What could be the place of artistic research in current contemporary scholarship in the humanities? The following essay addresses this question while using as a case study a collaborative artistic project undertaken by two artists, Remco Roes (Belgium) and Alis Garlick (Australia). We argue that the recent integration of arts into academia requires a hybrid discourse, which has to be distinguished both from the artwork itself and from more conventional forms of academic research. This hybrid discourse explores the whole continuum of possible ways to address our existential relationship with the environment: ranging from aesthetic, multi-sensorial, associative, affective, spatial and visual modes of 'knowledge' to more discursive, analytical, contextualised ones. Here, we set out to defend the visual essay as a useful tool to explore the non-conceptual, yet meaningful bodily aspects of human culture, both in the still developing field of artistic research and in more established fields of research. It is a genre that enables us to articulate this knowledge, as a transformative process of meaning-making, supplementing other modes of inquiry in the humanities.

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This visual essay is composed of an associative thread of images that are sourced from several collaborative projects we (A + R) have conducted over the past six years. The context in which these collaborations took place include a symposium, exhibitions, various video works, and the teaching of a semi-virtual interior design studio in Melbourne. A crucial aspect within these situations was a shared spatial and didactical praxis that was located on opposite sides of the planet?—?Belgium and Australia.  The collaboration was thus largely determined by the gaps between A + R: the geographical separation, the physicality or virtuality of site, and the millisecond delay of the video feed. The virtual screen that speared through each interaction meant that the technologies and processes employed were often undulating attempts to minimise these gaps. To compose this visual essay, the image archive of each collaborative project was examined through a peripheral lens, in order to create relations that interrogate the spatial and conceptual implications of bridging this physical distance. The anachronistic approach to the images allowed new forms of configurations to arise, emphasising the specific spatial situations over any previous context or anecdotal chronology.  As a consequence, elaborating on the precise details of each project seems to be somewhat beside the point. In fact, prosaic descriptions detract from what is actually important about these interactions. The textual interspersions throughout the essay are attempts to develop  a syntax for pointing out what is conceptually relevant. They try to unpack?—?or make more accessible?—?the visual argumentation that the essay is constructed from, without ever claiming or providing unisonal clarity. The words do not function as explanations, but instead as musings that attempt to mark?—?and disclose?—?the various typologies, as well as to narrate the transition between them. They are attempts to describe both the experience of the digital landscape and the terrain itself.  In these thematic paragraphs, we have attempted to find language that resonates with the configurations of site that come together through the juxtapositions within the visual sequence. The collected imagery has been curated to lay bare the constituting components of this shared experience within digital space. In this way, the essay as a whole can be read as a subjective taxonomy of our digital communication of place as well as a truly digital simultaneous compression of it into one singular entity.  Ultimately, the resulting transmedial constellation of images, text, places, objects, and projects aims to interrogate the kind of interiorities that are generated when two bodies interact from distant locations through predominantly digital platforms. It describes an exchange between the virtual spaces that we occupy and the physicality of the bodies and objects that remain essential for this virtual occupation.

This visual essay and accompanying text explores the work of the Belgian assemblage artist Camiel Van Breedam through a series of dialogues: between Van Breedam’s personal archive of waste material, and the works that he has shaped out of it; through the very different works that Remco Roes has himself made using that same archive; through the relationship between the two-dimensional images that make up the visual essay, and the complex three-dimensional spaces they seek both to articulate and to conceal; and through the ensuing conversation between Roes and Peter Snowdon, which itself simultaneously explicates, complicates, revises and evades the visual modes of knowledge developed by the images. In this dialogue, it is suggested that none of these spaces – whether tactile, visual or verbal – can exist apart from the particular bodies that engage them as their “sole locus of reference,”and that the dark space where the raw, fragmentary material is collected and conserved is never exhausted by the emergent work, but persists and insists as its ground and its condition. The result is not a commentary or an analysis, in images or in words, but a form of resonance between interiority as a sensory practice, and the exposed surfaces of the always-provisional artistic work.

The point of departure of this article is a collaborative installation work in whose creation one of the authors (Remco Roes) participated. The article combines a visual essay, composed from images documenting both the final exhibition and the process leading up to it, and a written commentary that attempts to point at-or point out-how knowledge or thinking may occur within or through a sequence of images such as this. These two essays, and the oblique relationship between them, are designed to shed light not only on one specific work of art but, more generally, on how we may inhabit different kinds of interiors, whether or not they are purely "physical." It also reflects on the visual essay genre as itself a way of thinking through artistic, design and philosophical problems.