Art & Science: Methods and Practices of Transdisciplinary Research


Lecturer: Martin Reinhart


Link to directory for Martin Reinhart's courses on Base.


Experimental Studies I–IV, SE, 2 SH, 4 ECTS
Methods of Sensing and Knowing, VO, 2 SH, 2 ECTS
Transdisciplinary Expeditions I, VU, 3 SH, 3 ECTS
Perspectives from Science and Art, VO, 2 SH, 2 ECTS
Transdisciplinary Expeditions II, VU, 2 SH, 4 ECTS

By drawing from the diverse academic backgrounds of the master students, this forum tries to create a deeper understanding of current and historic developments in the interconnected fields of Art, Science and Technology. It empowers the students to question existing order and to understand their own world, culture and history as human-made and changeable. It provides them with the knowledge to change, expand and counteract given worldviews and norms with the means of art and technology. This of course applies equally to practical artistic work as well as to the discussion within the framework of artistic research. Nevertheless, this kind of self-empowerment should always be more than just another strategy of artistic productivity and point beyond the desire for individual independence. It should allow a more fundamental and productive critique of the established systems and, in so doing, enable openness to the unknown and to ‘the other.’


Lecturer: Noor Stenfert Kroese


Link to directory for Noor Stenfert Kroese's courses on Base.


Collaborative Exhibition Making I/II, PA, 2 SH, 4 ECTS

Collaborative Exhibition Making is a bi-weekly, hands-on course in which first-year ArtScience Master students collectively develop the yearly group exhibition. Each year this exhibition takes place in collaboration with a gallery / museum in Vienna, inspired by the yearly topic. Students develops and shows their own artwork as part of the exhibition, while the exhibition itself is shaped by the whole group together. The course runs across two semesters, each with its own focus.

Collaborative Exhibition Making I (Winter Semester) focuses on developing the exhibition's concept. Testing early ideas with each other and giving each other feedback. Getting to know the space, and each other's concepts. You also look outward: visiting an existing exhibition, gathering outside references, and engaging with a curator working in the field of art & science. From this, the group works toward a shared curatorial concept and title, responding to that year's overarching theme, and organises into working groups toward the end of the semester.

Collaborative Exhibition Making II (Summer Semester) focuses on realising the exhibition. Among other things, you write your artist bio, artwork description, and technical rider, and take on responsibility within your working group; covering exhibition design and technical coordination, graphic design, communication, and the public programme around the exhibition. The semester builds toward setup, the exhibition run, and dismantling.


Art & Science Studio, SE, 2 SH, 4 ECTS

This bi-weekly course offers a shared space for 2+ year Art&Science students to stay connected and reflect on your work. It supports the ongoing development of each student's trajectory within the MA Art & Science by focusing on your questions, process dilemmas, shared learning, and dialogue across disciplines. Students can use the space to reflect on their work-in-progress / master project development, exchange with peers, or bring in topics they want to think through together.

The content and structure of the sessions are co-developed with the group, and may include thematic discussions, skill-sharing, or anything else you bring to the table. This also means sharing expertise, offering feedback, and proposing sessions based on your own current interests.

What could this be? Last year, we worked, for example, on in-depth feedback sessions on work-in-progress students bring to the table. Through this process, students not only receive feedback but also learn and practice a form of giving and receiving feedback, according to a methodology. We also looked into what it actually means to have your own "practice". What this so-called practice is, how it relates to your daily life, and how you can shape it?

Optional readings and input on the field of Art & Science are offered throughout.


Art & Science Forum, PA, 3 SH, 4 ECTS, optional

Art Science Forum is a practice-anchored course built around direct encounter with people currently working in the field of Art Science.

What is ArtScience?
It is a term that keeps resisting definition, no matter how often people try to pin it down.
We will certainly not settle what Art Science is.
The resistance to definition might even hold the very complexity of what the field is.
The many methods, ways of working, practices, thoughts, thinkers, and makers.

Across the semester, you meet a curator, an artist, a lab and an institute, each shaping the field differently. Through direct contact with their approaches, and through reflection and discussion with your peers, you explore your take on it.

In the first session, we will have a look at your own practice and interests, and at the guests you will meet this semester. From there, the format varies by session: you meet a curator and an artist in different formats, one as a talk and student-led Q&A, one as a hands-on workshop, take part in a full-day excursion to a lab and meet Austria's most well-known institute for Art Science and Society: Ars Electronica. The last session is shaped together with the group depending on your own interests.

