Tour de Fierce Research

Artist-Led Origination: Before the Hypothesis

Author: Joseph Stanek
Series: NeuroArts Expansion Series
Essay: No. 03

​Abstract

NeuroArts has built an identity around a genuine commitment to equal partnership between artists and scientists in the investigation of aesthetic experience, yet the formal architecture of inquiry within the field tells a different story. Research agendas originate predominantly within scientific institutions, and where practitioners are invited to participate, eligibility is structurally gatekept by institutional affiliation; the Renée Fleming Neuroarts Investigator Awards, for instance, require practitioners to identify and partner with a narrowly defined early-career scientist holding full-time institutional affiliation before their inquiry is even eligible for consideration. The consequences of this asymmetry are not merely ethical; they are epistemic: a field whose structural conditions consistently exclude the origination layer of its own subject matter inevitably approaches a threshold beyond which its investigative horizon cannot meaningfully expand.

This essay addresses that asymmetry directly by developing Artist-Led Origination (ALO) as the second major pillar of the NeuroArts Expansion Series. It advances ALO beyond its earlier introduction as a structural access remedy, establishing it as a formal epistemological principle: research agendas may legitimately originate from the lived expertise of practitioners operating within Applied Aesthetic Contexts, because certain classes of aesthetic phenomena may not enter the field’s investigative purview through any other pathway—and because inquiry originating from that expertise deserves consideration within the same funding pathways and evaluative structures that govern institutionally supported research. The essay distinguishes two operational modes through which ALO functions: Artist-Initiated Inquiry, in which practitioners formulate research questions derived from sustained professional experience, and Practice-Led Inquiry, in which knowledge emerges through iterative cycles of artistic creation, refinement, and response. It repositions earlier access-based arguments within a broader epistemic architecture organized around a three-stage lifecycle of knowledge production: origination, evaluation, and execution. It then introduces Diachronic Aesthetic Knowledge as a named conceptual contribution: the practitioner’s accumulated capacity to interpret aesthetic phenomena across time, functioning simultaneously as a detector of emerging cultural dynamics and as a translator of historically transmitted aesthetic systems, advancing this capacity as one of the field’s most consequential and least utilized evidentiary resources. Together, these contributions establish Artist-Led Origination as a structural evolution to how NeuroArts validates the multifaceted origins of inquiry. Until now, NeuroArts has largely operated as an invitation for the art to enter the science laboratory. This essay invites science to the stage.