Artistic Gossip in the Arts: Ethnographies of Artistic Practice

How interiorized learning patterns in art school shape the way atists work ? The general objective of this project is to identify the changes caused by the digital turn in the artistic practice of established professionals. Our integrated model defines artistic practice as a socio-cognitive process of a distributed, multimodal and embodied nature. Digital resources are objects of epistemic judgment, not just externalizations of knowledge. Intersubjective situations that are first precommunicative are later co-created, such as distributed attention in dance and synchronized swimming (Muntanyola-Saura, 2015). Both in scientific knowledge and in artistic knowledge, we semantically infer what is not there, in the perceptually immediate environment. Language is our tool to bridge this cognitive gap. Moreover, there is technical gossip in laboratories (Knorr-Cetina, 1999) and artistic gossip in studios (Muntanyola-Saura, 2016, Basov & Muntanyola-Saura, 2024). Our hypothesis is that digitalization shapes the communicative modalities and epistemic objects of the artistic process, thus modifying artistic gossip. Methodologically, we compare the discourse and practices of photographers, architects, film editors, designers, choreographers and musical composers, recognized in their field and linked to artistic schools, from two different generations, one educated analogically, the other digitally. Ethnographic filming and observation focus on the reconstruction of theartistic workflow, while Social Network Analysis, interviews and focus groups capture how new meanings emerge. Initial results show how we can pragmatically and relationally explain what really happens in the black box of the artistic process in conceptualization, execution, and evaluation. The detailed analysis of the use of technology and materials allows us to understand moments of coordination and creative projection. The digital turn constitutes a process of institutionalization of specific patterns of artistic gossip. Artistic gossip is made of shared vocabularies, counterfactuals, and metaphors in conversation.