This article examines how qualities of expertise are constructed and sustained within the televisual world of craft reality competition television. We suggest that part of the appeal of this relatively recent media typology beyond any didactic or instructional interest, is a desire to observe expertise and thus gain perceived but highly circumscribed access to the community of practice that is presented by these television shows. We identify three principal expertise positions as common to the contemporary mediation of expertise presented by craft reality competition television: ‘keystone’, ‘relative’ and ‘vicarious’ expertise. It is argued that these different forms of expertise are mobilized as roles across a variety of craft reality competition television programs to enable entertaining access to craft practice-specific expertise which enables the audience to become experts of spectating expertise, masking the real time, effort, and access to hands-on training involved in becoming proficient in crafts practice.

This article explores the potential syntheses between practice-based arts research methodologies and the historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's framing of the scientific ‘experiment.’ Rheinberger offers the experiment as a ‘future-generating machine' resulting from materials discursive processes enacted as ‘repetition with difference’. This framing of epistemological development has applications in practice-based methodologies through their simultaneous execution of action and reflection, as well as the importance of ‘surprise’ in experimental practice.