Week 11 Writing, thinking, and making: Lee, Siukonen, Jones, Barrett

Barrett's proposition of the artist as researcher is an interesting but fraught with potential crises for me. Specifically, when we talk about research and especially if we're looking to science as the source for how we define research one particular pitfall arises. Science aims to find objective realities and while many question whether it ever does that, to me there is no way to reconcile what I do as an artist and what a scientist must do.
There are many parallels for sure. The scientist and I experiment with our materials, create theories, test them, research other work on the topics and so on. But my goal is kind of the opposite of the scientist. I can't discover a truth in my process. In scientific research, no finding can be considered to be true unless it can be replicated but someone other than the researcher who proposes it. I can't prove that life is this and that. I can't prove that the way in which I see a thing, a person, a time is the best way to see it, the most truthful way to see it. But a scientist can prove that sugar is detrimental to the human body. They can prove that cigarettes cause cancer. They can prove that color is simply the wavelength of the light that an object reflects. I can't prove that the vast majority of our ways of seeing the world are based on our shortcomings.
However, I do agree that as artists, many of us are conducting research. We are trying to see the world in new ways. We are trying to understand what images do to our selves. We are trying to create sensations and thoughts in others. I wish more people thought of artists as a kind of researchers. I wish society saw us as professional investigators who produce aesthetic experiences as venues for collaborative analysis.
So while I may nitpick the semantics, I am buoyed by Barrett's perspective.