Research Projects

Praxis means action. Accordingly, project area A "Practices" comprises projects whose objects of investigation are deeply entrenched in specific historical everyday worlds and more general socio-cultural contexts and activities. In those practices, we seldom meet explicit reflections on their premises and conditions. This is why in this project area the heterological dimension of our praxeological model is more clearly marked than the autological one. Social function and aesthetic performance are frequently interwoven in unexpected locations of socio-cultural materialisations. The projects in this area aim at illuminating those aesthetic inscriptions into everyday practices which have been neglected both by aesthetic theory and by reasearch on the "material turn" that has frequently focused on sub-aesthetic phenomena.

Project area B "Manifestations" groups together projects in which aesthetic figures of reflection are more clearly noticeable in specific aesthetic actions and artefacts than they are in area A. Area B investigates smaller units of reflection whose potential for aesthetic conceptualization is by no means ensured. Tentative, emerging manifestations of aesthetic reflection may have a certain programmatic potential, which frequently becomes evident only in an experimental and allusive manner. The projects thus focus on clues and traces of aesthetic reflection that appear elusive and marginal but which may (but need not)  solidify and become pronounced poetological statements or articulations of pictorial rhetoric. Since these clues and traces, as it were, struggle for status, it is particularly rewarding to analyse the ways in which they draw on the autological and heterological dimension for justification.

Project area C "Concepts" comprises those projects that investigate actions and artefacts which explicitly reflect upon themselves, which seek a specific artistic profile in opposition to other concepts or which are marked by conceptual claims of their own. In comparison to project areas A and B, this area includes projects that are concerned with the most obvious aesthetic statements. Accordinly, in this area projects are working together that focus on actions and artefacts in which aesthetic concepts are dealt with discursively. Research in this area has in common that (developing) concepts can be clearly identified though they may not yet be available to existing terminology. This is why the individual research projects of area C are clearly related to, and connected by, central aesthetic problems, traditions and norms of the autological dimension.