We never create alone. Like a musical jam session or a multi-ingredient soup, workshopology is the collective process of being amateurs together, creating spaces and temporalities where knowledge unfolds through experimentation, interdisciplinarity, and negotiations across pluriversal visions. As with other artistic forms such as painting or sculpture, workshopology is a legitimate medium that can be cultivated over time. It opens artistic research into a participatory practice of world-making, where creation becomes a shared process rather than an individual act. The term originates in the open-source bio-art scene, where knowledge is shared non-hierarchically, authority is distributed, and process is valued above predetermined outcomes. More poetically said, workshopology is where we learn what works and doesn’t work under an ethos of love and care. 

“Workshopology and Earthly Engagements” grounds this practice in the recognition that we are beings of the earth and enmeshed in its political ecologies. Throughout the course, we will explore how workshop-based methods can respond to contemporary conditions of alienation, erasure, scarcity, and uncertainty. How can we design workshopologies that operate on multi-being and multi-relational levels? How can participatory structures nurture attunement, repair, or new modes of collective being?

This course meets Mondays 13-15h in the seminar room at Paulusplatz 5 / 2nd floor, 1030 Vienna. Over the semester, students will develop and test their own workshopologies and participate in the workshopologies of their classmates. Because the course depends on process, presence, and shared learning, full attendance is essential. 

This course is especially suited for students working with collective, ecological, participatory, somatic or hands-on research methods.

To register, please send a short proposal of your workshopology along with your current portfolio to mary.maggic@uni-ak.ac.at by Thursday, 5 March 2026, 23:59 CET. Accepted applicants will be notified by Friday, 6 March, and are expected to attend the first class on Monday, 9 March at 13:00. A maximum of ten students will be enrolled.