Kristoffer Gansing is professor of Artistic Research and director of the International Center for Knowledge in the Arts. 

Due to his academic and curatorial / artistic background, Kristoffer Gansing has always paid close attention to aesthetics as much as to the content, which is what has led him to find a career in transdisciplinary knowledge fields. He calls this a post-digital perspective due to the interactivity and participation through digital media already declining and becoming commercialized, he explains, something he began noticing from the first edition in 2005 of a festival focusing on new media, and which became a critique to people to work on analog media as a way to move forward into a multidisciplinary future.

He explains that AR is basically research in and through artistic practices. “That in itself doesn’t give too many answers. I think the main thing is that it has given artists an opportunity to take more ownership over the knowledge that is produced through art.” A practice which traditionally has been applied to other fields of study and interpretation, but which previously was not a focus in the art world.

“What AR does is it serves as intervention into knowledge itself. It shows how it is performative, aesthetic, so much more than just hard data. It brings in the more experiential dimmensional knowledge that are extremely important today, because we live in a world that is producing so much more polarization in different groups and society, that artistic knowledge production (doesn’t necessarily solve problems but) it brings perhaps another way of dealing than what we see today – a failing, a rational, scientific world view capable of bringing change – because the artistic view often wins over the scientific view, in the sense that people believe what they want to believe in – they invest their energy in the aesthetics and poetics they most identify with, anyway… so artists then, can actually do a lot of change in terms of being allowed into that flow of knowledge production.”

Special thanks to Kristoffer for the guidance and feedback through the development of this project.