AVU Research Groups: Forming Fields
Join us for the official launch of the new AVU Research Groups programme dedicated to artistic and theoretical inquiry across a range of thematic areas.
- Date
- 15 December 2025
- Location
- AVU Veletržní – Veletržní 61, Praha 7
The AVU Research Groups are collaborative environments where researchers can work together on shared thematic interests and concerns in a systematic and long-term way. The groups connect perspectives from the arts and humanities as well as social and natural sciences, often extending beyond AVU to include partners from diverse local and international institutions. While the programme primarily supports doctoral research, all groups are open to AVU faculty, students, and external collaborators.
The Research Groups programme will be officially launched on 15 December at Research Groups: Forming Fields, a public event held at AVU Veletržní. The launch will introduce the overall Research Groups structure and the individual thematic groups established so far, as well as a collateral performative programme presented by guest artists and researchers affiliated with the existing groups. Entry is free and everyone is warmly welcome.
Research Groups: Forming Fields – Event Schedule
Introduction of the programme (in both Czech and English language).
Short presentations by group leads:*
Emergent Technologies group – by John Hill
Alien Languages group – by Irina Gheorghe
AVU History – by Pavlína Morganová
Spaces of Discontent – by Hana Janečková
Fluid Identities, Liquid Bodies – by Darina Alster
Multispecies Ecologies & Practices – by Markéta Dolejšová & Tamara Spalajković
Food & drinks provided.
Performative presentations by artists (&) researchers affiliated with individual research groups. The programme features a performative lecture by Danielle Wilde (Multispecies Ecologies & Practices group), a participatory experiment by John Hill & Enrique Encinas (Emergent Technologies group), a conversation between Irina Gheorghe, Ben Woodard, and Ștefan Tiron (Alien Languages group), and a sound performance by Kavkaz Widow (Fluid Identities, Liquid Bodies group).
This performative lecture invites AVU researchers to consider how research can emerge from everyday encounters with more-than-human life. Drawing on work in the Gulf of Bothnia—where seals, microbes, algae, fishers, and regulators co-shape coastal futures—it explores how food can operate as both method and mediator in multispecies inquiries.
Using edible artefacts such as a placenta cake and other off-centre ingredients, the session examines how aesthetic and moral tensions become tangible when tasted rather than merely discussed. These dishes act as small portals into larger questions: Who participates in shaping the futures we imagine? Whose needs and desires—human or otherwise—are centred? And what happens when research begins not with representation but with sensory, embodied encounter?
The keynote demonstrates how artistic researchers can use food to sense multispecies relations, unsettle familiar moral frames, construct unsettling sensory data representations, and co-create “new-old” futures rooted in shared ecological entanglements.
In this performative session, we will explore what "emergent technologies" mean from the situated perspectives of attendees to Forming Fields. Drawing on the double sense of casting (as sculptural modelling and as magical summoning), Enrique Encinas will first introduce AI prompting as a collective inquiry practice. We will then discuss and finally co-create a shared AI deep research prompt around the question: what is emergent technology for you, and what would you like to know about it? This session will end by running the prompt in openAI’s latest model to produce raw material for the group's first newsletter.
The history of attempted investigation of, and communication with a hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligence is marked by the inaccessibility of the object of study, and the absence of a response. Astronomer and astrophysicist Peter Ulmschneider argues that the gap between the empirical image we have of intelligent life on Earth and the form that an extraterrestrial form of life would take is so significant that the faculty of imagination could not overcome it. Any language project aimed at communicating with such an entity must reconcile with the unresolved character of the enterprise: the message might never reach its destination, it might arrive too late, it might prove to be impossible to decode, or there might be nobody at the destination to even try deciphering it. The conversation will address the challenges of cosmic language projects, the role of abstraction in devising them, their relationship with verbal and nonverbal artistic vocabularies, and their possible enactment in space and time.
Following the launch, all groups established so far will open to new members. If you are interested in joining one or more of the groups, you will be invited to submit a short expression of interest (detailed onboarding guidelines will be provided at the launch event).AVU researchers (faculty) are also welcome to propose new Research Groups focusing on relevant thematic areas. Detailed information about the requirements for initiating a new group will be presented at the launch.More information about the Research Groups is available HERE.