Artist-Led Origination: Before the Hypothesis

Artist-Led Origination: Before the Hypothesis is the third installment of the NeuroArts Expansion Series, an independent scholarly contribution by Joseph Stanek, Lead Researcher at Tour de Fierce Research. About this Essay NeuroArts has built its identity around equal partnership between artists and scientists, yet the formal architecture of inquiry within the field tells a different story. Research agendas originate predominantly within scientific institutions, while the practitioners who generate, navigate, and embody the phenomena under investigation remain structurally outside the processes that determine what gets studied and why. This essay addresses that asymmetry directly. Artist-Led Origination (ALO) is established here as a formal epistemological principle: research agendas may legitimately originate from the lived expertise of practitioners operating within Applied Aesthetic Contexts, because certain classes of aesthetic phenomena may not enter the field's investigative purview through any other pathway — and because inquiry originating from that expertise deserves consideration within the same funding pathways and evaluative structures that govern institutionally supported research. The essay makes four principal contributions: It advances ALO beyond its earlier introduction as a structural access remedy, positioning it as the second major pillar of the NeuroArts Expansion Series and as a structural principle governing how inquiry originates within fields whose subject matter is generated by practitioners in complex real-world environments. It distinguishes two operational modes through which ALO functions: Artist-Initiated Inquiry, in which practitioners formulate explicit research questions derived from sustained professional observation, and Practice-Led Inquiry, in which knowledge emerges through iterative cycles of artistic creation, refinement, and response. It repositions earlier access-based arguments within a broader epistemic architecture organized around a three-stage lifecycle of knowledge production: origination, evaluation, and execution — clarifying that ALO expands the range of phenomena that may enter investigation while preserving the evaluative standards through which all research proposals are assessed. It introduces Diachronic Aesthetic Knowledge as a named conceptual contribution: the practitioner's accumulated capacity to perceive aesthetic phenomena across time, functioning simultaneously as a detector of emerging cultural dynamics and as an interpreter of historically transmitted aesthetic systems — advancing this capacity as one of the field's most consequential and least utilized evidentiary resources. Series Context This essay is the third installment of the NeuroArts Expansion Series: Framework Essay (Series No. 01): NeuroArts Expansion: A Framework for Artist-Led Inquiry in Applied Aesthetic Contexts — https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18875322 Pillar Essay No. 02: Applied Aesthetic Contexts: Environments That Generate What Laboratories Cannot — https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18930627 Predecessor Preprint: The Artist-Initiated Frontier: Structural Evolution and the ALO Framework in NeuroArts Research — https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18603117 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-9390-4809 For additional research outputs, series updates, and related work, visit the official Tour de Fierce Research website.