Happy New Year!
Happy New Year to you all! It does not take much prophecy to predict that the year 2025 will be full of challenges, both in the local contexts in which we work and in the face of large-scale societal changes.
It would be naive to assume that the field of artistic research is exempt from these challenges. On the contrary, the need for solidarity and mutual support between artistic research institutions and individual artistic researchers is more evident and urgent than ever.
Therefore, the entire Society for Artistic Research is committed to meeting every challenge we may face by creating and strengthening a community of artistic research, by building and intensifying relationships among its individual and institutional members, and by broadening and deepening the impact and value of artistic research in the current processes of transition that are likely to have unprecedented outcomes and may force us to abandon traditional certainties and habits.
The new SAR Board has laid the groundwork for a strategy that builds on the work of the past few years, in which we have reviewed and critically reflected on the concrete needs to professionalise our structures, refocus our internal and external communications, and further develop and consolidate the Research Catalogue as a collaboratively owned and maintained open source project, as well as the Journal for Artistic Research as the leading peer-reviewed publication in the field.
Recently we have witnessed a rapidly growing interest in artistic research from stakeholders and policy makers beyond the immediate target audience of art schools, conservatories and universities of the arts. We do not, of course, see this as a threat, but rather as a unique opportunity to broaden the scope of our activities, to continue to grow and to support the diversity and multiplicity of methods and approaches that characterise the field of arts research.
Soon we will launch the new SAR website, initiate a new level of networking within the new COST Action Artistic Intelligence and, most importantly, meet in person at the 16th International SAR Conference in Porto on 7-9 May 2025.
Stay tuned for more!
Florian Schneider
President, Society for Artistic Research (SAR)
