Artistic research can question artistic practice itself, because it challenges art as a product and as a fixed work. On the other hand, it dares to ask how insights can be gained outside of a scientific approach.

Artistic research takes up the idea of embodied knowledge (cf. Peters 2013) and creates laboratories and spaces for new investigations (cf. Badura 2015). It questions social and cultural discourse, creating utopian and alternative perspectives linked to a historical or scientific context. Ultimately, it can also be linked to the idea of artistic progress by questioning issues of exclusion, arbitrariness and marginalization (see Baldauf and Hoffner 2015). In this sense, it explores uncharted territory of knowledge transfer and knowledge creation by laying trails for new dialogues and insights along the way. Artistic research can be understood as an exploration of modes of perception, but also as a "refraction of perceptual conventions and a search for alternative possibilities of perception" (Schürmann, 2015: 63). There is no need to design a "social counter-model" (Bippus, 2015: 67); instead, the focus is on researching possibilities and functions that are contextually and socially framed. Artistic research is closely comparable to participatory action research, it seeks to "transform and improve practice" (Borgdorff, 2015: 72) and "aims to make a substantive, preferably innovative contribution to the development of practice, a practice that is as saturated with stories, beliefs and theories as it is based on skilled expert actions and implicit understanding." (ibid.: 71) The strategies used are, for example, "participatory observation, biographical narrative, thick description, reflection-in-action and cooperative research" (ibid.: 71). Anke Haarmann describes it a "thoughtful methodology" (Haarmann, 2015: 85), that does not wish to be "fixed to certain procedures by external standards of the scientific" (ibid.: 85). 

show.Rooms has been working with the method of artistic research from the very beginning. Through the research project ‘Mapping the Unseen’, funded by the FWF (2019-2021), it was possible to intensify this research.

"Artistic research (AR) is a newly recognised discipline in the field of the arts. Over the last 30 years at the latest, it has made its way into art academies and has become an important recipient of international funding. However, this process has not been without resistance and has triggered numerous debates about its particularities and problems. As a practice, AR challenges the traditional understanding of art as it shifts the focus from aesthetic experience to the production of knowledge. (...) From this perspective, the question of AR shifts from the question of whether art produces knowledge to the question of what kind of knowledge is produced. That is, what do artists who make AR produce, how, and most importantly, for whom? (...) Through this understanding of AR, an awareness can emerge that certain scientific endeavours are linked to histories of violence and oppression, to instead develop an understanding of the emancipatory potential of research in becoming a practice aimed at social change in the service of people." (Mariel Rodriguez, artist and researcher, speaker at the release of the virtual mapping)

Haraway also describes the importance of this togetherness in the connection between art and science: ‘I am convinced that scientific artistic worldisations represent an important sympoietic practice of life on a damaged planet.’ (2018: 96)