Alice Twemlow: If you had to categorise your research practice…

Louis Braddock Clarke: …I’d call myself a “field researcher”. I devise methods and build instruments with which to conduct research, so my practice and my research are really closely connected. Most of the time it’s about coming up with ways of understanding the space or site that I’m in.

AT: Your data sources include the sites themselves. What are you trying to listen to within those sites?

LBC: I try to work with “full-spectrum listening”. You have multiple ways of listening to a site, of taking data from the Earth. Through triggering conversations, through technical data collection, or it can be through fictional writing also.

AT: Using these methods, then, what is the information you’re trying to get from these sites?

LBC: Most of my data is based on inaudible phenomena. For me the interesting thing is the network of phenomena. Not necessarily A or B but whatever is between A and B. On another level, the data would be about measuring the anomaly. And the anomaly can be more scientific, but it can also be more abstract, like how people in that place have been affected because of the presence of a magnetic field, for example.

AT: Who do you collaborate with on research projects?

LBC: When I was a student at the KABK my research was quite individual.. But after graduating and being more part of a group dynamic, I realised that research can only happen in settings where there’s a conversation. Now I always work with big groups of people. I always want to find the specialists and the super nerds. I like to collaborate with Dutch scientific institutes or universities.

AT: What’s an example of a recent research project?

LBC: Currently I’m an artist resident at the Venice Music Biennale. This is the first year they are focusing on digital music, or what they call “micro music”. I still had to write a research proposal. I based it on the one I did for the Design Lectorate Research Group. I rewrote it in terms of producing something more concrete. But it’s still called “Weather Gardens”.

AT: Does it have a guiding research question?

LBC: Since having been in the Design Lectorate Research Group, whenever I write work texts or the caption text for a work, I always include a research question. For this one, I wanted to explore the sonic ecologies that are particularly shaped by humans in the age of the Anthropocene.

As the world speeds up its own signals, we have to re-tune our own consciousness to this new frequency or tempo of the Earth. My goal is to create awareness around how to be more in tune with something like climate disaster or extreme weather events on a non-visual level.

AT: To which fields, academic disciplines and discourses do you think this project contributes?

LBC: I want to show through my research that science doesn’t have to be inaccessible. I want to help scientific knowledge to seep out. I always start by looking for how a scientist measures a phenomenon, and then I download their open-access PDFs (laughing). I produce the same thing, the same mode of listening, but on a DIY scale, and with a really low budget. Then I distribute it so that more people can participate. My goal is to really shake up the scientific community, to show them, “Okay, you have an instrument that costs €60,000 and I’ve just made the same instrument for €30. So, what’s going on here?”

But I also want to bring alternative approaches to the scientific community. Because most of the time artists are called in to translate the scientific research, to illustrate it. And that’s so boring. Or the artists and researchers who go into these institutions want to extract something, they want someone to give them data. Whereas if you go into spaces with an open mind and willingness to collaborate, it’s way more rewarding.

AT: We’ve talked a lot about the process of research — the how. What are the outputs of this project — the what?

LBC: In the end for me it has to be a piece of time-based media, an experience, in an exhibition or festival which someone can step into, not know anything about, and still get some information from. Then, I always write a text. I think it’s important to provide different levels of entry to a project. What’s also important for me with dissemination is that I don’t just wait until the project’s done; that I do it during the process. Like we did with the Design Lectorate Research Group, at the Fault Lines Research Forum, or when we visited OT 301 and with what I showed in collaboration with Zuzanna Zgierska at W 139 in Amsterdam (where the piece was a research station). Then a research project offers itself as a set of iterations.

AT: This is something that I think art and design research at the KABK can really offer: how we share research while in progress.

LBC: Right. Dissemination shouldn’t be an afterthought; it should happen throughout the process of research. Because I do a lot of field research, it’s important for me to bring my audience with me into the field, and that’s why I embrace Instagram. I always really describe where I am, what I’m doing, everyone who’s involved. And it’s nice because then you get immediate responses from the audience. Some people want to discuss the details, others suggest people I could go and meet.

AT: How do you think the outputs or processes of your research are used?

LBC: Because all my work relates to climate, and generates new evidence, a lot of it is also used in those discourses. The instruments I make get distributed to citizen scientists. And this generates awareness, but it also creates a network, a community…

AT: What kinds of research collaborations do you have within the KABK?

LBC: Students who have valued my teaching ask to work for me. I can’t employ them full-time, but I always involve them in projects. I think it’s important to provide a support structure for graduates who might otherwise have to leave The Hague. With teachers, in the BA Graphic Design department, there isn’t space or time to actually learn from each other as tutors. The Design Lectorate Research Group is the only place I collaborated with people at the KABK. I love that there was this intense trust between us and how we shared everything.

AT: How do you feed your own research back into your teaching? And how do you teach how to research?

LBC: Teaching is such a big part of my practice, it’s hard to separate them out. I start with an assignment that in itself has research questions, but which also requires the students to come up with research questions of their own. We explore various methods about how to listen to a site, be more sensitive to the place, as a way to understand its geopolitics. I often use the Port of Rotterdam because taking a body of students there is exciting. For most students, finding out that research can be like this is mind-blowing.

AT: So this is their kind of immersion into research the year before their thesis.

LBC: As a third-year teacher I feel a responsibility to gear them up in terms of having the right strategies, methods and sources for pulling off a critically-aware graduation project.

AT: And what about the other research activities you participate in at the KABK? Either ones that exist or that you’ve initiated?

LBC: In my teaching, I push students to find ways to disseminate or publish their research outside of assessment criteria. My students have to organise a concert where they give a two-minute oral presentation about their research questions and process, before they show the work.

AT: How do you experience the research culture at the KABK, and what could be done differently?

LBC: One of the reasons I’m in The Netherlands is because of the public access to knowledge. I can walk up to TU Delft, or the Royal Conservatoire, knock on the door and enter a very specific body of knowledge very quickly.

But not everyone does this so at the KABK, we have to become better at creating these connections to other institutions. For example, we do study trips to museums; but why not libraries, research institutes or science labs? Why not concert halls? I think the knowledge is there, it’s public, it’s accessible, we’re so lucky and privileged in The Netherlands to have all those things happening around us. There should be people at the KABK that make this happen — a department for public collaboration. Can you imagine how cool that would be?