IABS: Investigación Artística Basada en Significantes

Abstract

The Artistic Research Based on Signifiers or ARBS is a methodology that I devised to give meaning and coherence to the way of writing my doctoral thesis. It means turning practice-based research on its head, this practice being the very process and result of academic writing. It consists of paying close attention and playing with signifiers –letters, acronyms, word fragments, thumbnails, phonemes, machine translation errors, or search engine indexing– to hint at new meanings. Thus, it implies a performative and aberrant decoding of the semiocapitalist acceleration, using its logics, but, at the same time, questioning them. The ARBS overlaps the theoretical and the practical and camouflages itself in the orthodoxy of the academy to make its impossibilities shine, because it often works from errata, misunderstandings or random –apophenic– coincidences. Like a fractal, it can influence an image caption, a sentence, a paragraph, an entire chapter, an entire document, or the physicality of an installation or a performance. In short, ARBS raises the artistic possibilities of what happens inside a word processor, glancing at the various open browser tabs. As a final point, the text proposes a brief critical reflection on the dynamics established in the digital platforms of academic capitalism, based on SPAM mail or on the overinformation of the indexation of papers in bulk.