Research Catalogue

Unstable Systems Instability can be a creative force in art, design, and architecture. Artists, designers, and scholars work both with and against systems that are ever-changing, fragile, or unpredictable. Whether dealing with technological systems, ecosystems, social structures, or sensory experiences, instability is often a prerequisite for creation. Instability opens pathways for new ideas and processes, reshaping how we approach and redesign the systems that shape our lives. It can also refer to the creative act itself—one that does not follow predetermined trajectories or established norms. Art, design, and architecture serve as tools to disrupt stable systems and/or shed new light on systems that appear stable but in reality, they are not. No system is truly stable, and when we resist that instability, it becomes a problem. Instability is perhaps the only certainty we can rely on. Hugarflug 2025, the annual conference on artistic research, will take place on September 11–12. It will serve as a platform for research that engages with instability across various systems—from technological advancements such as AI and interactive systems to issues related to politics, society, and the environment. We will explore how instability functions as a tool for generating new possibilities while also fueling unrest and transformation within society and academia. The Iceland University of the Arts invites proposals of all kinds, including presentations of ongoing or completed research by our faculty, students, and collaborators.

In this exposition I’m showing you my journey for these past two years of investigating my artistic practice through the meeting of identity and aesthetics. Due to my Iranian background, I have felt a need and curiosity to bring together my Iranian and European identities. This project is a dialogue between myself and music, encompassing sounds, arrangements, physical presence, materiality, technology, context, and politics. By politics I mean; history, cultural appropriation, diversity, colonisation, beliefs, and the current needs of the western culture. A project involving confrontations with habits, default parameters, and elements within digital audio workspaces, thereby incorporating scales.

Digital overview of artistic works by musician Jordan Sand

"Grain: Mediator Between East and West" is an image-led, cross-temporal exploration of bread wheat as both a commodity and a metaphor. Drawing on its historical and practical ubiquity as a staple grain in agrarian (Eastern) Europe, wheat emerges as the focal medium through which cultural and geopolitical narratives are revealed. What narratives does bread wheat carry, and what is entangled within localised perspectives? To what extent does the cultural history of grain intersect with modern grain infrastructures, whereby wheat transforms from an elemental medium into a mediator between East and West? Through thinking with and about grain, this work interrogates the gaps, overlaps and resonances between East and West, the post-war Soviet 1940s and the present day, repositioning wheat as a cultural mediator. This Master's project was conducted within the European Media Studies program at the University of Potsdam and University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, August 2025.

The dramaturgy of Conversation aims to tackle different approaches, analyses, and practices of conversations. Several forms of conversations and various related knowledges are questioned from different positions and perspectives. The data studied come from personal, external, or created (for and within the project) archives. In this project, researcher Ingrid Cogne analyses, develops or transforms, re-articulates and re-structures the ways in which one creates, inhabits, and facilitates conversations. The central question of The dramaturgy of Conversation as a methodology is HOW: How can the context, structure, location, and duration of existing or created situations of conversation support the (re-)articulation of the persons involved? How can one use or work with conversations? How can one read, inhabit, and embody the parameters of a conversation? How can one facilitate a conversation? How does a situation itself facilitate the meeting with knowledge? How can one create a situation of conversation that will be the facilitator itself? The dramaturgy of Conversation proposes situations, settings, and protocols of conversations that involve, combine, or isolate various languages (spoken, bodily, and written), “in-between” and relational knowledge, and dialogical methods and processes as well as formats of communication. The dramaturgy of Conversation is a methodology that focuses on “how” practical knowledge can be read, unfolded, and circulated within the “doing”. It is a research project that facilitates the access to the unknown and the inarticulable – navigating between quantity and quality, fiction and reality, material and immaterial, visible and invisible. This research is aproached by the author as the context wherein a self-reflective process can be (re-)articulated and CO- and reciprocal activations of hardly articulable knowledges can be performed. With this re/search, Cogne insists on the need of “conversation” to be practiced and considered as knowledge. Duration: 15.1.2019 – 14.1.2025 Project leader: Ingrid Cogne (IKW) Funded by: FWF - Austrian Science Fund | Elise-Richter PEEK (V709) Institution: IKW, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria

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