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

Camlot RC for PP

RC welcome audio file

An RC adaptation of the project as presented at the Hugarflug conference, Reykjavik 2025. The presentation takes its point of departure in a photographic artistic research project that moves within the queer borderlands between drag and wrestling – two performative expressions that, through eccentric personas, embodied gestures, and DIY culture, destabilise notions of sex, gender, and sexuality. I approach these practices as arenas of performativity, where the hypermasculine and the hyperfeminine are not positioned in opposition, but meet in mutual tension and unstable, embodied renegotiation. Through photography, in reciprocal movement with essayistic writing, I explore images of identity in motion. The presentation is part of a diffractive methodology, where photographs neither illustrate nor represent, but emerge as entangled with fiction, memory, theory, and philosophy as components of a broader research apparatus. An unstable interplay emerges, where photography and language generate tacit knowledge – a possible, partial and situated enactment of how identity and the body are (re)presented and displaced. The project is diffractively grounded in the thinking of Barad, Butler, and Haraway on research apparatuses, performativity, and situated knowledge – with particular attention to the camera’s and photographer’s access to spaces where identity is performatively negotiated.