Research Manifesto

Making Other Kinds of Futures

• ArtEZ professorships dream of Other possible futures, and stimulate, initiate and conduct research through arts and design to (re)imagine, create and contribute to inclusive and resilient future societies.
• In their exploration of Other kinds of futures ArtEZ professorships create spaces where diverse voices can be expressed and heard, and where being in the periphery (in an intellectual, physical, socio-cultural and geographical sense) may become an empowering position.
• Encouraged by critical theory, diverse thinking and making, and by being aware of the intersectional position of individuals, ArtEZ professorships think and act differently in scientific and societal debates about urgent challenges in society by always being open to connecting to others, and making room for the other, always in the process of becoming-Other.
• ArtEZ professorships have the task to ask and reframe tough questions, by confronting, provoking and rethinking the current state of the world.
• ArtEZ professorships create alternative concepts, intersectional spaces and sensory experience for other futures.

Performative Speculations of Future Making

• ArtEZ professorships are challenged to think, explore, reflect, speculate, feel, self-reflect, dream, envision, create and make – all at the same time.
• ArtEZ professorships have the responsibility to bring not only the probable but above all preferable futures to the now by ‘doing’ art and design theory and research in a multi-dimensional way and by performatively constitute future bodies, future spaces, future materials, and future makers.
• ArtEZ professorships are not willing to solve problems and to develop ready-made solutions, but they stimulate speculative value-based performative thinking and doing driven by fundamental questions related to societal, economic, political, environmental or scientific challenges. Their way of thinking and doing can create chaos and confusion by unexpected experiments, radically different future visions and creative interventions. They mobilize the seemingly immobile, and imagine and create the seemingly unimaginable – a permanent flow of new and diverse thinking.
• ArtEZ professorships use therefore known and unknown artistic, design and scientific research methods that are well documented and transparent.

Resilience for a (Post)Human world

• ArtEZ professorships challenge the dominant anthropocentric world view, and believe that new (digital) technologies and mimicking ecosystems from nature will become – and already is – our post-human condition.
• ArtEZ professorships use technologies as a making practice and part of the human nature and strongly linked to ecosystems in nature. There is no opposition between humans and technologies – it is a continuum of (living) matter. Art matters, design matters, bodies matter, humans matter, new technologies matter – and all have the material agency to help build resilient and regenerative futures, environments and societies. Our post-human nature is no idée fixe, but we will take collective responsibility for the repercussions and consequences caused by human actions.
• ArtEZ professorships highlight the ethical role of art and design by critical thinking and making to consider revision and urgently create a more resilient and sustainable future nature of human existence.

Politics of care-making

• ArtEZ professorships propagate cooperative models and alternative progressive systems to collectively create mutually nourishing relationships between the human beings that we work and live with in order to realize our shared visions. They create, change and reinvent ecosystems of people who share or challenge their passion, values and commitment to address specific research themes and/or societal challenges. Within these ecosystems, everyone can share one’s expertise to contribute. Everyone is shareholder and has common interests and responsibilities.
• ArtEZ professorships encourage shared impact by nurturing long term and durable relationships and the development of open source knowledge.
• ArtEZ professorships think, research, make and act cooperatively by inviting the Other – all possible stakeholders and Otherwise – to create diverse, equitable and resilient futures.