Positive Disruption: Priming for Creativity

Breakout Session 2: Thursday 21 November 17:00 - 18:30
Trish Osler, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

This workshop delves into the intricacies of creative cognition, challenging traditional notions by exploring convergent and divergent thinking through the lens of recent neuroscientific developments. Emphasising the interplay of memory, affect, sensorial experiences, and cognitive processes, it addresses the core of arts-based research in education. By empowering creative processes through metacognitive approaches, participants gain access to intuitive, affective, and non-linear expression. The session encourages arts educators to reconsider assumptions about the creative process and advocates for transdisciplinary pedagogies promoting creative flexibility. Engaging in divergent thinking strategies, the workshop models the neural processes behind creative decision-making, urging participants to disrupt and challenge their aesthetic preferences. Through mindful exercises, individuals explore intentional disruptions in object/space relationships, fostering unexpected connections and novel narratives. The culmination involves creating personal artworks that reflect newfound connections and meaning, making the artistic process visible and accessible through discursive, metacognitive unfoldings.

 

Futuring: A framework for transdisciplinary storytelling

Breakout Session 3: Friday 22 November 09:00 - 11:00
Angelica Boehm, Film University Babelsberg, Germany

Embark on a journey of collaborative, transdisciplinary storytelling that envisions desirable climate futures in this innovative workshop presentation. Developed through a partnership between Griffith Film School and the Art for Futures Lab at the Film University Babelsberg, the project explores futuring as a narrative framework to counter dystopian climate tropes, fostering hope and agency in participants. Co-creation practices integrate diverse knowledge, including scientific perspectives from the Australian Rivers Institute, enriching the storytelling process. Grounded in the Blue Heart wetlands regeneration project, the narrative comes to life through place-based storytelling and screen futures technology, offering a virtual experience of the site. The workshop not only showcases the project's process and learnings but also raises discussions on the futures it envisions.

 

Choreographing Transdisciplinarity: Designers in the ‘Metaverse’

Breakout Session 3: Friday 22 November 09:00 - 11:00
Ian Biscoe, Design Academy Eindhoven, Netherlands

In response to global challenges, Transdisciplinary Design Networks (TDN) explores innovative approaches to transdisciplinary collaboration. As experts face silos, geographical dispersion, and language barriers, TDN investigates sustainable network creation through technological and holistic means. Utilising networked collaborative spatial environments (the ‘Metaverse’ or ‘Intraverses’) and transdisciplinary mediators, TDN aims to overcome obstacles to greater transdisciplinarity. This initiative raises the intriguing prospect of designers, including artists and freethinkers adept at transcending discipline-specific thinking, serving as ‘choreographers’ of transdisciplinary conversations. The session delves into transformative methodologies to facilitate collaborative efforts in the face of urgent planetary issues.

 

Parliament of Lines

Breakout Session 3: Friday 22 November 09:00 - 11:00
Sarah Kolb, Jutta Strohmaier, University of Arts Linz, Austria

Delve into the multifaceted realms of art, science, and practical wisdom with the collaborative endeavour ‘Mycelial Space’. Since its inception in 2021, this project has fostered cross-disciplinary collaborations, intertwining the expertise of artists and practitioners across diverse fields. At its core, Mycelial Space utilises fungi as a focal point to unravel the intricacies of relational, non-binary knowledge production. This collaborative exploration aims to fortify the concept of artistic intelligence, drawing on fundamental cultural techniques like observing, reflecting, and storytelling. The workshop invites participants to collectively construct a mycelium network, intertwining stories, perceptions, and imaginations around fungi. Join this transformative session, exploring the intersection of art, science, and practical wisdom in the context of Mycelial Space.

 

Public Fictions: Methods for (world-)building alternative Realities

Breakout Session 3: Friday 22 November 09:00 - 11:00
Ann Mbuti, FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel, Switzerland

In an immersive workshop, participants will delve into the creative power of fictionalisation for pressing global challenges. Drawing inspiration from the practice of Public Fictions, the session employs various artistic disciplines to equip attendees with tools for future implementation. Inspired by world-building techniques, the workshop integrates a writing approach from Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha's Octavia's Brood, prompting participants to envision worlds they strive for. Additionally, it explores ‘Storyworld 2.0’ by Simon Jon Andreasen, emphasising diverse narrative content circulation channels. Participants engage in accelerated world-building, gaining insights into fictionalisation applications for social change. The workshop fosters individual creativity while creating collaborative structures for interdisciplinary idea development, challenging traditional narrative patterns for broader audience accessibility.

