areas of thematic overlap?

• What is artistic research and when does art qualify as academic research?

• How may we relate artistic research to film practice?

• What challenges need to be addressed to establish a long-term impacting model for practice and artistic-based research within the field of Film and Media Studies?

It is when trying to answer the question of what is artistic research that we are confronted with a myriad of terms, definitions and descriptions.

Fig 2. Defining Artistic Research. Damásio, Manuel José., Érica Faleiro Rodrigues, Deirdre O’Toole and Maarten Coegnarts (2021). Mapping Artistic Research: Opportunities and Challenges. Reproduced by permission of FilmEU

According to Andrea B. Braidt, one of our guest speakers, there are three different ways of approaching the issue of artistic research (see Figure 3). There is the critical approach that upholds that artistic research is a way to criticise modern understandings of science and its master narratives. Artistic research posits itself as a ‘better’ alternative to mainstream research. Then there is the essentialist approach, which highlights the unicity and specificity of artistic research. Instead of building hypotheses that are verified/falsified (like in the sciences) or theses that have to be argued and made plausible (like in the humanities), artistic research brings forth a ‘singular explorative research’ based on ‘condensed experienceness’. Lastly, there is the pragmatic approach, which Braidt herself advocates and which, contrary to the previous approaches, does not consider artistic research to be any different from research in other disciplines. She gives four important arguments for this claim. Firstly, artistic research meets the original five core criteria of the OECD and thus qualifies as a Research & Design activity (novel, creative, uncertain, systematic, transferable/reproducible). Secondly, the quality standards that artistic research activities are measured by are developed by the research community as is the case with any other discipline. Thirdly, artistic research activities are neither more critical or challenging to the scientific system than any other research activity, although they can be. And, finally, artistic research is usually undertaken within a transdisciplinary setting.

Fig 3. Three Possible Approaches to Artistic Research (after Andrea B. Braidt). Damásio, Manuel José., Érica Faleiro Rodrigues, Deirdre O’Toole and Maarten Coegnarts (2021). Mapping Artistic Research: Opportunities and Challenges. Reproduced by permission of FilmEU

Consequently, much of the debate on artistic research hinges on questions of methodological and institutional nature that have to do with further articulating this epistemological condition:

• With what kind of knowledge and understanding does research in the arts concern itself? And how does that knowledge relate to more conventional forms of scholarly knowledge?

• Through which methods and techniques of investigation do we reveal and articulate this knowledge?

• How do we reproduce this type of knowledge?

• How do we assess such knowledge? When does a particular practice qualify as research?

These are the type of questions that the Alliance will have to confront in order to further build up its own research agenda on artistic research.

Special note: Elena Rusinova provided us with an insight on artistic research at VGIK, in Russia, whilst Cahal McLaughin granted us an expert overview on the practice based research PhD model in the United kingdom. Both speakers explained with a certain level of detail how these models of research operate, the UK providing a seemingly more flexible approach when compared to Russia.

In its conclusion, this report acknowledged that to establish a long-term impacting model for practice and artistic-based research, the Alliance will further pursue a common and transdisciplinary research culture on artistic research within the field of Film and Media studies. To this aim the Alliance will:

• set-up a series of collaborative activities among art researchers within the four institutions to further our thinking about some of the methodological and epistemological issues that were raised in this document;

• via continuous and systematic methodological research, it will provide public reports on improving transnational communication and overcoming difficulties that arise from terminological and ontological differences in arts-based research;

• develop a dynamic research structure from the ‘bottom up’ rather than through predetermined classifications imposed from the ‘top down’. This structure should be conceived as a fluid network of researchers clustered around topics rather than as a strict hierarchy;

• train academic art research examiners, enabling them to provide rigorous and accountable assessments;

• further build a common research agenda across all four institutions and beyond, to extend its network with worldwide partnerships;

• empower artistic researchers with the appropriate training and resources.

FilmEU 2022 Report: Supervision Models in Film and Media PhD Education

This report was dedicated to the topic of doctoral education and supervision within FilmEU. The first section provides the reader with a literature overview of the European policy papers that are pertinent to the discussion of doctoral education. By presenting an insight into previous studies and surveys of doctoral education until today FilmEU aimed to provide a general conceptual framework that mapped important principles and guidelines of doctoral supervision. The second section of this report moves away from this “macro” European perspective and offers an overview of the current doctoral requirements and supervision capacities existing within the four institutions in the Alliance. Contrasting the current state of affairs with the background of the recommendations in the first section, allows FilmEU to conclude the report with a number of challenges and future opportunities for doctoral education and supervision in FilmEU.

Fig 4. Research Design Task “Supervision Models”.Coëgnarts, Maarten., Manuel José Damásio, Érica Faleiro Rodrigues, Kaia-Liisa Jõesalu, Elen Lotman, Daithí Mac Síthigh and Deirdre O´Toole. Supervision Models in Film and Media PhD Education. Reproduced by permission of FilmEU.

The discussion of PhD supervision models for artistic research should be placed within a broader European context of position and policy papers, surveys, reports and handbooks that have been published since the Bologna declaration in 1999; a selection of which have been mapped in the timeline below. The boxes above the line represent papers on doctoral education in general. They provide an encompassing framework of principles and guidelines for the boxes below, which deal more specifically with papers on doctoral education in the arts.

Fig 5. A timeline of position papers and reports on PhD education in Europe. Coëgnarts, Maarten., Manuel José Damásio, Érica Faleiro Rodrigues, Kaia-Liisa Jõesalu, Elen Lotman, Daithí Mac Síthigh and Deirdre O´Toole. Supervision Models in Film and Media PhD Education. Reproduced by permission of FilmEU.

An indispensable document when it comes to defining the policy of doctoral education in Europe was the publication of The Salzburg Principles in 2005. This document laid the foundation for discussing doctoral education in the context of the Bologna Process. Under this process, European governments participate in discussions regarding higher education policy reforms and strive to overcome obstacles to create a European Higher Education Area.

Fig 6. The Salzburg Principles (2005). Coëgnarts, Maarten., Manuel José Damásio, Érica Faleiro Rodrigues, Kaia-Liisa Jõesalu, Elen Lotman, Daithí Mac Síthigh and Deirdre O´Toole. Supervision Models in Film and Media PhD Education. Reproduced by permission of FilmEU.

Building upon most of the papers mentioned above are The Florence Principles on the Doctorate in the Arts. The seven ‘points of attention’ out of which they are composed, “attempt to extract the critical core of doctoral education in the arts and seek to provide orientation pillars for a field which has been developing over the past 20 years or so.”

Fig 7. The Florence Principle on the Doctorate in the Arts (2016). Coëgnarts, Maarten., Manuel José Damásio, Érica Faleiro Rodrigues, Kaia-Liisa Jõesalu, Elen Lotman, Daithí Mac Síthigh and Deirdre O´Toole. Supervision Models in Film and Media PhD Education. Reproduced by permission of FilmEU.

A more recent and comprehensive publication with an increased focus on supervision is the report entitled “Doctoral education in Europe today: approaches and institutional structures”. Published in 2019 by the European University Association (EUA) this survey provides an overview about the current landscape of doctoral education in Europe along a series of ten key aspects:

Fig 8. The ten key aspects of the 2018 EUA-CDE doctoral survey. Coëgnarts, Maarten., Manuel José Damásio, Érica Faleiro Rodrigues, Kaia-Liisa Jõesalu, Elen Lotman, Daithí Mac Síthigh and Deirdre O´Toole. Supervision Models in Film and Media PhD Education. Reproduced by permission of FilmEU.

With regard to the dimension of doctoral supervision, universities were asked to address two key questions:

1. What institutional rules and guidelines are in place to organise various aspects of supervision, ranging from the appointment procedure for supervisors to their training?

2. To what extent do early-stage researchers find themselves supervised by a single supervisor or a supervisory team, either with members internal to the institution or from other universities?

Fig 9. Strategies for Artistic Research PhD Supervision. Coëgnarts, Maarten., Manuel José Damásio, Érica Faleiro Rodrigues, Kaia-Liisa Jõesalu, Elen Lotman, Daithí Mac Síthigh and Deirdre O´Toole. Supervision Models in Film and Media PhD Education. Reproduced by permission of FilmEU.

These strategies are further complemented with a set of attitudes and attributes for Artistic Research supervisors adapted from the text Reconsidering Research and Supervision as Creative Embodied Practice by Jane Bacon and Vida Midgelow. This text arises from the project ‘Artistic Doctorates in Europe’ (ADiE, 2016-2019) and suggest several exercises for students and supervisors to explore practice in research including the following list of guidelines for “what it takes to be an artistic research supervisor”:

• A willingness to reconsider and approach your supervisor/mentor/facilitator of practice – perhaps, changing and challenging your own expectations of candidates;

• An ability to apply and be self-reflexive in relation to artistic practice;

• Knowledge of your own strengths and weaknesses;

• Interest and commitment to embracing criticality;

• Willingness to both a challenge and a champion;

• An understanding of the different time requirements and inherent tensions between artistic practices and university regulations;

• An understanding of embodied practices and a commitment to the logic of practice;

• A capacity to see rigour and clarity of purpose as potentials in the candidate rather than imposing them;

• An interest in the practice of the candidate and the candidate themselves;

• Embodied knowledges and specialist insights;

• An ability to stay attuned to wider contexts, working together with micro and macro, zooming in and out;

• An ability to track progress while allowing for openness and trust in the process;

• An awareness of, and ability to challenge, if needed, the institutional regulations.

Reasons behind, practicalities and the implications of this podcast

The reasons for undertaking this research are to build an international research culture that promotes artistic research in a transparent way that champions artistic outputs as knowledge creation. Artistic research that works in an international sphere and can create collaboration and creation across borders. From this research the following steps will be taken;

• Produce a podcast that showcases insights from the panel of experts;

• Use primary and secondary research as grounds for establishing a PhD structure that can work across the Alliance;

• Establish a network of experts in artististic research that can act as examiners or mentors whilst developing a PhD pathway.

The following insights emerging from this podcast are important for the creation and understanding of and implementation of artistic research. The next section will outline a highlight from each of the experts featured on the podcast: Florian Crammer, Michelle Teram, Nico Carpentier, and Till Ansgar Baumhauer. This podcast was researched and created by the FilmEu Team; Érica Faleiro Rodrigues, Deirdre O’Toole and Manuel José Damásio, with technical help and collaboration from Tarun Madupu. Below is a small outline of what our experts expressed within the podcast.

• Florian Crammer (joint interview held with Michelle Teran on the 29th of March 2022). Crammer is reader in Autonomous Practices at Willem de Kooning Academy & Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam. Current research projects include “Making Matters” (with Leiden University, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Waag Society & West Den Haag), on collective material practices, and “Autonomy Lab”, on new concepts of autonomy in the arts. With Nienke Terpsma from “Fucking Good Art”, Crammer wrote the essay “What is Wrong with the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research?”. Other recent publications include “Crapularity Aesthetics” (2018, online) and - with Wendy Chun, Hito Steyerl and Clemens Apprich - the book “Pattern Discrimination” (2018). Crammer volunteers for WORM, PrintRoom, De Player & Awak(e) in Rotterdam.

