Imagine a practice room in a theatre academy. A group of students discuss the films that their supervisor has suggested they should see, their favourite artists and what they value in their work, and the short performances they prepared the night before and have just shown to one another. They are exploring the possibilities of new theatre technologies in a project called The Virtual Body. Later, they gather for a week to work in a huge barn, where their supervisor assembles what can only be called ‘stuff’. They experiment with spraying chalk on the planes of the small greenhouse with which they are to work. They gauge whether the resulting opacity will allow it to become a screen for a projected virtual reality. They worry about the expected confusion between the real and the non-real, live and non-live that will result. There are fierce, painful silences among the students over the issue of where and when theorising is appropriate. They search for evidence that their work is converging into a necessary thing, but right up to the premiere, they have no idea whether or not this is true.

Now imagine a fado cafe in the streets of the Lisbon neighbourhood of Bairo Alto. Inside, a group of people listen to a singer performing the song ‘Carmencita’. They have assembled, as they do every night, to listen to fado. The singer has explained to them how and why she wants to learn to sing fado: by listening to other fado singers, taking lessons, practising at home, through reading and writing about fado. The people in the cafe are sceptical. O fado não se aprende – Fado is not something one can learn, they say – one is born with fado. The singer wants to refute this claim by using her own voice and convincing her audience that she has fado, while at the same time learning more about her audience's claim that O fado não se aprende.

These two situations tell us something about the practice of artistic research. It is open-ended, messy and uncertain. The artists are making, questioning, refuting, hoping, all at the same time. They are concerned with an idea, a claim, a technology, an experience, a question, and they are working on it, assembling new ideas, claims, technologies and questions in the process.