The publishing of artistic research may be understood as the considered placing of an epistemically underdetermined practice in a discursive field. While the previous section looked inwards at the expositionality of creative research processes, this final section places particular emphasis on spaces of encounter. Introducing examples from the history of art and contemporary art, we suggest that bridges need to be built between existing artistic practices and those of academic publishing. Given that, over its history, art has found meaningful access to most if not all forms of expression, it is not impossible that artistic practice may, at some point, make academia its own.

In our understanding, this – admittedly optimistic – perspective goes beyond appropriation or cohabitation as a fundamental rethinking of art through academia. Just as one may say that painters are continually rethinking art through painting, the space of academia, its resources, histories and conventions continually offer new opportunities to art. At the same time, it is clear that academia, like any public space, is created and controlled by institutions and that institutional critique is necessary in all stages of the process. Rather than making artistic practice fit into academia, we suggest that academia should also fit art. Academia needs to respect artistic research practices and make space for precisely those critical manoeuvres without which art would be stripped of its worth, even if they challenge its very definition.

To open this section, we selected Andreas Gedin's text Distant Voices and Bodies in a Market Square in order to suggest how complex an object can become as it enters a new space. While the chapter is taken from Gedin's 2011 dissertation, Jag hör roster överallt! – Step by Step, it was considerably reworked for this book, now literally including the editor's voice in some passages that challenge editing processes and notions of authorship. Discussing the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Gedin highlights the need for distance and dialogue, which creates space within texts that is comparable to the types of space we know from art. Developing this point further in the second part of his essay, Gedin argues, with Michael Holquist, that text is not only an abstract but also a physical being. With this, the author highlights the new and, to some degree uncomfortable, implications that arise when the boundary between conceptual and physical work is negotiated.