The Alchemy of Research-Creation

Reviews / Votes

"In this refreshingly expansive interrogation of research-creation, Hyland and Lewis bring us on an esoteric-alchemical adventure, reminding us that 'an antifascist politics is possible even in fascist times.' This is a book to grapple with, to dance with, and to savor. Why not turn right to the end, where the authors invite us to 'use this book'? Start there. Follow their instructions. And may we all nurture some serious new magic together." - Natalie Loveless, Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory, University of Alberta

"A radically poetic digest of esoteric, political, and pragmatic connections all too often ignored in conventional histories of art. I'll be using it in my own practice as a teacher and artist for years to come." - Matthew Ritchie, Mentor Professor in the Graduate Visual Arts Program, Columbia University, and the Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist in Residence at MIT

"There's something proto-future about this book. Its ideas are beyond fresh, beyond radical, beyond beyondedness. If there was Lasik for the intellect this book would be that." - David Stuart MacLean, author of The Answer to the Riddle Is Me and How I Learned to Hate in Ohio

"As academia faces a reckoning, in part of its own making, from the outside and from within, Hyland and Lewis offer a framework for a new poly-directional path forward. The authors extend various nodes-from Harney and Moten's 'undercommons' to Agamben's remaking of Western ontologies and Benjamin's philosophies of aesthetics-to redress the academy's perennial reluctance to pivot toward new ontological possibilities of (creative praxis as operative to) knowledge gathering, building, and redistribution(s). In the process of the internal squabbles, the doors have been left ajar for fascist tacticians to make gains in dismantling the entire project. The lingering remnants of a neoliberal hangover. Hyland and Lewis's undertaking is a disassembling of the existing institutional frameworks and its binding concepts of research/researcher contributions to productive non-production. The authors find purpose in scattering the pieces for a future reassembly from a studio-based alchemy-contributing new usage for an epistemological drift." - Triton Mobley, Assistant Professor of Studio Arts, English, and Film and Media Studies, University of Pittsburgh

"In The Alchemy of Research-Creation, Peter Hyland and Tyson Lewis question the Enlightenment's stark separation of art and science. They raise the possibility of an alternative way of approaching the apparent division of knowledge and pleasure-of research and creativity-by considering alchemy as a practice located in an understanding of space-time that assumes a continuity rather than a separation of knowing and creating. They imagine a different way of being in the world, one that sees the world as an always unrealized collection of possibilities in which transformation is not simply a means to an end but the definitive human activity. They provide not only grounded defense of the alchemical studio as a crucial space for a set of necessary and vital practices but also guidance on how this alchemical studio can become a space for education. They do not offer advice on method but, to use their language, sketch out what they, as teachers and artists, have done in the classroom as studio. This book is not so much an argument for alchemy as it is a work of alchemy, one that invites its readers to embrace the risk of inhabiting a world that is defined by possibility." - James L. Kastely, Department Chair and Professor of English, University of Houston

"Lewis and Hyland are the new alchemists! A very important critique of positivist scientific knowledge cults and mystifying artists' practices. The Alchemy of Research-Creation reconsiders studio practices without recourse to neoliberal/technocapitalist 'interdisciplinary' imperatives or fascist drives toward achieving perfection. We are led down into a cryptic world of practices pasts and possible futures that invite us to undo the binarity of studio vs. lab, drifting alchemically away and within legitimacies and illegitimacies of knowledge that exist between and inside both. There is little interdisciplinarity here. These new alchemists pursue something more akin to an intra-disciplinarity that is far more fit for the complexity of twenty-first century research practices than what we currently have. The splits between head and hand, knowledge and pleasure, science and art are not made whole but rather are configured through five gates to different research in ways that matter." - Annouchka Bayley, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge