Art as a Future-Generating Machine: Rheinberger’s Experimentalism in Practice-Based Arts Methodologies

This article explores the potential syntheses between practice-based arts research methodologies and historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s framing of the scientific “experiment.” Rheinberger offers the experiment as a “future-generating machine” resulting from material discursive processes enacted as “repetition with difference.” This framing of epistemological development has applications in practice-based methodologies through their simultaneous execution of action and reflection, as well as the importance of “surprise” in experimental practice.