Research Catalogue

A moving image essay in three parts.

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 these works I have explored how I can relate to my environment through my daily practices of teaching, eating, animating etc. I begun the project by improvising lectures for various audiences I wanted to have input from. I have lectured to all possible enteties in the ecosystem I am a part of, from blueberries to colleagues to films. Every time something new continues to take shape. The exposition include essays, paintings and animations.

The project is a semi-graphic notification of the artist/author’s initiatives to stretch fiction – so-termed analogous to the stretcher component of an umbrella – in his language-based and visual practice. The referenced time-frame is from 2014 through 2025. The contention is that if one considers oneself as subject within one’s work, amidst whatever the work's more objective concerns, then it is a fairly obvious next step to third-person oneself – in the sense that a writer such as Fernando Pessoa invented heteronyms. While in visual practice such a prospect is, arguably, more difficult to articulate, a fictional element instilled in art- or other academic writing already has certain precedents in more experimental writing in the latter fields. If, as in the artist/author’s case, such writing is an adjunct to one’s visual practice, then a fictional characterisation of oneself as another can comment on and variously inhabit one’s visual work. Unlike how characters often populate fiction, however, the artist/author’s strategy is to only partly develop them, hence having them oscillate as, themselves, a question of relevance.

This project explores the cultural disappearance of Czech railway station pubs—once vibrant, affordable communal spaces where different layers of society met. As gentrification and modernization erase these places, the project treats them as social relics: through photography, objects, gestures, and staged re-enactments, it asks what is lost when shared public rituals fade. The research approaches the railway pub as a vanishing cultural microcosm. The aim is not only to document, but to interrogate the meaning of these spaces for both national identity and personal memory.

This exposition is part of the series The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators inhabit hybrid identities at the intersection of composition, performance, production, and technology. This interview features Rafiq Bhatia, American guitarist, composer, and producer, and member of the experimental trio Son Lux. Bhatia’s work dissolves the boundaries between jazz, electronic, and contemporary classical music, exploring sound as a sculptural and spatial material. His practice embodies a deep integration of composition, production, and performance—where the studio becomes an instrument, and the act of shaping sound is inseparable from the act of composing. In the conversation, Bhatia reflects on the interdependence between the roles of composer, performer, and producer, on the DAW as a generative and compositional environment, and on the emergence of sonic identity through timbre, space, and texture. He discusses collaboration within Son Lux, his process of scoring for film, and the relationship between abstraction and precision in communicating musical ideas to orchestras and ensembles. Bhatia’s reflections reveal an artistic vision in which technology and human expression coexist symbiotically: music as a living, evolving ecosystem of gestures, resonances, and spaces—an art of listening, translation, and transformation.