Disclosing New Worlds: Artistic Entrepreneuring through Designed Fictions

Abstract

The 'creation of possible new futures' and the 'disclosure of new worlds' are considered to be at the core of both art/design and entrepreneurship. While art/ design activities are mainly concerned with the creation of material, visual, and virtual artefacts, entrepreneurial practices deal with the social creation of organizations. In hybrid organizations such as artistic companies, art/design practices and entrepreneurial practices are highly interrelated and can no longer be studied separately. Since these 'interrelated practices of disclosure' are in need of being empirically documented and conceptualized, the research project sets out for an interdisciplinary study between the field of art/design research and the field of entrepreneurship studies to develop a subtler understanding of how possible new futures come into being. By drawing on the actor-network theory, recent conceptual publications in both fields attempt to equalize human (social dimension) and non-human (material dimension) actants and to take the distributedness of agency along actor-networks into account. From a creative and processual view, this allows to understand the 'interrelated practices of disclosure' as a part of an actor-networking process that assembles and reassembles artefacts and people. The interdisciplinary research project takes the actor-network theory as the conceptual starting point to empirically study and categorize the practices and to develop a common theory for this intersection between art/design research and entrepreneurship studies. Hence, the empirical research is lead by the following question: How do actor-networks bring new possible futures into being? What practices are enacted to disclose new worlds? Since the primary goal of the empirical study is theory development, a process oriented multiple-embedded-case design will be used. As the process of actor-networking can be tracked along their narrative trajectories, audio and video based ethnographic observations and interviews serve as the main methods of data collection. Data will be analyzed through a narrative analysis approach and an ethnographic film. In this connection, the study explicitly aims at combining both approaches to develop a common interdisciplinary method to improve the analysis of the social-enacted, material-related and visual-performed practices. The proposed study is the first of its kind in Switzerland and internationally to focus specifically on the creation of possible futures from an interdisciplinary perspective between art/design research and entrepreneurship studies in order to establish a common research agenda in the respective intersection.