The Silent Researcher: A New Method for Obtaining a Critical Response to a Holographic Artwork

A critical context is an essential aspect of practice-based research; however, a lack of structure exists to obtain and evaluate criticism from peers. This paper presents a case study of how the ‘silent student’ critique method used in Higher Education settings in the UK (Elkins, 2014) was adapted for a holographic arts research study. A ‘silent researcher’ critique session with nine experts was held in Aveiro, Portugal, June 2018 to evaluate the author’s digital holographic artwork, on display at the City Museum. The experts asked the author critical questions about the artwork while the author remained silent. The session was filmed, transcribed and processed using a general inductive approach for analysing qualitative evaluation data (Thomas, 2006). This paper outlines the benefits and drawbacks of using this new critique method for research. The benefits included; participant’s careful response to the artwork avoiding engagement of egos of critic and researcher, the drawbacks included the difficulty of evaluating against a pre-determined research question when the discussion could not be steered. This paper evaluates the artwork critiqued describing how the work contributes to the aesthetic development of the medium of holography; which used the Z-axis of holographic space to depict a chronological narrative.