• Michelle Teram (joint interview held with Florian Crammer on the 29th March 2022). Teran is an educator, artist and researcher. She is a practice-oriented research professor in Social Practices at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Teran received her PhD in Artistic Research from the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen. Her current and ongoing research areas are: socially engaged art, counter-cartographies, feminism, eco-social and critical pedagogy. Recent publications connect to emerging research around transformative pedagogy and include “Everything Gardens! Growing from Ruins of Modernity” (2020) with Marc Herbst and “Situationer Workbook/Situationer Cookbook” (2021), with various authors. Teran is the winner of the Transmediale Award and Prix Ars Electronica honorary merit.

• Nico Carpentier (interview held on the 31st of March 2022). Carpentier is professor in Media and Communication Studies at the Department of Informatics and Media of Uppsala University. In addition, he holds two part-time positions, those of associate professor at the Communication Studies Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB - Free University of Brussels) and docent at Charles University in Prague. Moreover, he is a Research Fellow at the Cyprus University of Technology. Earlier, he was ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association) treasurer (2005-2012) and Vice-President (2008-2012), and IAMCR (International Association for Media and Research) treasurer (2012-2016). Currently, he is Chair of the Participatory Communication Research Section at IAMCR. Carpentier is also the author of numerous academic articles and an artistic researcher.

• Till Ansgar Baumhauer (interview held on the 4th April 2022). Baumhauer is an award-winning artist, curator, lecturer and publicist. He has had numerous solo exhibitions and has worked extensively as a performer and in musical projects. He obtained a postdoc scholarship at Bauhaus-University Weimar with an artistic research project on subversive structures in contemporary fine arts in the Persian-Pakistani cultural area. In 2020 Baumhauer became a team member of the international university alliance EU4ART at HfBK Dresden. Since 2021 he is content leader of the EC-funded alliance research project EU4ART_differences on artistic research. Amongst others, he has lectured at the State Art Collections of Dresden, Potsdam University, Hällisch-Fränkisches Museum Schwäbisch Hall, Goethe-Institute Hanoi, and the universities of Zittau-Görlitz, Hildesheim, Osnabrück and Dortmund.

As mentioned in this qualitative research, for all interviewees there was a common set of questions, however, throughout the process, flexibility was key, as different personal experiences and perspectives meant that the interviewers had to direct the conversations accordingly, making space for new questions and directions of reasoning.

The researchers that developed this podcast are all members of the task force of FilmEU’s work package 6 - Research and Innovation, and are the authors of FilmEU’s report Mapping Artistic Research: Opportunities and Challenges and the report Supervision Models in Film and Media PhD Education :

• Érica Faleiro Rodrigues is a filmmaker, curator, and assistant professor in film and media arts at Lusófona University. She is a leading writer in FilmEU´s Work Package 2 - Institutional and Staff Capacitation, and Work Package 6 - Research and Innovation, having undertaken substantial research in this area and produced various open source reports under these two umbrellas. Previously, her work as a filmmaker granted her a Skillset Millennium Fellowship Award from the British government for a series of documentaries on the role of art in the life of refugees. She has also secured a grant to direct a feature documentary on Portuguese pioneer women filmmakers. The relationship between theory and practice is central to her academic work. She is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck, University of London.

• Deirdre O´Toole, is a lecturer in the National Film School of Ireland, IADT. She has a practice-based PhD in Film and Visual Studies from Queen’s University Belfast, where she made documentaries collaborating with storytellers who had experienced trauma. O’Toole is a filmmaker who has worked for many years as a cinematographer where she filmed documentaries, music videos and dramas. She lectures on the BA (Hons) Film and Television Production, BA (Hons) New Media Studies and the Erasmus+ MA Cinematography. O’Toole is a leading writer in FilmEU´s WP6 (Research and Innovation) and has directed three documentaries, which have been screened extensively in film festivals and galleries around the world.

• Manuel José Damásio is a board member and the coordinator of FilmEU. He is the chair of GEECT – the European association of film and media schools and a member of the board of CILECT – International association of film and media schools. Damásio is an associate professor and the head of the Film and Media Arts department at Lusófona University. He has vast experience in consulting and production in several areas of the field of audiovisual and multimedia production. He is the author of several papers and chapters in international peer-reviewed publications and was the principal investigator in numerous international R&D projects.

For FilmEU, it is essential that PhD candidates are given opportunities to participate in all aspects of research and innovation projects. With this in mind, a PhD candidate with suitable technical and theoretical skills was called upon to contribute to the project as a sound designer:

• Tarun Madupu is a sound designer, composer and filmmaker from India and a member of the FilmEU taskforce. After graduating from Swarnabhoomi Academy of Music with a focus on audio engineering, he went on to get his Master’s degree from Kino Eyes – The European Movie Masters. Through his education and experience in film and music, he has equipped himself with an understanding of the mechanisms that weave film, narratives, and soundscapes together into something powerful. He is now centering these elements as the focus of his PhD study at Lusófona University in Portugal.

Significance of the Work Developed

Investigating the mapping of a sustainable support model for practice-based researchers within the FilmEU alliance, this podcast invited for discussion four scholars with proven careers in both artististic research and 3rd cycle teaching: Till Ansgar Baumhauer, Michelle Teran, Nico Carpentier and Florian Crammer. In so doing, it established a most needed bridge between artistic research within academia and artistic practice outside it. To foster knowledge, it was based around three main questions. How to reconcile notions of artistic freedom and academic boundaries in artistic research? What are the specific needs of PhD supervision in artistic research? What should the framework be for the evaluation of artistic research PhDs? The qualitative research developed under this umbrella, and the conversation steered in different directions according to each speaker’s viewpoint, provided important insights and acted as a timely catalyst for further discussion and for raising fresh questions, such as:

• That the Vienna declaration on artistic research needs more intense scrutiny and renewed debate;

• That for a Phd candidate in artistic research it is fundamental to be part of a collective of exchange. PhD support must be synonymous with creating a milieu of constant debate for and between candidates;

• That artistic research can not be centred around a debate solely within academia but rather that it needs constant synapses between stakeholders internal and external to academia, including those who can provide support to PhD candidates.

Answers were given that lead to further relevant questions in the mapping of a sustainable support model for practice-based researchers. The work developed in this instance is vital for the debate in the field of practice based artistic research and it can certainly be used by a plethora of researchers.

Podcast Link

https://soundcloud.com/user-226659953-53146715/filmeu-artistic-research-mapping-a-sustainable-support-model?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

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Practice-based Research and Creative Arts Practice:

Intra-action, Self and the Other; Drawing and Installation in the British Peak District

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2022.11 | Issue 9 | Oct 2022

Sabine Kussmaul (University of Chester)

Abstract

This research uses a creative arts practice emerging from the processes of drawing and installation to create and explore the relationships between the artist and the outdoor spaces of the British Peak District. A mobile working kit made from paper, fabric and wood is used to make temporary installations outdoors in response to wind, weather and topography. The mobile working kit modules are then returned to the studio and later installed in art exhibition spaces, their display indexing the connection between self, other and the outdoors. The multitude of processes in outdoor environments and their relationships to landscape and its inhabitants’ actions is used as a methodological template to frame change. Based on the dichotomy of mobility and inscription, artmaking actions and the research process are described through the conceptual lenses of ‘gesture’, ‘practice’ and an expanded understanding of drawing. Following this, a taxonomy is suggested that categorises the embodiment of artmaking events from the tensions between their experienced particularities and the artist’s perceived material practice frameworks.

Introduction

Practice-based research approaches in the creative arts can address the sensuous and experiential dimensions of a research topic and make embodiment and aesthetic processes part of its methods and forms of expression. Challenged by the multiplicities and indeterminacies of the life-world and the limitations particular to any research approach, it may find itself having to justify its rigour and explain how it adheres to standards of accessibility, transparency and transferability, characteristics identified by Gray, Malins and Bristow (2018) as key to good research.

This article aims to offer a perspective on what practice-based research in the creative arts might be by describing how my doctoral research project uses an arts practice from drawing and installation to produce, sustain and investigate the relationships between self and the outdoor environments of the British Peak District.

Following Gray’s definition of practice-led research (1996: 3), the arts practice delivers the project’s content, methods and motivations, where practice-led research is ‘ … firstly, research which is initiated in practice, where questions, problems, challenges are identified and formed by the needs of practice and practitioners; and secondly, that the research strategy is carried out through practice, using predominantly methodologies and specific methods familiar to us as practitioners in the visual arts.‘

Using myself in the role of a visual artist and researcher who engages with the outdoor landscapes in the vicinity of Pott Shrigley, Macclesfield, this enquiry aims to answer the following questions: Which materials and practical methods does the arts practice use in order to function as a facilitator for the relationships between self and the outdoor environment of the British Peak District? (1). Which methodological framework might be used to describe how change occurs between environments, arts practice and the research process? (2). What are the determinants of the embodied engagement between self and outdoor environments? (3).

The project’s artmaking activities are focussed on the production and implementation of a mobile artmaking kit. This mobile working kit is produced in the studio and made from paper, fabric and wood. It is taken to the open spaces around Pott Shrigley where it is modified in response to wind, weather and topography. Artefacts are then returned to the studio and later installed in art exhibition spaces, their display indexing the connection between self, other and the outdoors. As the research enquiry unfolds, the arts practice is developed. The project’s objective is to develop the pragmatics of working with the materials of the mobile working kit and to formulate conceptual lenses to describe and analyse such artmaking and its subjective experience.

The following description of an outdoor artmaking event illustrates some of the practicalities and challenges of this outdoor arts practice. I am folding paper over a large rock, tucking it in at its edges and holding it down with my own body until I can fasten it with tent pegs. I want to model the paper over the rock surface, responding to its shape. This is difficult to do, because the paper has a limited folding potential and the result of my shaping efforts look very untidy. I am fighting the wind, which threatens to disentangle areas that are not solidly fixed. I am proceeding to use ink on the paper surface, drawing around my own body, as I stand or kneel on top of it. I also draw some of the observable landscape features. It starts to rain, and I have to be quick before all the ink-marks disappear in puddles of rain. The cold numbs my fingers, as I struggle to quickly roll up the drawing and take it downhill.

My practical artmaking approaches comprise of a range of creative methods. These either leave visual traces on surfaces, like footsteps on the ground or lines on paper, or they bring about new spatial arrangements on outdoor areas, changing the aesthetic dynamic of the land through mobile working kit installations. Such installations are only of temporary duration, lasting the length of time that I spend with them outdoors, which often are just a few hours. At the end of this time, the materials are de-installed, wrapped up, bundled together and taken back to the studio. Some of the project’s artmaking actions also occur on a desktop work station, where I make drawings using a digital drawing tablet. In moments of making such illustrations, I reflect about the project’s concept which leads to the clarification of terminology and further understanding. The illustrations visualise the project’s themes and its internal structure. I combine them into animated on-screen presentations when engaging with other researchers.

The project faces a range of challenges and limitations. As the project is set up to facilitate engagement between self and outdoor places through the vehicle of an arts practice, more generalised conclusions about our relationships with outdoor environments need to be taken with care. A further challenge arises from the nature of an artistic, creative approach when used as part of a research process. As arts practices may gain the justification for their existence from the context that expressivity is an essential part of the human condition, its functionalisation in a research process can be problematic. Though creative practitioners identify themes and aims as part of their practices, the differentiation between object of enquiry and method may appear as an awkward imposition upon the nature of a creative process. In the face of this challenge, I employ particularly explicit documentation processes that allow analysis and evaluation of the Practice-as-Research process.

