Art as a Future-Generating Machine: Rheinberger’s Experimentalism in Practice-Based Arts Methodologies

Abstract

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.