Thematic Working Groups 2026-2027

Measuring a nation wants to assemble a group to work upon exploring possibilities in the modalities and contents for the production of a documentary about natural and political borders, considering temporality, measurement methods, cartography and geopolitics at a center of a fragile environment, the one of the Alpine Arc, where different laws rules and nature is redrawing the map: melting glaciers, watersheds and landslides, disappearing physical markers and eco-systems, including ice-cores that tell us so much about the climatological past.

Organon is a NAVET TWG dedicated to investigating the boundaries of organology — the study and classification of musical instruments. By focusing on liminal instruments that resist classification, we want to challenge rigid, technoscientific frameworks to classify musical instruments. Our work will focus on instruments at different stages: from their design and fabrication to composition and their meeting with performers and audiences. By using these undefinable instruments as case studies, we move beyond the digital/acoustic binary toward alternative organologies with porous categories. Our goal is to develop situated, open-ended frameworks that reveal how instruments store and produce knowledge.

The working group will gather and investigate the various sonic and electroacoustic practices that are present within the NAVET partner universities. Using a transdisciplinary approach, we further aim to reach out to the wider community of artists and makers within the Stockholm area. The primary collaborators will be KMH, KTH and Konstfack, where the three principal investigators will form a core group.

We will share knowledge and search for common topics and curiosities through a series of workshops and lecture performances that join the concerned groups in sharing and critical discussion. Furthermore, we will analyze the gathered material and find possible avenues for research, extracting and shaping research questions from the experience of the workshops with the goal to write one or more funding applications in order to strengthen the research environment for sonic practices within the NAVET community.

The Critical AI + Arts Thematic Working Group is bringing together researchers and practitioners across NAVET partner institutions currently working in improvisation, music, sonic interaction design, sound art, video art, virtual and extended reality, experimental design, computer science, and artistic research, among others. While our practices vary, each participating researcher is deeply engaged in transdisciplinary approaches, a quality that we all share, thus enabling the foundation for a critical inquiry whose aim is not only to enable exchange across fields but to examine the very notion of discipline in the context of contemporary artificial intelligence. The going from transdisciplinarity to multimodality as framed by current AI systems sprouts from the awareness that, as these models learn across text, image, sound, code, and gesture, making evident that we also need to redefine the conceptual and practical terrain traditionally occupied by distinct creative fields. Rather than approaching multimodality simply as a technical feature, we treat it as an epistemic shift that challenges existing forms of knowledge-making within art, design, and computation starting with transdisciplinarity itself. In this way, the group will focus on the implications of AI technologies, particularly generative models, for artistic, design, and technological practices simultaneously.