A third challenge is particular to this very project: when artefacts from outdoor artmaking situations are used for indoor gallery displays, their connection to the outdoor situations may become broken or distorted. I believe that this disconnection is symptomatic for our problematic relationship with nature and natural environments. An arts practice like this one can contribute to address this problem by making explicitly how and where disconnections occur.

In outdoor environments, process manifests in the form of objects, landscapes and interaction patterns by its inhabitants. Change is a core feature specific to process. When change occurs, materials move and bodies, objects and landscape features become reconstituted. In my role as an artist and researcher, I am interested in observing and engaging with the processes that take place in outdoor environments. My attention is also on my creative arts practice and on the research process as a whole. In each of these three contexts, change occurs and manifests in different ways. Changes to the artmaking practice can affect its material choices and technologies, whereas changes to the whole research process might mean that new ideas for conceptualising are discovered. Process in outdoors environments, in practical artmaking and in the research process might be seen as analogies of each other. As part of this enquiry, I question how the research process might benefit from this comparison. The relationship between process and form can reveal the contexts and conditions of knowledge generation. Framing this relationship forms the conceptual basis of the project’s methodology.

The actions of walking, drawing, installation and writing as part of this arts and research practice bring about change. The disciplinary frameworks of dance, performance and visual arts and their interdisciplinary connections allow to describe how change manifests in the making of time-based performances and three-dimensional artworks and how this impacts on the affected environments and subjects. This project draws its methodological connections to such practices and theoretical frameworks where they offer to describe how change registers between the sentient corporeality of the human body and the other than human material forms we engage with. The dancer Paula Kramer (2015) has developed a dance practice where she produced movement material based on the sentient connections between her own body and the materiality of the natural environment, whereas the visual artist Greig Burgoyne (2020) has used his own movements in outdoor spaces to shape the experiential space thus created. The outdoor world supports but also challenges our bodies and this is reflected in some of Joseph Beuys’ choices to use felt, fat and other materials and also in Studio Orta’s (2020) sculptures which resemble tents or oversized garments.

As a visual artist working outdoors, my experience of outdoor places is much determined by the physical engagement of my body when walking over the land, carrying materials, making installations or drawings, and getting back to the studio. There are many iterations and variations of such artmaking events. Each time spent outdoors I visually engage with the distant sections of the land whereas my direct corporeal contact with materials and surfaces is limited to areas in direct proximity to me. Through the rhythm of my breathing, my internal corporeal space is in continuous exchange with the space around me. Feeling the weather and atmosphere is another important dimension of spending time in the open. How distance, nearness, and atmosphere are registered by the faculties of my senses determines the experience my artmaking activities. My role as an artist in an outdoor world might be seen in analogy to the role of a researcher in a particular research territory. In both instances, proximity, distance and different modes of corporeal engagement are important aspects of the artist’s or researcher’s activity and any knowledge used or produced is always embedded, local and embodied.

Fig. 1. The mobile working kit in outdoor artmaking situations and as part of a gallery installation. (Kussmaul, 2019, 2021)

The first part of this article will describe how meteorological, metabolic and geological processes in outdoor environments can be understood as movement of materials and their reconstitution into new three-dimensional shapes. This manifests in landscape forms, but also in alterations to the land made by humans and other than humans like the construction of buildings or the digging of mines or dens.

The article will then continue to describe ‘mobility and inscription’ as a duality that captures how perceived change in outdoor environments manifests in the movements of materials on the one hand and their reconstitution into new forms on the other. How the artist and researcher experiences change is explained by using the concept of ‘gesture’, in adaptation of Noland’s (2015) concept. I will understand, ‘gesturing’ as a feeling of being in a sensuous correspondence between observed change in the environment, and our memories from previous experience. Perceived change around us also impacts on the way how we feel about ourselves. For this reason, I suggest an additional conceptual lens: Adorno’s approach to mimesis (Gebauer & Wulf, 1995) describes how self and other come about. It also describes how the production of meaning occurs in the creative arts.

In the article’s following section, I will describe my artmaking activities as ‘practice’ where individual artmaking events are embedded in a wider context of techniques, temporal rhythms of artmaking activity and preferred choices for tools and materials. As artmaking manifests in the development of techniques and produces artefacts, the practice can be seen to carry and visualise the knowledge of its own epistemic process.

The practical work of the arts practice is evidenced in three-dimensional installations, line-based illustrations, diagrams and written notes which are all seen as an expanded version of ‘drawing’. Such drawing is understood as the production of form through its extraction from the complexity of the life-world or through its embodied enactment.

The article concludes by suggesting a taxonomy for the embodied dimensions of outdoor artmaking by understanding their form-giving processes from the viewpoint of embodied cultures and material technology. It will describe agency as the tensions between the somatosensory determinants of the artmaking situation, categorised into tiers of complexity and formulated as the conceptual motives of ‘capture’, ‘carry’, ‘mark’ and ‘spend time’.

Wind, weather, drystone walls and artmaking

The windy pastures of Bakestonedale Moor above Pott Shrigley are covered with tall grasses, thistles and bracken. Sheep and hill walkers roam in changing numbers, their movements intersected by drystone walls and the landmarks left behind by mining for coal and fire clay. There are concrete-capped mine shafts overgrown by tall ferns, rock debris from historic quarrying and grassy ledges, the remainders of coal transportation trackways. The land appears like a bowl made of soil, grass and rock, turned upwards towards the incessant interchanges between clouds and sky, sun and rain. The landscape’s sounds are a polyphony of aircraft noises, voices of crows and song of skylarks mixed with the commotions from nearby farming. Human engagement and the actions of the other than human combine with the forces from geological, meteorological and metabolic processes, their patterns of change manifested in an unfathomable complexity. As human participants in such materials and processes, we subjectively experience place and ourselves when we spend time in such environments. My artmaking as the core approach of this enquiry is part of this experience.

An abundance of forms exists in such a rural outdoor environment: scree slopes, trees, drystone walls, sheep, the bodies of human visitors. All of these are three-dimensional forms – some of them alive bodies with fluids moving inside them, some of them conscious and sentient. In such a dynamic environment, change manifests in the movement of things and the reconstitution and deconstruction of bodies. Further to physical form, there is also the form that is generated through process: the movement patterns of a herd of sheep, the routes regularly walked by a hiker, my own patterns of returning to the place to make drawings, all have their own rhythmic and temporal dimensions, driven by intensions or instinct and ultimately connected to the flow of energy between sun and Earth.

Fig. 2. Bakestonedale Moor. (Kussmaul, 2021)

The genesis of form through process can be understood from Barad’s postulations that change comes about in a process of intra-action (2003): bodies co-constitute each other’s forms, characteristics and differences, making all change and knowledge-production relational and situated.

My position as a visual artist in outdoor places offers an example of our broader position in an outdoor world. We are never outside of our relationship with environments and our experience of this relationship is never distanced and objective. Being actively immersed in an unfolding relationship also carries the risk of loosing sight of my own role and position within it.

Harraway (1988) and Braidotti (2012) have based their philosophies on the relational, situated and enacted characteristics of knowledge and its production. Barad postulates that due to the situatedness of any research process, we need to consider the method of our enquiry and its object from the cohesive context of a ‘phenomenon’. When we use artmaking as a process for research, this means, that we have to consider creative methods as part of a wider creative practice.

Outdoor environments have many protagonists that use its space. Sheep, farmers, hill walkers, myself as a visual artist and researcher. We all share each other’s space, though our journeys and sojourns follow our own rhythms. We are within each other’s space as we go about our habits of using the outdoors when we camp, ski, pick blackberries, erect fences or observe birds. In comparison to natural outdoor spaces, urban environments are more segregated into sections of activity, their formal geometry often dominated by verticality. The horizontal extension of Bakestonedale Moor reaches far and the relationship between distance and nearness always features in our experience of it. The many iterations of natural processes, manifested in the repeat cycles of seasons, propagation, growth and decay, have an accumulative effect on the physical shapes and interaction patterns they produce. Many iterations of processes, expressed in multiple generations of lived activity or as material movements in geological time frames, impact on landscape forms, the interactivity patterns of living creatures and the natural designs of their organisms. Repetition can be associated with circular temporal patterns, whilst curves are the formal features of alive physical bodies. Such forms are also described by Nelson (2013: 53) when he writes about the hermeneutic-interpretative models for generating new knowledge. He associates their dynamics with form that is “ … not linear but figured as circles, spirals or networks with many points of entry.” However, in natural environments, repetition of geological processes may often produce layering and sedimentation. Deleuze’s concept of smooth versus striated space (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013) understands form and movement within open spaces as patterns of human material productivity expressed as the polarity between nomadic and static habitation.

Form can be seen in relation to the different conditions and methods of knowledge production. It seems of particular interest here, that architectural form in urban environments, as well as the forms of things that hold abstract knowledge – books, shelves and sheets of paper, present in a reduction of formal variety as verticals and horizontals.

Fig. 3. Mobile kit modules and the material textures of Bakestonedale Moor. (Kussmaul, 2020)

Ingold (2007: 29) writes that our engagement with the outdoors reaches deep into our bodies, rather than relying alone on sensation from the organs of touch or vision. Though our body surface and its skin can act like physical boundaries between self and the external, our engagement with landscape works through the porosity of this boundary. Our skin has properties to absorb fluids and gases and process the qualities of being touched. The physical action of an uphill walk passes through the skin barrier and impacts on a warming of muscles, the engagement resonating from our internal sentient structure. We experience our physical engagement with the world on a continuum between the sensed internal and perceived external places, sustained by our physical rhythms of breathing and the duality of perception and reflection.

Each time that I spend artmaking outdoors, the subjective experience of wind, weather, paper surfaces, my walking or running, unfold as a unique event. Some of these experiences build new memories and registers of knowing, doing and feeling. However, the singularity of each event always throws open more than what we already know, challenging our understanding, and through this, implicitly, connecting us to the unknown.

Experience and new knowledge emerges as a process that Ingold (Ingold, 2017) describes as a meshwork of ‘lines of becoming’ where continuous differentiation occurs, an open process that gives rise to the unexpected, temporal and relational.

Mobility versus inscription and the gestural process

Outdoor environments are constantly changing. Change manifests in live and inorganic forms and no matter if it occurs only once or as a repetitive pattern, the dislocation of matter is always part of it. This mobility of matter on the one hand and its inscription embodied into new forms on the other can describe two opposing dimensions of process. This duality not only applies to form in landscapes and biological processes, but also to people shaping stones into drystone walls, the artist making installations or the researcher introducing a new method for reflective writing. On an abstracted level, the duality between mobility and inscription also occurs in territories of knowledge, as change brings about an inscription into new frameworks and concepts.

Objects and bodies that are part of such processes carry the knowledge of their maker - if there is one such identifiable subject – and information about the context and unfolding structure of their making process. In this sense, the physical shapes and internal structures of objects and bodies are indicative of how they have changed and evolved. For this reason, they can be seen as ‘scripts’ not only of their own becoming but also of the conditions and situations they were part of. A research enquiry can use this epistemic dimension as a methodological strategy by incorporating and visualising the artmaking and research process through its artefacts, revealing its internal structure and different stages of development.

