Introduction: Practice as Research, Politics, Affect, and the Camera

Abstract

This essay focuses on three political topics that run throughout the contents of this special issue. The first area, concerned with the fact that we are all invested in new methods of making art politically, relates closely to debates about the nature and method of practice as research in the creative arts in general and screen production in particular—practices that generate new approaches to making and documenting artwork. The second area, political import, discusses the way that new practices might generate different ways of knowing and how these might provide alternative strategies for engaging with the world than those given by liberal and neoliberal institutions and ideologies. The final area considers artmakers who use cameras in a range of different related media. It argues for the importance of the camera in today’s cultural climate and how that importance might be harnessed in as yet undocumented ways of valuing through artmaking and political action.