The Re-Thinking Autonomy symposium started with a topological question: “When do we speak of artistic research?” Is research perhaps a temporary thing that can only take place within the experimental sanctuary created by the institutional framework of art education? A space that generates a temporary autonomy where purely artistic research can take place free from instrumental and / or calculating preconditions. A research environment that offers critical resistance to the one-dimensional rhetoric of the omnipresent visual culture and the opportunistic dictates of the creative industry. In short, a laboratory-like, speculative research environment that can function as a platform for a non- instrumentalizing, homogenizing iconography, or rather, as the critical conscience of today's art academy.