I am working outdoors on an exposed grassy slope, pegging down sheets of paper that I cut from a roll. This requires swift actions and a pin-and-overlap technique so that the wind has no chance to rip apart the growing paper platform. I dip a large brush into a glass jar full of ink and before my hand can get to the surface of the paper, the wind has already started to spread the black liquid, spitting it onto the white paper. I draw large circular shapes. In certain paper sections, the ink pools into puddles or forms little streams flowing down the papery slope. A light rain starts. It feels like the weather urges me on to hurry up, and now hail stones begin to fall, a crackling, crisp sound on the paper surface. The icy particles melt into the ink, some of them developing a black rim around their raised ice shapes.

The complexity of the outdoor world entwines with the intricacy of the artmaking process. My experience of this unfolds as a dialogue between myself and expressions of change that I pick up from the weather and the handling of materials. The artmaking event proceeds as I consciously take decisions or delay a response. Often, I do not know how different appearances in the environment might congregate to produce my subjective experience of the situation. However, I might feel, that the experience presents to me as if its expressive particularities were asking for my response.

In order to clarify my role as artist and researcher in such a subjective experience, I use an adaptation of Noland’s concept of gesture to describe it. Noland, a dancer, choreographer and writer, has developed the concept of gesture (2010) to describe the context of body movements in dance and corporeal activity. She explains that all embodied actions occur in a context where four aspects stand in a particular relationship to each other: firstly, there is the gesture - the movement of a part of our body – and, secondly, perceived kinaesthetic feedback from this movement. There is also, thirdly, our programs of knowing how to do things and, fourth, there are tools and materials that we might use. I believe that this concept can be adapted to describe the subjective experience of an outdoor artmaking situation where I perceive kinaesthetic feedback from actively moving myself, objects or materials, or where I feel ‘moved’ or ‘stirred’ by perceived difference.

Change between self, the environment and the artmaking agenda manifests in the subjective particularity of the gestural event. This unfolds as a sensuous dialogue between qualities of perceived difference, their resonance on subjective patterns of knowing place, artmaking and environment, and an awareness of the unfolding event. The artmaking event develops its own unfolding spatio-temporal shape, similar to an improvisation event amongst dancers or musicians which has been described by Sgorbati as ‘emerging form’ (2005).

Fig. 4. Outdoor ink drawings and illustrating the relationship between processes in the environment, artmaking and the forms of objects. (Kussmaul, 2020, 2021)

The dancer and choreographer Schiller (2014) has described how movement-based interaction creates the space of its own experience for its performer, a ‘dwelling space’ for the experience. The experience of artmaking or conducting research pools into the here and now and produces a subjectively perceived dwelling space. It also creates the transfer of momentary experience into more permanent knowledge and the transformation of existing knowledge into new forms. The experience of change and how this brings us into contact with the unknown is related to engaging with materials as Hunter suggests that: ‘… not-knowing’ is directly bound to working with materials. Artists and performers facilitate the production of new embodied knowledge as they, ‘…meddle with what we discursively and ontologically do not know and generate ways of knowing or becoming with that material.’ (Hunter, Krimmer & Lichtenfels, 2016: 3).

Each artmaking event feels like a dialogue with an unfolding situation that not only contains my contribution but also the expressions picked up by myself from the current weather, the forms of thistles taller than myself, the hollow shape of a path, and the feeling that the folded paper object suggests a way of drawing on it different from what I already know.

Fig. 5. Using the illustration process to reflect, develop and communicate about the gesturing concept of this enquiry. (Kussmaul, 2021)

Fig. 6. The gesturing process as a dialogue between artist and perceived change. (Kussmaul, 2021)

Mimesis, self and artmaking

Each artmaking or research event changes the artist and researcher, and in doing so, brings about a different understanding of myself and other. When engaging with the things of the world, we firstly register them as a resonance felt on our own sentient system. This then allows us to differentiate between ourselves and the other. Hunter describes this as ‘morphing’, as that which ‘…happens when the somatic complexity of being changes because it recognizes something else. ‘ (2016: 5). I believe that Hunter’s description points to a mimetic dynamic, a process that I think underwrites all processes of gestural engagement. Mimetic dynamics inform how our selves and the other come about in actions of artmaking but also when a person engages with artwork. Adorno has described mimesis in connection to artwork (Gebauer & Wulf, 1995: 281): the aesthetic qualities of an artwork might offer ambiguities to its audiences or otherwise escape the production of equivocal statements. For that reason, it facilitates meaning making based on affect. ‘Mimetic movement encompasses these pre- and nonrational elements, which represent the essential aspects of art that are anchored in the ambiguity of the somatic. ‘ (1995: 290). For this reason, artwork can reveal knowledge about our relationship with outdoor places and embodied material cultures that are only available subconsciously or inaccessible for other reasons. The mobile working kit and its installations aim to startle the viewer and disturb their understanding about the role of an artmaker and the outdoor practices that we are familiar with. O’Sullivan (2010: 205) explains that contemporary art has the function to orientate itself towards the future: ‘Art ruptures dominant regimes and habitual formations and in so doing actualises other durations, other possibilities for life.’

‘Practice’ as vehicle of knowledge production

Over many millennia, our engagement with land has led to the development of techniques for shelter, food production and other unique material cultures. Iterations of singular actions have gradually improved our habits to grow crops, dry fish, use skis to spend time on snowy slopes or walk on countryside footpaths. Repetition and variation of processes not only shape objects but also the processes in which we create them. Techniques and technologies store embodied knowledge and in doing so, allow a transfer of such knowledge to those who share such methods with us. Mauss is often referred to as the founder of our understanding for ‘techniques of the body’ (1973), describing them in the context of their societal determinants. His understanding of ‘technique’ does not only comprise how we use materials and our bodies, but also how we develop habits based on our engagement with our feelings and emotions, exemplifying this in his descriptions of the technique of making oneself fall asleep.

Patterns of knowing how to feel, make and do things, can be seen as ‘practice’, also comprising techniques, material technologies and the intentions and values of its practitioners.

I have learnt how to feel and rate my momentary experience of the weather, the surface of the paper or the effort to walk up a steep hill in comparison to similar previous situations.

My embodied actions are also experienced from a register of organising and directing my artmaking actions from the framework of a professional visual artist, with respective goals and intentions. And then, this arts practice becomes a method within the framework of this research enquiry, where drawing and installation are joined by different methods of writing, each such drawing, installation or writing event a gesturing between materials, the environment and a particular register of knowing. Each practice event features as a singularity of experience but also resonates on my frameworks of sensuous experience and acquired techniques.

The mobile working kit contains modules that are made from paper, wood, fabric and string. Folding, bending, cutting and joining are the basic actions applied in the fashioning of the modules. Some actions permanently change the shape of the mobile working kit modules whilst others are temporary. Many repetitions and variations of such processes have gradually shaped this project’s practice techniques and I have learnt which ones to perform how and to what aim. However, beyond the mobile working kit’s role in this practice, its elements and their outdoor and indoor installations appeal to our knowledge about joinery techniques, garment production, leather crafts and bookbinding. I consciously use the mobile working kit so its elements appear decontextualised from their original material technology. This creates ambiguities of meaning to the installation and therefore questions our knowledge about them.

I use journals as writing and reflection platforms and I document practice development in photographic catalogues. Wall hung displays and installations in gallery spaces enable me to communicate with the public or with academic audiences. I also document practice development by allowing early steps of multi-stage assemblage processes to remain visible. Pencil pre-drawings or marks from pre-permanent assemblage processes will remain as valued parts of the artefact’s aesthetic. The unfolding arts practice has also led to the production of wall storage modules and frames for mid-room displays. Gray, Malins and Bristow (2018) have postulated that creative practice-based PhD enquiries might use a final exhibition, as an ‘exposition’, to demonstrate their processes and results. I believe that the visualisation of the project’s development at any stage will increase its internal coherence and raise its potential to communicate with audiences.

I understand my outdoor artmaking practice in relation to the rhythms and habits performed and shared by other creatures outdoors and in connection to the processes driven by the physical forces outdoors. In each artmaking event, engagement in the here and now gestures towards its own and other practice frameworks, creating patterns of refraction between them.

Fig. 7. Using the mobile working kit to visualise practice and research development: An installation demonstrates material choices as part of a four-tier taxonomy. Wall storage racks. (Kussmaul, 2021

Fig. 8. Assembly and surface treatment methods. (Author’s own photographs, 2021)

Fig. 9. Communicating about practice and research development: A poster explains what the artist does in an outdoor artmaking event. (Kussmaul, 2020)

Drawing as extraction and enactment of from

Using the mobile working kit to make drawings and installations outdoors, my own body also changes the spatial situations of the environment by leaving traces on the ground or, when working at the desktop work station, by producing illustrations and written text. These actions also build and reconstitute the project’s framework. Such intra-active engagement between materials, myself and environments also affects the temporal dimensions of working patterns and extends to research dissemination situations. When I engage with other researchers, I might demonstrate my artmaking actions in a live conference situation or use illustrations and words to engage with them through on-screen presentations, each such event producing its own choreography of bodies and artefacts, words and images.

I use several practice log-books as digital writing platforms where photographs, diagrams and text come together so that reflection and analysis can take place across and between these different forms of information. With each iteration of engaging with a practice log-book, my current thoughts and observations are revealed as expressions of change that gesture towards previously established knowledge, leading to the perception of difference.

The previously introduced concepts of ‘gesture’ and ‘practice’ have framed the subjective experience of change and the rhythms and techniques of knowledge acquisition.

It appears useful to describe the artmaking methods explained above through a conceptual lens that relates them to notions of mark making from a context of drawing. The verb ‘to draw’, in its various Germanic and Proto-Germanic forms refers to acts of ‘pulling’, ‘dragging’ or ‘carrying’ out (Online Etymology Dictionary, 2022). Common to these historic roots is their reference to the notion of ‘extraction from a context’ but also the performance of an act that receives its form by means of its enactment. These two actions, firstly, the pulling out or extraction of a thing from a context and secondly, the performing of an action, both bring identity to the process in question. In this expanded sense, my artmaking can be seen as drawing, as the action of producing and enacting form within a complexity.

I step onto the paper rock cover and kneel down. With a marker pen, I draw around the perimeter of my legs, bent at the knees, folded under but slightly pushed to the side, as my body’s weight rests on my right thigh. I have to pass the marker pen from my right to the left hand to get all the way around my body. Now that I have marked my own position into the drawing, I use the pen to draw lines that represent the visual rhythms of the drystone walls, the curvatures of hills and their clusters of grasses and bracken. Drawing produces and enacts form and brings a new dynamic to our experience of existing space.

I use many metres of elastic string wound up on sticks or cones as mobile mark-making devices on the land. As I walk and carry with me such a cone of string, I swing the stick in a circular motion, unwinding more metres of it as I walk along, and, at certain intervals, pinning the string to the ground, stretching it over the surface of big rocks, bending it and twisting it around others. Although these actions of walking, spindling and marking, form a process with its own enacted nature, it is often difficult to determine whether this process of enactment is positioned within the disciplinary framework of dance, performance or visual arts. I believe that this is due to the fact that the experiential dimension of such actions gain their relevance from the primary or primeval connection between the self, environment and materials rather than rely on meaning-making dynamics based on references to contemporary forms of ‘dance’, ‘performance’ or ‘installation’.

