Emergence: a constitutive epistemological category for research-creation

Abstract

Research-creation operates at the intersection of two epistemological traditions –the scientific and the artistic– and within that intersection, whatever arises without having been anticipated in the methodological design tends to be treated as an anomaly. This article proposes reading emergence as an epistemologically constitutive category of artistic research. To sustain this argument, three theoretical traditions are brought into dialogue: Najmanovich's (2005) aesthetics of complex thought, which legitimizes the ambiguous and the emergent as valid forms of knowledge; Hübner's (2024) common ground model, which incorporates emergence as a constitutive dimension of research design; and Nelson's (2013) epistemology of artistic practice, which recognizes modes of knowledge that can only be formulated a posteriori. From this triangulation, a typology of three modes of emergence is proposed –corpus-level, methodological, and epistemic– with direct implications for the design, evaluation, and institutional legitimization of these projects.