Symposium-Festival of Artistic Research: ARTikulationen 2026, 6–8 October 2026, ‘Metaphors in Practice’
The University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Centre for Artistic Research (CEAR), invites you to its this years symposion: Metaphors in Practice. Asking how the entanglement of musical and scholarly terminology shapes artistic research. To call a score a map, a sound a trace, or a performance a negotiation can change the behaviour of everyone involved — metaphor can become a practical instruction. The symposium considers metaphor not only as something to be analysed, but as a catalyst for creativity: something to be heard, experimented with, and tested for how it shapes the field. It features a keynote by Nina Sun Eidsheim(UCLA), “The ‘Matterphor’ of Musicking”, with presentations by Irena Müller-Brozović (Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität Linz), Basak Senova (University of Applied Arts Vienna), Dániel Péter Biró (Grieg Academy Bergen), Tiziano Manca (HSLU Lucerne / Orpheus Instituut Ghent), and Alexander Khalil (University College Cork). Two panels bring these questions into open discussion. Further guests join online as external advisors: Lucia D’Errico (Gustav Mahler Privatuniversität für Musik, Klagenfurt), Simone Mahrenholz (University of Manitoba), Sarah Nemtsov (Universität Mozarteum Salzburg), and Jennifer Torrence (Norwegian Academy of Music).
Conference dates: 6.–8. October, Graz
Artistic Identity in Research Projects
The symposium offers a platform for visions of artistic research and its possible definitions, methods and forms of transfer and transmission. At the heart of this research lies artistic practice itself: as an object, as a source of central questions and as the initiator of new insights and knowledge.
Time and Place: 08.–10.10.2026, University of Music Karlsruhe
Symposium: How to Live Together in Sound? Towards Sonic Democracy
We all communicate through sound and contribute in different ways to constituting and sustaining more-than-human communities in the aural domain. We condition and shape our common life-worlds through the performance of our aural and sonic actions: hearing and listening, as well as producing, processing, and distributing sounds. We outline different forms of otherness and commonalities by mobilizing sonic agencies in encounters that unfold, at least partially, in the aural medium. As artistic research practitioners we provide new evidence of all these complex and intertwined processes by expanding and enhancing our sonic attention and awareness. We thereby disclose new possibilities of understanding different shapes and ways of individual and collective aural being-in-the-world.
Conference Dates: 12.–14.10.2026, Helsinki Music Centre
Performativity(ies) of Memory(ies) Interdisciplinary Conference
The conference aims to address the role of memory in contemporary creation by discussing:
– the process of creation and its relationship to memory work;
– memory as a territory under construction (bodies, texts, sounds, images, narratives) through artistic research; and
– the politics of memory in today’s societies and new forms of creation.
Time and Place: 22.–23.10.2026, School of Education, Polytechnic Institute of Viana do Castelo, Portugal
HUB Open Call #8: Varia
HUB - Journal in Art, Design and Society is a peer-reviewed and open-access research journal for reporting on arts, design, and performing arts. Dedicated to an open-themed research, VARIA provides a space for diverse subjects, methodologies, and forms of artistic inquiry, reflecting the plurality of contemporary research practices. The journal is looking for work that pushes the boundaries of art and design research, whether through the questions it asks, the methods it employs, or the issues it brings into focus.
Deadline: 30.10.2026
Planned Publication: 05.2027
Orpheus Instituut: Bodies as Transducers
Artistic research operates at the intersection of bodies, materials, and concepts. From this perspective, musical performance appears as an intense transductive process through which energy, information, and materialities undergo continuous transformation. Musical objects emerge not so much as reproduction of fixed works, but as dynamic concatenations of infinite “musical particles”—micro-events of ongoing individuation where affective, material, and conceptual forces momentarily converge, only to dissolve and reconfigure elsewhere. For performers, each particle marks a threshold where muscular, sensory, and imaginative energies convert into sonic form; for composers, these particles constitute generative diagrams that invite further differentiation. Drawing on Simondon’s concept of transduction, Deleuze and Guattari’s multiplicities, and Paulo de Assis’s differential ontology of music and the notion of performative transductions, this conference examines how performance functions as a field of energetic reconfiguration where the body acts as the central transductive force and bodies, instruments, notations, and concepts mutually transform one another.
Conference Dates: 05.11.–06.11.2026
5th International AIE Conference
The AIE Conference is a platform for exploring artistic practice as a mode of research, where creation, reflection, and education converge across disciplines. We welcome both conventional academic formats and non-traditional modes of presentation and encourage proposals that critically engage the intersection of art, research, and education. We are thrilled to announce that Michael League and Daniel Canogar will join us as keynote speakers in the upcoming edition of the AIE Conference.
Time and Place: 18–20 November 2026, Madrid (in-person and online)
Call for Contributions: FORUM+ New Dossier Launch
FORUM+, an international peer-reviewed journal for research in the arts, is looking for English and Dutch contributions for the new dossier “Solidarity as a form of imagination. Artistic research between the personal, the political, and the communal”.
Deadline: 15 January 2027