The seminar considers the current modes of artistic research, i.e. research done by artists in, through or by means of their artistic practice, as an institutional practice. “Institution” is understood here in twofold ways: partly as an established mode of perception, behaviour and governance, partly as an activity through which human collectives tend to assure and improve the conditions of their existence (cf. Ferdinand Saussure, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hans Blumenberg, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucauld, among others). As research enters the establishments of higher education in arts, it entails a change in them. A new level of reflection is opened in relation to the functioning and purpose of those pedagogical institutions. On the other hand, the role of arts and artists start to change in the arts field. The seminar is motivated by the worry related to those changes: new kind of institutionalisation or instrumentalisation of the arts can be avoided only if the academic artistic research, from the very start, takes its own institutional conditions into account and as its research object. The aim of the seminar is to provide its students with critical means to consider artistic research practice. The seminar tends to find and sharpen arguments, according to which artistic research could be conceived as an auto-critical practice. Special attention will be given to practical examples, as well as for the practice of the participants themselves.