This seminar explores artistic practice not as the production of static objects but as the unfolding of dynamic, time-based processes. At its core lies the proposition that art is fundamentally a practice of becoming rather than being—a continuous process of emergence in which ideas, materials, technologies, environments, and human actors co-produce forms that cannot be fully predicted or predetermined.

Drawing on contemporary philosophy, Science and Technology Studies (STS), Actor-Network Theory (ANT), New Materialism, and the process philosophies of thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the seminar examines how artistic, cultural, and technological systems emerge through the ongoing interactions of heterogeneous human and non-human actors. Rather than understanding systems as bounded entities separated from an external environment, participants will investigate networks of relations in which agency is distributed across people, objects, materials, technologies, infrastructures, institutions, and environments.

Central to the seminar is the concept of emergence: the idea that complex forms, meanings, and events arise through interaction and cannot be reduced to the intentions of individual actors or the properties of isolated components. Artistic practice is therefore approached as an open-ended process in which outcomes are continuously negotiated, transformed, and reconfigured in real time.

The seminar introduces students to a range of conceptual and methodological approaches for engaging with process-oriented systems, including speculative thinking, systems mapping, actor-network analysis, and process-based artistic methodologies. Through theoretical discussion and critical analysis, participants will investigate how artworks, technologies, and social formations evolve as dynamic ecologies rather than fixed structures.

Literature:

Jane Bennett — Vibrant Matter (2010)

Erin Manning — Relationscapes (2009)

Manuel DeLanda — A New Philosophy of Society (2006)

Bruno Latour — Reassembling the Social (2005)

Isabelle Stengers — Thinking with Whitehead (2002)

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari — A Thousand Plateaus (1980)

Alfred North Whitehead — Process and Reality (1929)

Compulsary participation!