 

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most artistic of them all? Exploring the relations between creativity, artistic representation, and artificial intelligence

Breakout Session 3: Friday 22 November 09:00 - 11:00
Elisa Poli, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, Italy

Explore the future of artistic intelligence at this engaging session. Delving into the evolving relationship between mind and brain, the session traces the shift from traditional notions of intelligence to multifaceted approaches. This session, blending theoretical discourse with a dynamic workshop, unravels key binomials like original-copy and invention-assembly. Participants employ modified Propp's cards to craft futuristic stories set in 2034, intertwining creativity with AI's 'magic element'. Led by the NABA Research Centre, this exercise prompts creatives to artistically reflect on the transformative impact of technological advancements on their work. Aiming to transcend anthropocentric perspectives, the workshop envisions futuristic self-portraits, exploring themes of hybridisation, selection, and falsification in the post-digital era. This workshop challenges artists to move beyond anthropocentric frameworks to illustrate how themes such as hybridisation, selection, and falsification extend in a process that presents remarkable similarities (Heidegger, 1977), from the Renaissance to the present day.

 

Echoes of the Dolphin House: Rendering visions of post-natural ecologies

Breakout Session 4: Friday 22 November 11:30 - 12:30
Eloïse Vo, HEAD – Genève, Switzerland

Embark on a captivating journey through a performative lecture rooted in a practice-based PhD, delving into the intersections of performance, 3D modelling, and post-natural ecologies. Centred around the enigmatic Dolphin House—a fusion of science lab, knowledge factory, and domestic space from a 1960s interspecies communication experiment—the session explores its physical, mediatic, and relational dimensions. From a post-human and feminist lens, the presenter uses performance and 3D modelling to unveil the agentivity of space, objects, technologies, and bodies within this historical context. Recovering the cybernetic experiment's overlooked potentialities, the study prompts reflections on animality, femininity, and their roles as technologies. Offering a performative guided tour of the Dolphin House, the presenter invites participants to engage in discussions, exploring the performativity of art-based research and challenging the ambiguities of more-than-human symbiosis in the face of climate crisis.

 

Anterior Futures

Breakout Session 4: Friday 22 November 11:30 - 12:30
Roberta Bernasconi, Alessia Prati, Alessandro Tollari, Iuav University of Venice, Italy
Tanya Beyeler, Pablo Gisbert, Teresa Barbagallo, Project El Conde de Torrefiel, Spain

Embark on a journey that challenges traditional Western approaches to knowledge production. Delving into the intersection of aesthetics and politics in performing arts, the institution, renowned for its exploration of pedagogical and epistemological potentials, invites participants into a paradigm where fictionality isn't a mistake but a wellspring of possibilities. Led by the internationally acclaimed El Conde de Torrefiel, known for their groundbreaking work in theatre and performance, this workshop questions the linear constraints of time and the stifling predictability of education. Join the lecture-performance to unravel how bodies, spaces, and histories interweave, challenging conventional notions of knowledge transmission. Additionally, a workshop during the NABA Experience will explore Milan's Navigli district, fusing embodiment and fiction in a captivating research process.

 

Teaching bodies and boundaries to blur: Attuning bodies and worlds

Breakout Session 4: Friday 22 November 11:30 - 12:30
Ties van de Werff, Ulrike Scholtes, What Art Knows, Maastricht Institute of Arts, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, Maastricht, Netherlands

Join the What Art Knows research centre in an engaging workshop exploring the transformative potential of artistic research. As artistic researchers are increasingly called upon to engage with societal concerns, this session focuses on experimenting with embodied methods to foster a generous and resonating research practice. The workshop challenges the traditional conceptualisation of the body, advocating for a form that extends beyond individual, bounded structures. Breaking away from the one-body-one-person rule, the experiment explores postmodern perspectives that view bodies and boundaries as leaky, permeable, and dissolving. Through body work exercises, participants will experience blurred boundaries, practice attunement, and feel connected. The session concludes with a lively dialogue on the societal and planetary impact of thin-skinned, weakly bounded, and attuned artistic researchers, questioning and complicating individual authorship, voice, and self. Don't miss this opportunity to delve into the evolving landscape of artistic research and its potential to transform arts education.