Fig. 10. Extracting and enacting form: Handling and engaging with the mobile working kit and installations that change the dynamic of its outdoor places. (Kussmaul, 2020 and 20

Fig. 11. Methodology journal: engaging with photographs and different modes of writing to progress the project. (Kussmaul, 2021).

I might make drawings with the intentions of representing a past artmaking experience that I want to record and document. The role of drawing here is similar to the way an industrial designer might use a sketch to plan the development of an object. The sketching process visualises the planning stage but it also represents a creative artmaking arena in its own right interfering with the planning process.

Brandstetter (2017: 48) has formulated this dimension of drawing as seen from the viewpoint of a score for dance. She writes that the score ‘…. oscillates between record (as documentation) and conception (as outline), it self-reflectively marks its relational position between work and performance, between image/text and body/movement.‘

From the comfort of an armchair at home, I am making a sequence of drawings on A4-size sheets of paper. I use faint pencil lines and then an ink-liner to gradually visualise the recent artmaking event outdoors, where I had made a paper covering for a large rock, folding and bending thick lengths of lining paper over the lichen-covered stone surface. As I keep drawing, I weave backwards and forwards in my thoughts between the past event and the drawing situation as it develops now, remembering how the wind and the cold made the situation a difficult endeavour. My drawing actions now resonate on my knowledge about the effective use of line and shading in making an illustration, altering it in the process, but also changing my understanding of the original event outdoors. My engagement with past artmaking is enacted by my momentary drawing actions whilst the finished drawing functions as a script of this interaction.

The notion of ‘practice’ as described earlier is a form-giving enactment in its own right and applies to the creative arts practice and the research practice. With each practice and research event, experience pools into the dwelling space of its enactment, changing the artist and researcher each time. Haseman (2010) has developed a concept for understanding research as performative when it is based on researchers that ‘… do not merely “think” their way through or out of a problem, but rather they “practice” to a resolution. ‘ (2010: 147) . He also postulates that ‘… the expressive forms of research work performatively. It not only expresses the research, but in that expression becomes the research itself.’ (2010: 148).

Brisson-Darveau and Brunner (2021:4) have developed a different way of contextualising multi-facetted experience. Their concept of ‘texturing space’ explores how research activity can produce space with ‘…. texture as an entry point into practicing techniques for activating new potentials for sensation.’ Their explorations are very similar to this project’s endeavour to describe how perceived form comes about through engagement. However, I understand that their project takes its starting and end point from within the conceptualised landscape of interdisciplinary research whereas my project aims to start and end with the open spaces of the Peak District.

The performed patterns and rhythms of outdoor processes and my artmaking and research practices can be seen to combine as a life-world with its own embodied knowledge. This life-world expresses an intelligence that fits the ‘4 Es’ of cognition: embodied, enacted, embedded and extended are the adjectives associated with cognitive processes with the latter two referring to actions and their manifestations in forms whose material parts are distributed in the environment. Shusterman (2013: 49) has suggested that these attributes of cognition need to be complemented by the affective and aesthetic dimensions, characteristics specific to the aesthetic processes that are part of a creative practice.

I am out at the top of Pott Shrigley, spreading lengths of paper over the grass, pinning it down with pegs and making incisions into it so that the openings created allow the paper to move around protruding stones or rocks. I then use black ink and a big brush to make simple circular marks onto the paper-platform. The ink not only leaves the traces of my gestural movements but it also drools down on the paper in response to the sloping of the landscape, marking its own path of movement and pooling in certain areas. My activities out there, on this Friday afternoon, with a low sun and its dramatic, large shadows seem to bring a strange feeling to the place. I feel observed as if my own actions have brought a ‘seeing presence’ to the place, as if the place has acquired a capacity to see and know for itself, and it now looks back at me.

The concepts of gesture, practice and drawing might suit to explain some dimensions of this event. However, the limitations of their conceptual reach are more than evident.

Fig. 12. Artmaking actions become enacted forms when using the mobile working kit, and drawing to represent experience and visualise concept. (Kussmaul, 2019, 2021).

A taxonomy for embodied engagement between self and outdoor environment

The mobile working kit consists of studio-fashioned modules made from rolls of lining paper, double sided leatherette, elastic textile string and wooden sticks. It also contains metal artefacts like tent pegs and blades to cut string. Though the material origins of these artefacts have been derived from natural resources, they still have gone through a combination of industrial production processes. Their reintroduction to a natural environment appears like an aesthetic mis-fit to my eyes. They appear ‘out of place’ and this feeling is particularly striking in the case of white paper, its smooth surface in stark contrast to all other outdoor forms, none of which have such distinct surfaces. Rather than exclude paper from my materials choices, I believe that its inclusion can visualise our problematic relationship with outdoor places as we experience them through the lens of the many technologies that determine our embodied engagement with them. We do not ‘return’ to the open places from an archaic or innocent position. We wear shoes and clothing when spending time outdoors, and we fashion our sojourns there according to the abilities of our bodies and their needs for warmth, food and shelter, which most of us find in the urbanity of our homes.

The concepts of ‘gesture’, ‘practice’ and ‘drawing’ have brought order to the multiplicity of processes in outdoor artmaking. However, my artmaking requires a pragmatic criticality that allows me to describe, compare and analyse project installations and drawings and to take decisions about future developments. For this reason, I suggest a taxonomy that categorises the engagement between myself, artmaking materials and outdoor places into levels of complexity considering outdoor places and their specific material and spatial contexts.

On a very elemental level (level 1), our engagement between ourselves and the outdoor places occurs between our bodies and the physical shape of the land. Our walking, running, and the time spent outdoors unfolds as a combination of actions where our embodied selves and the bodies of other materials ‘bend’ or ‘fold’, ‘connect’, ‘join’ or ‘divide in relation to each other. In each such engagement, the interactions come about as a negotiation between yielding to the forces of the other or offering resistance. This dichotomy between resistance or compliance in embodied interactions also manifests in the artist’s emotions in association to the artmaking event and can be seen in relation to a practice-specific intentionality.

The engagement between body and land gains more complexity when we consider the inclusion of additional artmaking materials. Introducing paper surfaces, tent pegs, drawing ink, and string (level 2), brings materials to the environment whose introduction and use may appear in aesthetic dissonance to the current environmental context. However, on this second level, these materials also become part of the bending, folding, joining, separating and connecting actions, contributing to interactions with their specific embodied potential.

On yet another level of complexity (level 3) materials engaged with can be seen as part of a material culture and represented by particular material technologies like building fences in farming, or using fabric in sewing and tailoring. Such material cultures use raw and manufactured materials and their methods have been developed and improved over long periods of time in relationship to societal and economic dynamics and the power structures associated with them. The material cultures referenced by the artist’s use of mobile working kit materials may be different from such material practices found in this particular outdoor environment. In such an instance, their use creates a sense of contrast and dissonance.

This creative arts practice with its particular material choices and methods can be understood as a particular version of such a material culture. I assign it to its own tier (level 4), though the practice-specific methods like drawing, installation and documentation also manifest as body-land relationships (level 1), are expressed using artmaking materials (level 2) and reference material cultures (level 3). In this sense, the arts practice is seen as a framework of material culture in its own right and it folds back into itself to reinforce its own methods and actions and thus building complexity. Such re-implementation of structure into its generic context reminds me of evolutionary processes where the effectivity of organisms is gradually improved over time in response to its engagement with the environment.

Relating different aesthetic and materials components of an installation to the frameworks of embodied material cultures offers a way to describe how the installation produces its agency: agency is produced by the tensions between embodied resonance from material components of the installations and how these produce connotations and dissonances in reference to material culture frameworks, a process that can gains complexity by layering and feedback into itself.

Fig. 13. A taxonomy for engagement with materials and outdoor environments. (Kussmaul, 2021).

As a way of describing the agentic potential of an object or artefact, I suggest to question it from the viewpoint of four conceptual motives: ‘Capture’, ‘carry’, ‘mark’, and ‘shape time’, each refer to a different aspect of an object’s properties to exhibit its relationships between form, knowledge and process. I believe that these terms are able to categorise the epistemic dimensions of any material artefact, embodied practice or, in more abstract terms, the form of a research process. ‘Capture’ refers to the events of form creation where in moments ‘of the catch’ the object or knowledge came about, whereas ‘carry’ means its potential to store and transport knowledge. ‘Mark’ refers to the particular spatial and material components that make up its form. ‘Shape time’ aims to describe how patterns of change and development, growth and decay bring structure to the perception of time, also raising the question, who might bring about such temporal patterns and who perceives them.

Fig. 14. Sewing and textile technologies are used as assembly methods and as a material culture reference framework. The human body and other materials engage by bending, connecting, joining, dividing or folding. (Kussmaul, 2021).

Conclusion

Artmaking activities on Bakestonedale Moor have created relationships between the artist and its open places which have then become the focus point of these research explorations. Drawing and installation processes, the rhythms of natural processes on the land, and the methods of conducting research have been framed in consideration of their connections between form and process, based on the dichotomy of mobility and inscription. Whilst ‘gesturing’ framed the subjective artmaking experience as a dialogue between self and the unfolding event, underwritten by a mimetic dynamic, ‘practice’ was used to describe the knowledge-building processes of repeat-and-variation patterns of making and feeling. The practical methods of installation, illustration and writing were understood as an expanded form of drawing, producing form by ‘drawing it out’ from a context or by enacting it. In addition to this, a taxonomy has been suggested that charts how agency comes about from the tensions between the perceived particularities of materials and bodies and the subject’s material culture frameworks.

The methodology’s focus on form and process arose from the need to develop a practice-based criticality for artmaking that can explain the pragmatics of working with the mobile working kit and facilitate choices between using fabric or paper, between cutting, ripping or tearing, between sewing together or using temporary assembly techniques.

The combination of the enquiry’s conceptual lenses has allowed me to describe flow and development as a subjectively experienced dialogue between self, the complexity of outdoor environments and the specificity of the momentary event. Such conceptualisations also allowed me to understand the artist’s actions in analogy to the rhythms and habits by the other than human actors encountered outdoors.

Some of the forces that drive the processes in outdoor environments may be associated with conscious intentions by sentient beings whilst others are based on instinct or geological and meteorological activity. The multiplicity of processes and their intentions might be understood as a choreographic texture between land and human and other than human actors. As this research enquiry has not yet reached its end point, I wonder how its framework might be extened to include emotion, conscious intention, instinct and physical forces as drivers for change specific to the theatrical dimension of place.

Fig. 15. Ink drawings on the slopes of Bakestonedale Moor. (Kussmaul, 2020).

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How to Establish Film Practice Research and Evidence Impact in the Greek Academic Environment?

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2022.12 | Issue 9 | Oct 2022

Iakovos Panagopoulos and Ioannis Deliyannis (Ionian University)

Abstract

Nowadays, there are two types of scholars teaching film courses at the Greek universities. The first one is the theoreticians with a background in film studies and a PhD in film theory, who approach their teaching methods strictly from a theoretical point of view. The second type of university teachers are practical filmmakers that come directly from the industry, most of them without a PhD or formal research experience. They approach their courses from a practical point of view sharing their experience from the industry.

