Neven Lochhead

An Artist’s Almanac
to Research, Organization, Education
and Bookings

Neven Lochhead

2024 edition
[479 pages]
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neven.lochhead [at] gmail.com

Fusing together current discourses on contemporary artistic research, contemporary art theory, curatorial practice, organizational studies, sound studies, and educational theory, An Artist’s Almanac to Research, Organization, Education and Bookings is a theoretically diverse dissertation-portfolio that interweaves methodological analysis with applied experimentation. Across four chapters, it examines the epistemological possibilities of art’s status as a form of knowledge, proposes a new theory of curatorial practice through the lens of organizational science, develops an educational philosophy driven by sonic phenomena, and launches a speculative academic discipline called Booking Studies. In its blending of disciplinary forms, which involves academic and conceptual writing, immersive exhibitions, performances, workshop designs, audio works, and films, a set of distinct methodological systems are built, each offering in their own way new perspectives on the possibilities of art-as-research.

The artist and writer invents, engineers, and implements a range of conceptual tools and vocabularies that help to comprehend and intervene on forces shaping the present regimes of artistic research, namely financialization, professionalization, and homogenization. A consistent intervention upon these impasses throughout is the text’s emphasis on the role of the habitat or ‘scene’ in the trajectories of artistic knowledge, which is conceptualized by the author as an adaptive contextual medium that is always amenable to recalibration, capable of constantly proposing new frames of reference for the aims of practice-led inquiry. This contention is defended both theoretically, in the academic writing, and concretely, in a series of applied projects interwoven throughout the chapters. The nested documentation of these projects both amplifies and dramatizes the dissertation, through a formally varied body of work that reflects the author’s own embedded roles as an artist, curator, and educator. His practice-led activity unfolds as an always responsive process to a range of institutional sites, from which a multifaceted ecology of activity emerges, involving the coordination of artistic research teams and distributed learning environments.

In its form and content, the Almanac seeks to expand and reorient the thresholds of ‘doctorateness,’ working consistently across platforms and modes of address to continuously evolve its voice into something else.

ALMANAC CONTENTS

4 | Acknowledgements
6 | Preface

Chapter 01
Fuzzy Logics
Artistic Research and its Knowledge Infrastructures

Chapter 02
Curating the Outside:
A Curatorial Theory of Organization

Chapter 03
Echometrics:
Notes Towards a Sound-Based Educational Philosophy

Chapter 04
The Official Handbook to
Booking Studies

383 | Module One: Bookings, Resources, and their Discontents
424 | Module Two: Fringe Applications and Resource Echometrics

457 Works Cited