Sustainably publishing artistic research in a way that cares about the aesthetic dimensions of knowledge is a complex and difficult task. It fundamentally requires giving artists and researchers a role in determining how their articulations will appear placing a particular responsibility on publishers to take care of it in a changing infrastructural environment. The Research Catalogue (RC) as it was conceived in the early 2010s moved a long way into this direction by offering the possibility to publish non-linear, multi-modal expositions in what may be described as online conference posters. While the RC has certainly be successful, some of the shortfalls have become apparent that need addressing, such as: (1) The absolute positioning that the RC affords is very user unfriendly in a time, in which mobile phones are ubiquitous; (2) While there is a lot of spatial control over an exposition, it is virtually impossible to control temporal aspects, such as movements across the screen or audiovisual events that can occur after an exposition has been loaded; (3) Transparent pre- and post-publication co-creation is not possible since reader and also reviewer interaction is limited to play/pause actions. (4) Linking of RC expositions to services, APIs and algorithmic processing is lacking because the format is tied to the editor itself.

Now almost ten years in, these and other experiences make it urgent to ask again how a space for meaningful articulations of artistic research can be perceived. As a starting point one may reflect on a change of purpose of the RC. In the beginning the RC was conceived solely as a space in which the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) could publish its articles in way that gave it credibility in the wider scientific community. At the time, the finality and control that came with the gesture of publishing was deemed important, while today an understanding prevails that expositions are much more transient and open-ended for authors as well as readers.  This raises questions of how unfinishedness can productively be authored and experienced, what trail and trace processes of authoring and experiencing might be needed in order to stay intelligible. This situation is complicated even further under a collaborative and co-creative perspective that included non-human actors. How would the exposition as specific digital object need to be described, and what kind of interactions with it would need to be designed to offer a new departure for the articulation of practice as research?