Hugarflug 2025 - Unstable Systems by Sigmundur Pall Freysteinsson

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.

Another Emergency Staff Meeting: Artistic Responses to Instabilities in the Art School

Ian Brown

Hugarflug annual conference on artistic research

11. - 12. September 2025

Iceland University of the Arts

This research draws upon the experience of three art school lecturers who together work as Common Culture. All have witnessed the transformation of the art school from a relatively free educational space for creative exploration and experimentation into a highly structured provision, centred on a commercial transaction between the student-client and institution.

In response, Common Culture have developed a series of narratives, set within a fictional art school, based on their collective experience. This has been developed into a comic/graphic novel for publication.

The presentation will include the delivery of a paper preceded by a new video work ‘Emergency Staff Meeting’ developed from the visual form of the comic/graphic novel, utilising AI generated imagery.

Akin to the fermentation of gossip in workplace corridors, ‘Rumours’, a series of short ‘Infomercial’ videos that purport to present University news updates.

Ian Brown
Professor of Fine Art, University of Staffordshire, UK.

The artist group, Common Culture, is David Campbell, Mark Durden and Ian Brown. Common Culture explores how contemporary social identity is constructed through the rituals of consumption within popular culture and investigate how venerated and vernacular cultural forms are unequivocally bound up with issues of taste, class and notions of national identity.

They have exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally, including solo exhibitions in Athens, Berlin, Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Derry, Derby, Lisbon, London, Manchester, Miami, New York, Nottingham and Porto. Major group exhibitions include: The Laughable Enigma of Ordinary Life, Arquipélago, Centro de Artes Contemporâneas in São Miguel, the Azores, Portugal; Double Act: Art & Comedy, Bluecoat, Liverpool & MAC, Belfast; Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain; The Bienal Cerveira, Portugal; Grin & Bear It – Cruel Humour in Art and Life, The Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork; The 6th Shanghai Biennale; Shopping – A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, Tate Liverpool.

Friday, 12. september, 2025 - 10:30 - 12:00

3x20 min Presentation + 3x10 min Discussion

Moderator: Una Þorleifsdóttir

Room: E331

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