Research and Study Program

The Research Training Group has pursued the thesis that the arts represent a genuine field of mediation, storage and production of knowledge. It was motivated by the observation of an increasing entanglement of arts and knowledge concepts in the 20th and 21st centuries. It could be shown that both knowledge concepts were and are of elementary importance for the justification, self-understanding, and practices of the arts of modernity and the present, and that the arts, in turn, have played a decisive role not only in the dissemination but also in the genesis of technical, political, economic, and scientific forms of knowledge. Moreover, the arts turned out to be particularly productive for the articulation of marginalized bodies of knowledge. Overall, the epistemological perspective on the arts opened up research subjects and methodological approaches that could only be elaborated in the transdisciplinary network of art and cultural studies, music, theater, film, and media studies, philosophy, engineering, and music and theater education. The Kolleg has thus opened up a field of research that had remained a desideratum in previous approaches to the sociology and history of knowledge. Of particular significance for the research was the focus on a specifically artistic generation of knowledge, whose conditions, effects, and critical potentials were analyzed.

The research of the first funding period turned primarily to the question of how knowledge is created in the individual arts and how it can be described comparatively. As a result, it was possible to distinguish between physical, technical, habitualized, and institutional forms of knowledge and to demonstrate their effectiveness for artistic practice. Building on this, the second funding period focused on the question of how knowledge is generated, distributed and effective through the arts. It was also crucial to examine the arts in global exchange processes and to subject the concepts of knowledge to reflection with regard to their areas of validity and claims to normativity.

Due to the fact that the research group was located at the Berlin University of the Arts, the research took place in close exchange with artistic practice and its discourses. The high productivity of the research training group's research questions and working methods was reflected in more than sixty public conferences, lecture series, and workshops with nearly 200 (international) guest scholars, as well as in a series of publications and an online journal that makes all research results available in open access (wissenderkuenste.de). During the entire funding period, 37 dissertations and seven postdoctoral projects were funded.