Reports vs textbooks

A report in artistic research is not a polished textbook or a sharp academic article, but an account of a process.
It documents the questions, experiments, reflections, and artistic works that shaped the path of inquiry. By tracing these movements, the report reveals how knowledge emerges through practice, rather than presenting only the final result.

When you do (artistic) research, you likely read articles, websites, and textbooks on your topic. It provides you with valuable information and gives you inspiration for a direction to follow or avoid. Basically, reading enriches you. When you’ve chosen to write a report as the final product for Research, you probably would like it to end up like these textbooks you’ve read. Clear and concisely written, well-structured, eloquent, and more appreciative properties will spring to mind. Or worse, it will spring to the mind of your inner critic. In this article, I aim to clarify the distinction between a textbook/article and a report. Getting this distinction clarified might help you in your writing process and beat that dragon of an overly active inner critic.

The Process

I’m not referring to Kafka’s The Process here. I’m referring to your own research process. It all began with a topic of interest and a question related to it. You read some books, you experimented a bit, reflected, questioned your own beliefs, and at some point, even your sanity. I would like to visualize this process as follows:

You start out at A with your initial topic of interest and related question(s). Experiments and reflections occur, beliefs are questioned, and new knowledge or artistic directions emerge. You arrive at A’. And so on. Now imagine that at some point, you become an expert on your topic of interest and you arrive at B. This is a point at which your knowledge, skills, and conviction become internalized and implicit. You are a master of your topic. You can communicate in a nuanced way on your topic, you know that you actually know very little and that there is still so much to research on your topic. And you know how your topic connects to different researches, different topics and more. It is a vast web of knowledge and skills you’ve garnered. This might be the point where you write a textbook. You know, the academic kind, with likely a lot of diagrams, many words etc. And young aspiring researchers read your textbook.

What I’m trying to say is that a textbook or an article can be a valuable source for your research. But don’t let looks deceive you.

The report

A report is not a textbook or an article. It is an account. It is the trail you leave behind as you move through your research process. It does not present the polished monument of knowledge that a textbook aspires to be, nor the sharp-edged argument that an article often is. Instead, it gathers the traces of your journey: the questions that sparked your interest, the methods you tried, the experiments that failed or succeeded, and the reflections that shifted your perspective. In artistic research, this also means sketches, rehearsal notes, recordings, drafts, and even the works of art themselves. The report shows the reader how these fragments connect and how they shape your evolving understanding. It does not hide the detours, but makes them visible, because they are part of the knowledge you created. In this way, the report is less about the endpoint and more about the movement between A, A’, and eventually toward B. It is a record of becoming, not of having arrived.

A report is a record of becoming, not of having arrived.

The inner critic

Your inner critic will likely whisper that a report should be flawless, seamless, and written as if you already knew everything from the start. But the very function of the report is to resist that illusion: it is not about perfection, but about recording the becoming. By embracing the crooked lines, the unfinished sketches, the doubts and detours, you turn the inner critic into a witness rather than a judge—acknowledging that research is not a straight road¹ to mastery, but a lived process worth documenting in its unfolding.

PvE, 1-9-2025

1. The attentive reader might see that I visualized the research process as a straight road. Which is ofcourse a folly 🙂 A research process is non-lineair, curvy, turny, twisty and mind-bogglingy unpredictable. And fun, don’t forget that. There you go ↩︎