Greek Universities are exclusively public at the moment and fall under the Ministry of Education. The system is quite bureaucratic and difficult to adapt within and responds slowly, if at all to changes. PhD candidates are dealing almost exclusively with traditional theoretical PhDs. Over the past several years, the first art-based PhDs focusing upon performing arts or visual arts in the Greek academic environment were submitted. However, the field of film practice research is still brand new. At the same time, over the past decade the Ministry of Education established a new unit in Universities that will measure the quality of research and teaching entitled Quality Assurance Unit (MO.DI.P). MO.DI.P is an advisory body for the administration of the University which, through the coordination of procedures for internal and external evaluation of the academic units of the Institution, gathers information regarding the strong and weak points of a University. Within this framework it is really difficult for arts based or film-based research practitioners to prove the impact of their research to MO.DI.P. and to establish film practice research in general within the Greek academic environment.

Since my background is on film practice and my PhD was undertaken in the United Kingdom, I am familiar with the ways that we can measure film practice impact in the academic environment. Establishing this culture in the Greek academic environment is quite difficult but at the same time it forges new paths and exciting opportunities for new art based and film-based research practitioners. This paper will focus on the ways that we can measure impact in film practice research, through examples from my own work. I will argue how I was able to measure the impact of my own films Flickering Souls Set Alight (2019) and A Quest for Eternity (2020) but also how to measure impact in more cross disciplinary research with examples of my participation as researcher in StoryLab (Skills Training for Democratised Film Industries) research lab. Finally, I will focus on the issues and the possibilities of establishing these new opportunities in the Greek academic environment and the solutions that this alternative path will be able to provide, not only to academia in Greece but to contemporary Greek filmmakers, too.

The reality of a contemporary filmmaker in Greece

Since we are discussing the impact measuring for creative practitioners, it is important to describe the route that a young independent director in Greece has to take to create their short film. Understanding this reality, that has nothing to do with academic research, will help us understand the alternative path and solutions that practice based research can provide to filmmakers. In my forthcoming book The Third Path in Cinema: The Academic Filmmaker Model, I introduce this new path in cinema and I describe these steps. I believe that it is vital for new filmmakers to fully understand the reality of the industry and the alternative paths they can take (Panagopoulos forthcoming) and therefore the book is structured as a university course guide. In Figure 1, we can see all the steps that an independent director in Greece has to take in order to make films and find funding. The first step is to understand the trends in film festivals that might be screening points for the film. This step is vital since most of the festivals are influenced by specific trends and therefore, they are interested in films which respond to those areas. The second step is that the director needs to change their gaze and style in order to fit in these trends so the final product can be included in the festivals. This process will help the funders to find its product appealing. Then, they move to the third step. The third step is really important because it reflects the reality of a young director in Greece. Searching for funding is almost exclusively the job of the director in Greece for short films. With this task in mind, there are basically two places that a young director searches for short film funding, the Greek Film Centre and Greek National Television. Both bodies run a small number of competitions each year for short film funding. The general reality is that the director will need to change their script in order to fit in the current trends. Even though there can be exceptions, the majority of the filmmakers know that they need to tick some very specific boxes in order for their film to be considered for funding. The funding bodies don’t have any particular requirements that they state in their calls, but it is a common truth.

So, at that point the director has already, potentially, changed their concept a lot in order to fit the topics of the festivals, the production companies, and the funding bodies. Then the director moves to step 4. At this step, the director tries to connect with production companies as soon as funding is secured. Most production companies need to know that funding is secured for a short film before starting working the project. It is important to mention that production companies almost never work as funding bodies for the project or help secure further funding. Most take the role of executive producers. Despite this fact, there is a number of good reasons to work with a production company:

1. Use the brand name of the production company to search for more funding

2. The feeling of security that film festivals will have a better look at the film if it’s under a production company that they know

3. To search for the rest of the crew and actors under the name of the company

Figure 1- Contemporary Greek filmmaker workflow

So, it is clear that the only reason that a director works under a production company is the brand name. Most of these companies normally don’t require change in the product but sometimes they may require some modifications if they think that the film may not fit in specific festivals. The reason for a production company to work with a short film is the potential opportunity for this film to be a part of film festival and win awards. The production company doesn’t expect to gain profit from a short film but to make the company’s name a bit more known. In addition, it is good for the profile of a company to show that it helps promising new directors in the beginning of their career. Moreover, the cash rebate regulation that has been active in Greece for the past three-four years has led most of the Greek production companies to work as executive producers for international films that choose Greece as the destination of production. This regulation has made filmmaking business in Greece a very profitable field. The only negative aspect is that Greek feature and short film directors have to try much harder to find a production company for their film. Also, the Greek production companies need some assurance that the film will have some success during the festival cycle. In most of the above cases and depending on the funding program that the director works under, he/she will need to give all the intellectual property of the film to the funding bodies or the production companies that support the film. So, if the film wins the “best film award”, that award will be claimed by the companies and not by the director, even though he/she wasn’t just involved in the direction of the film but also secured all of the funding.

At this point the director goes to step 5 and step 6 where the film is screened at festivals and (hopefully) wins awards. All the above steps are necessary so the director can gain attention which can be leveraged for the next film. If the above-mentioned model was used specifically for the mainstream cinema industry, it would totally make sense. However, this model is problematic for independent cinema. A director that wants to do independent films does, I would suggest, not do it for the money. There is a common reality that the short film director in Greece almost never gets paid. He/She is doing it to explore his/her own style and to create a product that he/she is proud of. In this current model the director doesn’t get any money, ends up with a completely different product, and loses the film as intellectual property. So, the independent cinema director only follows the above steps to be able to create something. This really doesn’t feel like independent cinema. The whole point of independent cinema, in my view, is the exploration of style, personal gaze of the director and freedom of choices. Also, as audience, we expect to see a variety of form and styles in an independent film festival and not a lineup of films the majority of which looks really similar and deal with similar topics. Even though it doesn’t feel that this process has nothing to do with film practice research, I believe that knowing this process in full depth can help to find the solutions that film practice research can provide to filmmakers that want to explore style and form through their personal gaze. I argue that it is really important because as a filmmaker the solutions that film practice research provided to me, helped me develop my own personal gaze and explore my form and style without having to compromise. Before I introduce the alternative paths that the practice-based research can provide I think that it is vital to understand the way that the Greek academic environment works especially for artists and practitioners.

The Greek academic reality for art-based practitioners

From the above we can understand that a director, in Greece, who wants to explore their practice and experiment with form and style will face some very important issues in the cinema industry. As an independent director, I faced these exact problems when I started my career in Greece. Back in 2015, most of my colleagues advised me to work in the industry as a runner or camera trainee to gain some experience, while trying to adapt my style in order to create my first film. I am not trying to argue that this path is not good, for some people, but it doesn’t provide the creative freedom to explore someone’s own style and techniques, especially for the ones that want to move to the more creative parts of the film industry. For quite some time I was working in the industry in a supporting role, while I was completing my BA degree and while I was doing my MA in the United Kingdom. I realised that this wasn’t the path I wanted to follow, because after a while I would run the risk of forgetting my dream of creating my own films. At that moment a new path opened for me when I discussed with Prof. Erik Knudsen the possibility of starting a practice-based Ph.D. under his supervision. That was the first time I realised that the Ph.D. doesn’t have to be strictly theoretical but it can also be approached from a creative perspective (Panagopoulos 2019b).

At this point, I think that it is vital to discuss the reality of the Greek academic environment, before I introduce the “Third Path in Cinema”, as I like to call it. In Greece at the moment, there are two types of teaching film courses at academic institutions. The first are the theoreticians; they hold a Ph.D. in film studies and approach their work from a strictly theoretical point of view. They publish research papers in film studies journals and are involved in research projects. The second are practical filmmakers that come straight from the industry. The vast majority of them doesn’t hold a Ph.D., and they approach their teaching from a practical point of view sharing their experience from the industry. Most of them are not involved in research publications and research projects but they produce art work and they submit it to festivals and exhibitions. Both of the above types are very important and extremely vital in order the students to gain knowledge but at the same time there is a need for an academic that will be able to work between theory and practice and produce research from a practice-based point. The only academics that can work somewhere between these lines in Greece at the moment are either theoreticians that have some experience in the film industry or filmmakers that have completed a theoretical Ph.D., something that is also quite rare.

This model has many names, such as arts-based research, practice-based research, practice-led research, practice-centered research or studio-based research (Skains 2018). Such approaches have become quite established over fifteen to twenty years in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom, but in Greece it is something that is still quite fresh. Even though some art-based PhDs have been completed in Greece over the past several years, practice-led research, especially around filmmaking, is something brand new. In part, this can be explained by the fact that the Greek universities are exclusively public, and so they inevitably work at a slow pace as everything has to pass through very specific channels with bureaucratic delays in order be approved by the Ministry of Education. For example, the creation of a new Assistant Professor position in a Greek University is a process that can take up to four years, in some cases, from the official request of the University to the Ministry until the point at which the Assistant Professor gets their first paycheck. This example makes it clear that this kind of system is not easily adaptable. Also, academics tend to prefer to work on projects that they know they can “fit in the Ministry’s boxes”, just to be sure that they will not face any issue in the evaluation of their final outcomes.

At this point, I want to state that I believe that in Greece there are some very important universities with excellent teaching staff and that any criticism focuses mostly on the way that Greek universities have to operate. However, over the past decade, Greek universities are changing and are trying to adapt to the European model while remaining in this public sphere. Depending on the party that is in power, several changes are made in the way that the Ministry and the Universities operates. These changes started during the first years of the Greek financial crisis (Varoufakis 2017) while many aspects of the Greek state had to go through modifications to meet the requirements of the MoUs. Greece is a country that is quite tense politically. People used to be very passionate about politics and over the years of the first MoUs there were many general strikes, occupation of public buildings and universities etc. During those years, conservative governments tried to change the education system and adapt it to the European Guides that were part of the MoUs. After that, center-left governments tried to change the education laws that the conservative governments created. Nowadays, those laws are in the middle of changing again from the conservative party that is in power at the moment. In my point of view, the educational system in Greece requires changes. However, radical modifications of the education laws every four years don’t provide the stability that is required in the academic community (Varoufakis 2017).

In Greece, the term “evaluation” has been demonised by a part of the society and has been beautified by another. For years, various governments tried to pass internal and external evaluation regulations at universities, most of which have not been implemented due to reactions mainly from students but also from the administrative and teaching staff. The reason for these reactions was that this part of the academic community didn’t trust that the changes can work in the Greek environment and they were afraid that this step would eventually lead to the privatisation of the higher education in general (Seferiades 2021). The concept of evaluation would enable the quality of studies of a university department to be measured at both teaching and research levels. The main idea was to have an internal evaluation by the institution itself as a first level and an external evaluation by foreign institutions to measure the work on a global scale. This thought seems perfectly reasonable and legitimate.

Despite the reactions to the evaluation, I personally believe that it can indeed help the universities to measure their quality and be competitive in the global market. As a lecturer in England, I had received several evaluation forms regarding my course both from professors of the institution and other institutions. Even though this process is stressful, it helped me to evolve and keep the quality of my course high under the guidance of my colleagues. At the same time, we had to complete and measure the REF (Research Excellence Framework) (REF 2021). Even though REF has some problematic points and is not very popular among academics, it is trying to include different types of research and ways to measure impact through creative practitioners.

