The possibility of the figure – in its substantial power field of artistic research – as a transformer provides not only opportunity of better understanding for and among us, but also to develop the process of understanding as such. The notion of the metaphor will be repositioned methodologically as an active figure. As a figure, a turned metaphor that becomes an incorporated aesthetic-epistemic device in action, producing and figuring out via poetic action. If used precisely, with its own means, understanding the metaphor as instrument, the metaphor needs to be identified and understood beyond illustrative terms but also in productive ones. The metaphorical value is about the forming process it gives impulse to. To take the real as reference leads to insights into the given hidden. It is obvious in the field of artistic research, the figure  opens up questions in new ways, collaboratively, as an exchange of different skill sets and further figures. The metaphor is the instrument, becoming an organ that helps to understand better. The metaphor needs to be understood as an active force (a poetic instrument) to explicate how/via disfigurement, as an aesthetic-epistemic device, is productive as an organ of/for research. My presentation will shed some light on the relationship between the literal and the figurative, leading to the figure as an idea of embodied organopoetic competence with artistic application, following the idea of Ortega y Gasset: “The metaphor is perhaps the most fruitful power man possesses. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation, which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him, like a distracted surgeon leaving an instrument in the body of a patient.” (Ortega y Gasset, 2017, 372) It is my understanding that it is not about a tool for creation but an instrument of understanding. I will provide examples for this, providing some insight into the power of artistic research.