Art has the potential to create strong connections through experiences, activities and creative processes that require presence, openness, and exploration of the unknown. Aesthetic experiences and expressions can challenge our usual ways of thinking and give us new perspectives on the world, ourselves, and our values.
The social challenge the lab focuses on is the distance seen in increased polarisation, loss of nature and increasing loneliness. The aim is to meet this challenge by creating settings where meaningful exchange, understanding and presence are achieved through artistic projects and processes.
The lab will be a hub where different sectors and actors, such as researchers, artists, musicians, citizens, students, and regional partners, can collaborate to create and develop things together. This will be achieved through, for example, co-creation projects, workshops, think tanks and artistic productions and more. In this way, the lab will act as a catalyst for positive change and deeper understanding in society.
What does Art & Aesthetics in Contemporary Society mean?
The lab's name consists of three main terms: Art, aesthetics, and contemporary society.
The concept of art involves all artistic expressions, such as music, theatre, visual art, literature, film and more. The concept of aesthetics involves everything we shape into something beautiful and expressive and can involve what is not normally considered in the concept of art, but which is nonetheless close. Examples can be design, architecture, urban spaces, computer games, clothes, and more. Contemporary society does not mean that there is only room for contemporary art, but that what will be interesting will be how artistic expressions are experienced, contextualized and move us today.
Which social challenges does the lab want to address?
How can we exist together through the arts in an increasingly globalised contemporary society? How does engaging with art respond to the challenges of being human today? How does art channel our imagination, create new connections and open the doors to imaginary worlds that do not yet exist?
"No one sets their own house on fire," my colleague tells me. We are sitting on a bus trip to Lindesnes as she explains about a collaborative project in a large Norwegian city where a warehouse-based industrial area will be turned into an urban area with homes and good public spaces. The municipality, various agencies and actors from design and architecture have engaged several artists and artist groups, who will explore the citizens' self-understanding and role in urban development. Instead of the artists entering the process late to decorate finished buildings, they are involved from the start as visionary thinkers. The place identity and voice of the local young people become involved in the development of the area through an artistic perspective that makes the development of the area sensuously accessible to the participants. "So incredibly exciting!", I reply and think that this is exactly what we want to achieve with the new FORTHEM lab.
The societal challenge that the Art & Aesthetics in Contemporary Society lab has defined is very open, but deals with a distance: increased polarization, ecological breakdown and loss of nature and decline in social arenas. Central to this is time, place, and manner of being together. In relation to ourselves, others, and our surroundings. Overall, the lab wants to contribute to creating new arenas for meaningful exchange through art and aesthetics in contemporary society.
New arenas for meaningful exchange mean to enable people to interact through and with artistic forms, as joint music-making, co-creating visual art, collaborating on local theatre productions, writing stories, and exploring together. Arenas are the shared space and time for this to take place. It could be an afternoon art-workshop for young families at the local library, an event for the homeless at the city centre, a regular choir-rehearsal for people with dementia or a collaboration project between a nature manager, a professional visual artist and youth at the risk of marginalization. In our lab we’re creating a playground for these ideas to flourish, by bringing together experts from different fields and sectors.
Art & Aesthetics in Contemporary Society Lab aims to create new arenas for meaningful exchange through art and aesthetic approaches in society.
The lab wants to shed light on the following societal challenges:
- Increased polarisation and absence of a public conversation
- Collapse of ecosystems and sustainability
- The change in social arenas, loneliness, and mental health
What is the Lab's core values?
The core values of the lab are to:
- Promote artistic integrity and autonomy
- Liberate and empower individuals and communities through artistic practices
- enhance dialogue, listening and collaboration
The inner contradiction between point 1 and points 2 & 3 creates dynamism and tension.
Creating art is in fact a ritual that is uniquely human, and our ability to imagine new ideas and to shape them with materials, strings, fabric, words, and colours has proved a key factor in our species evolution. The individual expression of an ancient cave painting, the transformative power of a fearless feat of acting, and the seeming banality of singing and dancing together demonstrate activities that are not useful but important.
This sense of meaning can shake our perspective on our surroundings, our relationships, and priorities. Joint music-making can be seen as an embodiment of human co-existence at its best; It requires to be-in-dialogue, with your fellow-musicians, your surroundings, your consciousness, and body. It also requires the gut to own your own voice and to make initiatives and expressions.
The societal challenges that shape our contemporary society, the polarisation, the ecological breakdown, and the rising individual isolation can be describes as an issue of not being-in-dialogue. A distance between humans, ourselves, and our environment.
Art and Aesthetics cannot alone solve these major challenges, but humans certainly can.
Supplementary competence teams
To be successful, the lab requires a team from different fields of expertise that complement each other.
The lab welcomes participants from all fields of study who are curious about art and aesthetics in contemporary society. Preliminary ideas for fields of interest for the work are:
- Community arts
- Political science
- Social psychology
- Ecology and environmental management
- Health and technology
- Education
- Sociology
- Aesthetics
- Architecture and urban development
- Music
- Visual art
- Art theory
- Theatre
- Literature
- Film
- Other
The lab is a meeting point where academic staff or fellows find common interests that can result in scientific publications, anthologies, handbooks, magazines or research projects. Access to each other's networks generally provides greater opportunities for data collection, co-writing, publishing and professional development.
Who are the various partners and players you will be working with?
The Art & Aesthetics in Contemporary Society Lab not only aims to establish an inter-university collaboration between the different universities in the alliance, but it also aims for an interdisciplinary approach that involves collaboration with associated partners and other external experts. These can be various players in the region, the municipality, public and private actors both in Kristiansand, Agder, Norway and in the EU/EEA.
Furthermore, the Art & Aesthetics in Contemporary Society Lab intends to involve students and PhD candidates.
More information about partners to come.
What is a project in this context?
Provisional project categories are:
- Student-centred projects: art for, with and by students
- Human-centred projects: art for, with and by people in the marginal zone of exclusion
- Partner-centred projects: art, health, and education
- Sustainability-centred projects: art with and in nature
- Artwork-centred projects: the investigation of the connection between society and cultural expression
- Place-centred projects: art in urban or rural areas
Projects can have a process-centred focus instead of a work-centred focus and will be excellent arenas for transferring and negotiating ideas about art and aesthetics between university and society.
What should the lab result in?
Each lab must deliver at least the following results during the 2023-2026 period.
- A student-run project each year
- An ambitious co-creation project by 2026, initiated by an external partner.
- Significant contribution and collaboration with activities together with another FORTHEM venture
In the Art & Aesthetics in Contemporary Society lab, there will be many different opportunities to realise these results.
What financing options are there?
There are various funding opportunities in FORTHEM and in Erasmus+. Contact us and we can discuss what is possible for your project.
What should the lab result in?
The Lab Art & Aesthetics in Contemporary Society was created in 2023. We are therefore in an initial phase of lab and which projects we will work on. We would like to work with you, so please contact us.
Efforts and results will be published here.
Contact
- marius.l.igland@uia.no
- Phone
- +47 38 14 22 95
- linn.eriksen@uia.no
- Phone
- +47 38 14 20 46