In Greece, the Quality Assurance Unit (MO.DI.P) plays the above role by measuring the quality of the work produced at an academic institution. The role of MO.DI.P in the Greek universities (according to Law 4009/2011, Article 14) can be summarized as follows (MODIP 2018):

1. Development of the Institution's policy, strategy and improvement processes

2. Organisation, operation and improvement of a quality assurance system

3. Coordination and support of the unit's evaluation processes

4. Support for the external evaluation and certification processes of the curricula

The creation of MO.DI.P. is a step to the right direction for the evaluation of the quality of studies. However, the main problem we face is how the impact of research is measured. The truth is that in art schools in Greece, the so-called impact is difficult to measure. Even though the culture of practical PhDs in art has emerged in recent years, it has not been developed sufficiently in filmmaking-related fields, yet. In addition, practice-based art research is difficult to be measured in the Greek context at the moment, while the departments providing practice art provision are facing different issues.

In order to create this paper, I got in touch with Assistant Professor Agnes Papadopoulou, who is a member of the “Internal Evaluation Team” of the Department of Audio & Visual Arts of the Ionian University (Papadopoulou 2022). This team communicates with the “Quality Assurance Unit” (MO.DI.P.) of the Ionian University as well as with the Hellenic Authority for Higher Education (HAHE), an independent administrative authority which mission is to ensure quality in Greek Higher Education.

Dr. Papadopoulou provided me with many details regarding the quality assurance measurement and the ways that the ΗΑΗΕ carries out the external evaluation in accordance with the European Standards and Guidelines of the European Higher Education. During the evaluation process, the “Internal Evaluation Team” describes all the artistic work of the teaching staff. However, for the time being, this description does not have to address any specific requirements, a valuable advantage for the evaluation of an art department. At the moment, the only way to measure artistic work is either if the teaching staff has won awards for their art work or if they have presented their work in other universities, artistic projects, workshops, etc. As Dr. Papadopoulou aptly observes, research in the creative disciplines unquestionably contributes to knowledge and understanding, but methods of studying and quantifying art evaluation must be discussed.

The main issue is that there is no convincing and reliable measurement of the artistic work due to issues of subjectivity (films, exhibitions, sculptures and other forms of art that the teaching staff of an institution produces). This element raises a very sensible question, i.e. “Can every artistic work be considered a research outcome?”. In my opinion, it cannot. Not every artistic project can be considered as a research outcome. Α research outcome is not just the final product but the whole journey that it has been through and has to have a tangible impact through the research process or after its publication.

During the discussion with Dr. Papadopoulou she mentioned that the way to prove research outcomes is through publishing academic papers to peer review journals, collective volumes, books and presenting in international conferences. The best way for the “Quality Assurance Unit” (MO.DI.P.) of a university to measure a researcher’s impact is through their profiles in Scopus. They measure the citation of each publication, their ranking, their h-index and so on. Here, there is a paradox; Scopus does not let a researcher to add their own publications like ORCID, for example. Scopus uses a screening process where it tracks through its own channels the journals that fit to their requirements. In its official website, it is mentioned that in order a journal to be taken into consideration, it needs to meet all of the following minimum criteria (Elsevier 2022):

• Consist of peer-reviewed content and have a publicly available description of the peer review process

• Be published on a regular basis and have an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) as registered with the ISSN International Centre

• Have content that is relevant for and readable by an international audience, meaning: have English language abstracts and titles

• Have a publicly available publication ethics and publication malpractice statement

In addition, it is also stated that Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB) members must have deep subject matter expertise, and are committed to actively seeking out and selecting literature that meets the needs and standards of the research community that they represent. Journals eligible for review by the CSAB will be evaluated on the following criteria in five categories:

1. Journal Policy:

   1. Convincing editorial policy

   2. Type of peer review

   3. Diversity in geographical distribution of editors

   4. Diversity in geographical distribution of authors

2. Content:

   1. Academic contribution to the field

   2. Clarity of abstracts

   3. Quality of and conformity to the stated aims and scope of the journal

   4. Readability of articles

3. Journal Standing:

   1. Citedness of journal articles in Scopus

   2. Editor standing

4. Publishing Regularity:

   1. No delays or interruptions in the publication schedule

5. Online Availability:

   1. Full journal content available online

   2. English language journal home page available

   3. Quality of journal home page

Moreover, Scopus mentions in its webpage that the journals it accepts are re-evaluated every year in order to keep the quality of their publications high. They state that in order to determine journal quality, Scopus runs the ongoing Re-evaluation program which identifies outlier and underperforming journals in four different ways (Elsevier 2022):

1. The journal is underperforming as it does not meet any of the three metrics and benchmarks for journals in the same subject area.

2. Concerns about the publication standards of the journal or publisher have been raised by formal complaints.

3. The journal shows outlier behavior based on its publishing performance in Scopus.

4. Continuous curation based on CSAB feedback.

All the above are totally understandable in order a website like Scopus to maintain its quality measures, but they cannot work as an exclusive way to measure the quality of research for the universities’ teaching staff, especially if we are talking about artistic research. If we consider that the evaluation process comes from the Ministry itself and aims at measuring the university research ranking in the country, we can claim that it is like “shooting yourself in the foot”, because the vast majority of the research will not be able to be included in the screening process of Scopus and especially that art university departments will not be able to show any research at all. This reality creates a problem not only to artists but to the Humanities in general, since most of journals cannot fit in the tight criteria of Scopus.

What is the impact of practice-based research and how it is measured?

How can we measure the impact of an artist’s research? Is there a correct way? As I discuss in depth in my forthcoming book “The Third Path in Cinema: The Academic Filmmaker Model”, I want to share some thoughts regarding the process of measuring impact in practice-based research (Panagopoulos forthcoming). Usually, the impact of a research process is measured by publications, presentations in conferences, collective chapters, monographs, acquisition of funding and so on. Then the so-called impact factor of these publications, i.e. how important is the medium that you published on, is calculated in order to measure the impact of a research. The impact of the work also gets higher if it has many citations from other authors. What happens, though, in cases where the industry is so virgin that there are hardly any journals or other means to publish? Also, is there a different way to measure the impact of a research except for conventional measurements? The REF mentions the impact of a research as: “New insights effectively shared.” I think that this definition is particularly accurate and purposeful (REF 2021). Isn't that what the impact is really supposed to be? Professor Erik Knudsen in his publication "Research Glossary for Creative Practitioners (Knudsen 2016). A Discussion Paper" mentions that when considering the impact of a research we must keep in mind three things:

1. who are you seeking to impact?

2. how are you going to reach them (engagement, dissemination and soon)?

3. what impact are you hoping to achieve and what is its significance?

In the same publication he mentions the peer review process, stating that the key to impact is that the research should be original, accurate and meaningful (REF 2021). He also identifies that a peer reviewer will review the following to evaluate a research process:

1. has the researcher identified a gap in the knowledge of the creative practice concerned, and/or its relationships to themes and subjects and/or its processes, and are the findings evidenced in the output, therefore, making an original contribution to the practice and knowledge in this field? (For REF, they might ask, is that original contribution world leading?)

2. have the systematic activities and exploration been rigorous and original in design and execution?

3. are the findings of this research leading to new insights, new knowledge and new understandings that could be of significance and impact the field and beyond? (Knudsen 2016)

Finally, Knudsen offers that:

…[A] publishing gateway may itself provide a peer review process. For example, a film festival selection, an award and a peer reviewed journal publication all involve peer assessment. These are particularly useful if there is evidence that the selection decisions are somehow related to the research component in the output. (Knudsen 2016: 5).

I think the above are particularly useful and at the same time enable us to think about the issue of impact from many different aspects. As a filmmaker, I had to pitch a future film of mine several times either in panels or to producers to find funding and support in general. I think that the issues that we think about pitching are not very different from finding the impact in a research process. The main questions we need to ask ourselves about the impact of our research and why someone should support our film are: “Why?", "Why Me?", "Why now?” (Panagopoulos forthcoming).

Let's take a minute and think these questions, both about the pitching of a future film and the impact of the research we want to carry out. The question "Why?" is really important when we want to prepare a new project. Which solutions does this project provide? Why is this project important? It may be important to us but why is it important to the rest of the world? Why is it so important to support it financially against other projects? So, we might ask: What makes this project special? By answering these questions, we will also be able to answer "Why?". The main issue is that we have to put ourselves in the position of the person who decides whether we get the desired support or not. Both a film and a research project may be very important to us and maybe we have been working on it for a long time but that doesn't mean that anyone else is interested. It may sound a little harsh, but it is the reality. A film producer should feel that if he/she financially supports a plan that we have for a film, this film will be viable and successful, either through ticket sales or awards wins. At the same time, a research funding decision maker must understand the impact of the proposed research. Why should this research happen? Which new solutions will provide this research? Which parts will return to the research community? So, the concept of what the research is doing and who is impacting is of high importance.

After we have answered all the above the next question that should concern us is "Why Me?" You may have an excellent idea for a movie or a research project. What makes you unique in order to make it happen? Why should a producer trust you? Why shouldn't a funding decision maker suggest a professor at a higher level than you who might have a similar idea and much more experience? Andrei Tarkovsky said: "A book read by a thousand people is a thousand different books" (1987). It is very important that the idea is good and original, but what we are mainly interested in both in filmmaking and research is what you have to offer. What is your perspective? What is your personal connection or access in some cases? How can you take a good idea and help it take flight? For example, The Travelling Players (1975) by Theo Angelopoulos is an excellent idea for depicting modern Greek history through alternative narratives and representations by following travelling players who performed the play "Gkolfo" by Spyridon Peresiadis (2012). No one could have captured and represented this narrative in the same way as Theo Angelopoulos did. His particular style, the use of space and time and the simultaneous representation by using theatrical and Brechtian elements made him unique in making a milestone in film history (Panagopoulos 2017a). This is exactly what we must bear in mind when preparing a new project, either artistic or research, or both.

Having answered the above questions, we now have the third and final question to answer: "Why now?" What makes this moment special? Why is it now the time to talk about this particular issue or about the point of view? This question is of huge importance both in cinema and research. In cinema, a producer wants the projects they fund to be deal with current stories. Otherwise, the participation in festivals, awards and so on is reduced. At the same time, a funding decision maker must see in the project that he will choose to fund something new and fresh, something that provides solutions to contemporary problems. It is no coincidence that since the beginning of Covid-19 funding opportunities relevant to the disease have been opened for research and creation in all areas, not only in the Sciences but also to a very large extent in the Humanities. It is important to talk and suggest ― or at least to be able to argue about ― issues related to the contemporary environment we live in by giving answers and solutions (Papadopoulou 2018).

All of the above are particularly important because they enable us to escape for a while from the closed limits established by the Sciences for what is considered to be research, finding, impact, and so on. Also, by understanding all of the above, we are given the opportunity not only to use the research terminology in our artistic product in order to be able to measure it as a research process but also to be able to produce our own artistic product as a final outcome of the research to take a piece of the research funding and use it for our own projects. At this moment, I would like to analyse two cases of my own research and how I was able to link the creative process to the research methodology.