This course is open to all students from Angewandte (recommended MA level). If you do not have an active art science practice (yet), but are interested in it, you're also welcome to join. The course is held in English.


Lecturer: Valerie Deifel

 

Link to directory for Valerie Deifel's courses on Base.


Art & Science Writing, SE, 2 SH, 4 ECTS

The aim of this course is to support you in the initial stages of writing your master thesis in the transdisciplinary Art & Science programme. Here, it is usually necessary to develop your own unique textual form to complement your artistic practice and chosen topic. Starting with the conceptualisation, the course will guide you through all the necessary steps to create a basic thesis outline by the middle of the semester. Throughout the course, we will discuss various academic writing tools and our own writing practices, building up to the submission of a first draft chapter for joint feedback towards the end of the semester. Teaching will combine theoretical input, group discussions, and exercises. You will also be given tasks to work on independently, and you will share your experiences with the other participants in the subsequent session. Active participation in the course should help you to get into the process of writing, and keep you on track while finalising your thesis according to your own timetable. Writing should become less stressful and more of an interesting place for experimentation.
 


Lecturer: Naoki Matsuyama


Link to directory for Naoki Matsuyama's courses on Base.


Making Knowledge: Science and Technology as Practice (Introduction to the Philosophy of Science), VU, 2 SH, 2 ECTS, winter semester

We all have an image of what science and technology are. These images have been shaped: by our education, by what we read, by our everyday interactions with them. That is to say these ideas are specific to the historical moment we live in. Science and technology are often seen as being based on facts, objective, or neutral. The goal of this course is to equip students with tools to rethink these widely held assumptions. Scientific knowledge and technological systems are, in fact, produced, stabilised, and contested in practice.

The course will focus on reading texts from the philosophy and history of science and science technology studies - from how facts stabilise in a laboratory to how infrastructures encode standards. But we will also learn methodologies scholars have used to investigate the makeup of science and technology - including interviews, ethnography, and mapping techniques.

There is no requirement for prior knowledge or experience of reading theoretical texts. I am, however, interested in what you bring to the class in terms of your experience, knowledge, and interests and how you connect those to the reading.

This is a mandatory course for first-year Art & Science students, but students can choose when to take the winter semester course (this course) and the summer semester course, which are designed to work together.


Making Knowledge Plural: Science and Technology in Perspective (Introduction to the Philosophy of Science), VU, 2 SH, 2 ECTS, summer semester

tba


Lecturer: Daniela Brill Estrada


Link to directory for Daniela Brill Estrada's courses on Base.


Expanded Nature Studies: Life in the Water, WSP, 1 SH, 1 ECTS, winter semester 2026/27, optional

This is a three-day workshop in which we will trace the history of the division of art and science as two different forms of understanding the world. We will study how humans have made sense of the world around them through their bodies and tools, and how they have invented technologies, disciplines, and taxonomies to organize and survive in this complex universe. On the second day of the workshop, we will visit the Haus des Meeres, where we will see how the division between art and science becomes apparent when viewing other species from a very human perspective: behind glass, in an environment built by humans and not by the planet. At the aquarium, we will observe the different forms of existence possible on this very watery planet while asking ourselves: How can aesthetic practices support ways of studying and understanding the world that are less hierarchical and exploitative, and more attentive to matter, bodies, relations, and different forms of existence? And why does this matter politically in a time marked by oppression, ecological collapse, and deep social division? In the practical part of the course, students are invited to develop their own artistic and research-based responses to these questions, using the course as a space to experiment with expanded ways of sensing and understanding the world.

Expanded Nature Studies: Life on Earth, VU, 2 SH, 3 ECTS, summer semester 2027, optional

tba


Lecturer: Peter Kozek


Link to directory for Peter Kozek's Art & Science course on Base.


Fundamentals of the Performative: Body as Method, SEK, 1 SH, 1 ECTS, winter semester 2026/27, optional

This one-hour course introduces students in the Art and Science department to key concepts of embodiment and explores how the body itself can be understood as a vehicle for cognition, expression and action. The starting point is the question of how performative strategies and frameworks expand and transform both artistic and scientific processes.

The focus is on fundamental concepts of performance and the performative, as well as initial practical and theoretical approaches to body-based practice. Students gain insights into how presence, movement and situational embodiment can function as independent forms of knowledge.

The course does not view the body as a medium in the service of a result, but as an active site of the production of meaning, experience and knowledge. This opens up fundamental perspectives for further performative and interdisciplinary work in the field of Art and Science.