Argh! What's my Methodology?
In
C.Gray and J.Malin's Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design Page 19, Methodologies are described to be the 'consequence of ontology and epistemology'. ' Methodology is evolved in awareness of what the research considers 'knowable', and in an awareness of the nature of knowledge and the relationship between the researcher and the 'knowable'.
The way I understand this is that the classical scientific method for understanding the universe would have been positivist. That is - reality exists 'out there' (p.20), the scientist would be distant and the work experimental and objective.
However this positivist epistomology (the nature of the relationship between the inquirer and the 'knowable') must have must have been severely shaken with the discovery of Quantum Mechanics and that the observer of an experiment can affect what is being observed. I've taken the illustrations below from a wonderful Blog entitled '
Quantum Art and Poetry'. Friday, 27 March 2009 which explains how the observer effects interference and the theory of Quantum Entanglement.
I'm going to have to ask a Physicist for help understanding this one, because I'll get it wrong.
Back to my methodology. My belief about my ontology (The nature of reality, the 'knowable') is that my paradigm of inquiry is somewhere between Critical Realist (believing that reality exists, but can never be fully apprehended - it is driven by natural laws that can only be incompletely understood) and Relativist which suggests that realities exist in the form of multiple mental constructions, socially and experimentally based, local and specific, dependent for their form and content on the persons who hold them.
My Methodologies for those two paradigms would be either dialogic (and involve eliminating false consciousness and energise and facilitate transformation) or hermeneutic, dialectic (individual constructions are elicited and refined hermeneutically, and compared and contrasted dialectically, with the aim of generating one (or a few) constructions on which there is a substantial consensus).
What does that mean? I say that I'm wanting to represent life more authentically by using time in three dimensions within holography and lenticular imaging. What does that mean in terms of an artistic methodology? How do I determine what 'authentic' means? Would I have to design some sort of questionnaire to evaluate whether I'm being more or less authentic - and ask lots of people? Yikes. I know I do not want to use any sort methodology which isn't familiar, or relevant, so I definately have to refine my research question. Sigh. A very smart Phd Physics student told me he spent much of his time during his PhD feeling stupid...