Flickering Souls Set Alight (2018) and field research on the Tejon Native American tribe in California

As I analyse in depth in my forthcoming book “The Third Path in Cinema: The Academic Filmmaker Model”, the first example is my short film Flickering Souls Set Alight (2018) (see figure 2) (Panagopoulos 2019a), which is the final product of my doctoral research. My doctoral research was about how we can start talking about a new kind of political cinema today in Greece by discovering and reimagining specific tools and techniques from the cinema of Theo Angelopoulos (Panagopoulos 2019b). This film was my example of how this new political cinema could work. Initially, there was a period within a year, before the film, during which data gathering, as we will refer to, took place. During this period, I was studying in depth Angelopoulos’s style and tools. There was an archive available to study in Theo Angelopoulos's production company, in the cinema museum of Athens, and in the personal archives of his associates. In addition, interviews with academics specializing in Angelopoulos and his associates were filmed. After this first phase, the methodology followed. At this point I had to use the above data in particular ways in order to be able to have specific results and final products. At first, due to the nature of the research and the fact that a final paper had to be written, I began to write and present some academic announcements at conferences about the theoretical part. In addition, I created a research documentary entitled A Quest for Eternity (2020) (Panagopoulos 2020b) (see figure 3), which contains the interviews I made and material from Angelopoulos's archive and the Hellenic Army Television Service to analyse and give answers to the research questions of my Ph.D. Finally, I decided to create two films. The first film, A Still Sunrise (2017) (Panagopoulos 2017b) gave me the opportunity to experiment with the cinematic tools I wanted to explore and try out my perspective, while Flickering Souls Set Alight (2018) was the final product and the main result of the experience gained by A Still Sunrise. At the methodology stage it is clear that I used many tools to process the data I had collected, such as archive research, critical and analytical reflection in the creation of presentations and practice-led research in the creation of films. The next stage is about the outcomes which are the three films and the final thesis of my Ph.D. (Panagopoulos forthcoming).

Figure 02. Flickering Souls Set Alight (2018)

So, what is the impact of this research? I would like to focus only on the impact of my final film Flickering Souls Set Alight (2018) which also represents the entire result of the above research. In this film, I wanted to use the techniques and tools that I had analysed in my research by approaching them from my own perspective. The most important thing, though, was that I wanted to present in Greece for the first time the "Third Path in Cinema”. What I found problematic in some cases of academic films is that they are low-cost films that are not submitted anywhere or cannot reach any other audience than the academics. I decided that Flickering Souls Set Alight (2018) will not be like this and after so much effort I managed to find funding to shoot it with well-known actors, a proper script structure, sets, and crew. The film was submitted to film festivals and was successful, winning amongst other awards the Audience Award at the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival (Kalafatis 2019) and the Best Set Design Award at the Drama International Short Film Festival. According to Knudsen (2016), we can say that the film has already the necessary impact and at the same time it was aimed at a non-research audience. Nevertheless, I also wanted to reach the research audience through a peer review publication, so I decided to submit an article to the academic magazine Screenworks, which deals with research in practical cinema and is one of the few options available for publishing research based upon an artistic work. The film was published in June 2020 with a supportive text of 2,500 words (Panagopoulos 2020a). Moreover, the research documentary A Quest for Eternity (2020) was published in the same journal a year later (Panagopoulos 2022).

Figure 03 A Quest for Eternity (2020) poster

As shown by the above, I followed all the stages of a research process (data gathering, methodology, outcomes, and impact) to produce a short film which had a clear impact on both research and artistic levels, since it was screened and awarded in multiple film festivals, it was published in an academic journal and was available for the research community to refer to. Let us see a second example which is not linked to the production of fiction and can, also, work with the combination of different fields through an interdisciplinary approach (Panagopoulos forthcoming).

During my Ph.D. research Prof. Erik Knudsen, who was my supervisor, suggested that I participate as a member of his team in the StoryLab (Skills Training for Democratised Film Industries) research workshop and that I organise a field research in Bakersfield, California, with the participation of the Tejon tribe (Knudsen 2020b) (see: Figure 04). This research was conducted in the summers of 2018 and 2019. Prof. Knudsen collaborated with Dr. Robinson on his AHRC-funded Unravelling the Gordian Knot Project-, an international project aimed at understanding Native Californian rock paintings (Kotoula, Robinson, and Bedford 2018) and basketry (Kotoula et al. 2019), and also involving collaborative work with Native American in the creation of virtual reality platforms (Cassidy et al. 2019) alongside the University of Central Lancashire (Robinson et al. 2020). During these two years, I got in touch with Ethnomediaology (Knudsen 2020a). Ethnomediaology is an interdisciplinary approach inspired by practices in ethnomusicology and autoethnography. It involves the active and immersive participation of researchers in a research culture and its processes, using this profound personal engagement as a basis for knowledge generation, data gathering and evaluation (Knudsen 2018). The reason for these California StoryLab trips was to help Dr. David Robinson and his team of archaeologists to develop ways of connecting contemporary Tejon tribe members with their heritage by exploring their relationship with the land inhabited by their ancestors and archaeological findings within it (Panagopoulos 2021).

So, in this case we are not talking only about a final artistic product and the research behind it. We are dealing with something with many different elements of research and exploration. In 2018 I had three different focus groups which shared the same land. The archaeology students who had come for the excavations, the Rangers who were preserving and protecting the land under The Wildlands Conservancy and the Tejon Native American tribe who had a deeper connection with the lands since it was their ancestral home. In 2019, the workshops were held with a group of participants consisting of the Native Americans and the archaeologists (see: Figure 03). Initially, for data gathering I decided to record all the workshops and to photograph all the results of the storytelling exercises I assigned them. At the same time, I filmed semi-structured interviews with the participants for their personal connection to the area. At the methodology stage it is clear that my basic methodological tool is Ethnomediaology which includes story creation through interactive workshops and practical research. The outcomes are, of course, all the stories produced by the participants. Also, I decided to operate a little differently from the StoryLab workshops that had been held until then and to suggest to the teams to create final films which are, also, their final findings. In addition, I decided to create a website and gather all the data. In the website, I uploaded all the photos, interviews, findings and so on so that I could directly link them to the papers I wanted to publish in the future. Another possible research to be conducted in the near future is the creation of a research documentary based on the semi-structured interviews I collected. Regarding the impact, which is what concerns us the most in such projects, I had filmed some videos at the end of each cycle of workshops with the participants who mentioned how they think the whole experience helped them (impact videos). Also, six months after my first workshop in 2018, I filmed an interview with Native American Sandra VE Hernandez (Treasurer of the Tejon Native American Tribe) where we discussed how she feels the workshops of 2018 influenced the relationship between the participants of her tribe and the communication between them, and so we planned the workshops of 2019. The main impact of the above research is the writing and publication of all this process in Frames Cinema Journal in June 2021 (Panagopoulos 2021). The article includes hyperlinks connecting all the data. A future article could refer to the documentary that will be created with semi-structured interviews in an academic journal which deals with video graphic work. Also, a joint article is being discussed with the archaeologists and the Native Americans about the whole experience in California. From the examples above, it is clear how we can use research tools to produce an audiovisual work, but also for a complete field research. I consider he tools mentioned above to be the key of the "Third Path in Cinema" because they enable us to get research funding to carry out our work without the commitments of a conventional filmmaker and at the same time to combine our methodological tools with different scientific fields and to produce research without having to change our work for the trends of film festivals and the production company with which we work. Of course, the production of these films works in a different way in relation to films commissioned by production companies.

Figure 04 Filming the final product of the 2019 California StoryLab workshop

Presenting this “Third Path in Cinema”

As I stated many times above, practice-led research is a field that has evolved over the last fifteen to twenty years around Europe. Presenting this model to the Greek environment provides the opportunity to suggest some changes. I believe that practice-led research can provide solutions in Greece not only to the academic environment but also to independent filmmakers. This is why I want to give a new name to this “Third Path in Cinema” and create the model of the “Academic Filmmaker”. I think that it is important to share some thoughts about how this model could work better and what problems have been found from working within this area. Firstly, I would like to mention four key features of the "Academic Filmmaker" (Panagopoulos forthcoming).

The "Academic Filmmaker" must:

1. be comfortable with both theory and practice, but without theoretical analysis being necessary. The theory should exist in order to support their own practice on the subject he/she is dealing with

2. create final artistic works that can be used both at a research level as deliverables and in an artistic context in screenings, festivals, etc.

3. provide solutions with his/her research both at an individual level by discovering their own "gaze", and in relation to the general impact he/she will offer in the field of practical research

4. be open to research with other fields in order to create interdisciplinary research and artistic products.

Let's look at the main points one by one and try to analyse them. The first point is extremely important, as it distinguishes the "Academic Filmmaker" from the film theorist. It does not mean that if an "Academic Filmmaker" feels comfortable to analyse some theoretical points in their research further, he/she cannot do so. It is simply a good thing that the distinction is clear and that we understand that theoretical research on practical cinema is done in order to provide sufficient resources to the filmmaker for the creation of his/her final artistic products, as well as to link these works to following research publications, which, as it is logical, will include a part of theory, like the applications for funding at the beginning of each project.

The second point is equally vital for outlining the "Academic Filmmaker". The final artistic products of his/her research should be able to be used for research and artistic purposes. But what does this mean and why is it vital? It is important for the final product to reach a larger audience, provide a larger impact and try to distribute it through the film festival channels and not only through the academic ones. Maybe a really good next step would be the creation of a distribution network for “Academic Filmmakers” to screen their films in larger audiences.

The third point concerns another major problem that I have identified in the existing field of "Academic Filmmakers". As mentioned above, the final products of practical research in cinema aim at the personal change and development of the researcher-artist. However, at the same time, the researcher must be able to offer new insights in the field through their own case study and own impact. This is very important and sets basic objectives in research on practical cinema. A research proposal cannot stand on its own because the researcher “feels” that the impact of that proposal is important to him. This proposal must be able to provide solutions both in the field and, if possible, in society in general (Panagopoulos Forthcoming).

The fourth and final point I would like to emphasise is the collaboration of "Academic Filmmakers" with other fields for the creation of interdisciplinary proposals. What I have noticed during the years that I have been living and working in Greece, is the need from various other fields for research on the practical filmmaking. In the short time I have been back in Greece, I have completed my postdoctoral research at the Department of Political Sciences of Panteion University in Greece. My research concerns a multidisciplinary approach to Heterotopia with a combination of methodologies from cinema and the political sciences. I, also, participate as a researcher in the Laboratory on Contentious Politics of Panteion University and in the funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.), program EPOCA "Hollowing Democracy, Party Politics and Social Protest During the ‘Great Recession’. The case of Greece, 2008-2018", in which I am in charge for the visual ethnography of the proposal. Finally, I am a research member of the Culture - Borders - Gender Lab of the Department of Balkan, Slavic & Oriental Studies of the University of Macedonia, Greece. What is clear from the variety of the projects in which I am involved is that there is a need and willingness to cooperate with researchers from other disciplines that are involved in practice-led research in cinema. I believe that this possibility, especially in a such a virgin field in Greece, can offer many possibilities for funding and research in the near future. If we manage to change the way in which academic research is measured in Greece and if we try to distribute our final outcomes not only to the academic environment but to a larger audience pool, I believe that there are many opportunities for this field to evolve in Greece and establish collaborations at an international level.

Acknowledgments

This contribution has been made possible through the financial support of the project HAL (Hub of Art Laboratories) *MIS :5047267*» code 80504, ESPA 2014-2020, EPAnEK, co-financed by Greece and the European Union and implemented at the Ionian University, Corfu.

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