Frontiers of the Imaginable: BICA’s Research Imperative
Research at Berlin International College of Art (BICA) is the quiet thunder beneath our creative storms—a deliberate pursuit of knowledge that doesn’t merely document the world but dares to redraw its contours. In a city where the scars of division now host hackathons and biennales, we position inquiry as activism: probing the intersections of art, technology, and society to unearth solutions that are as poetic as they are practical. Our ethos? Rigorous yet rebellious, collaborative yet contemplative. With €2.5 million in annual funding from DFG grants, EU Horizon programmes, and private patrons like the Goethe-Institut, we support 150+ projects yearly, blending high school inquiries with PhD profundities. It’s not sterile scholarship; it’s the alchemist’s lab, where a student’s query on biodegradable inks might ferment into a global patent, imperfections in experimentation yielding the gold of insight.
We embrace ‘artistic research’—a slippery, vital beast that defies metrics, validated through peer-reviewed exhibitions, open-access journals, and public interventions rather than footnotes alone. Faculty and students co-author outputs, from immersive VR ethnographies to policy briefs on digital commons, ensuring knowledge circulates like Berlin’s underground beats: accessible, infectious, transformative. Amidst this, we own our frailties—the stalled collaborations that teach diplomacy, the grant rejections that sharpen proposals—reminders that discovery dances on the edge of doubt.
Core Research Themes: Threads of Inquiry
Our endeavours cluster around five pillars, each a nexus of disciplinary defiance:
Digital Ecologies: Exploring human-AI symbiosis, this theme dissects how algorithms curate culture. Projects like ‘Neural Narratives’ train models on Berlin’s migrant archives to generate counterfactual histories, exhibited at transmediale. High schoolers contribute citizen-science apps mapping data biases in urban planning.
Material Revolutions: Championing post-anthropocentric design, we innovate with bio-engineered composites—fungi-based leathers from Spree-sourced mycelium. PhD theses model their lifecycle via agent-based simulations, influencing EU circular economy directives. Undergrad labs prototype ‘living’ installations that respire CO2, critiquing extractivism.
Cultural Cartographies: Mapping power through visuals, initiatives remap Berlin’s colonial ghosts via participatory GIS art. MA students co-create with Neukölln communities, yielding interactive maps for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, blending ethnography with glitch aesthetics.
Economic Imaginaries: Interrogating value in creative sectors, we econometricise ‘affective labour’ in gig platforms. Collaborations with Berlin Economics yield dashboards forecasting art market volatilities, empowering freelancers with predictive tools.
Speculative Sustainabilities: Futuring green transitions, this strand simulates socio-technical scenarios—e.g., blockchain for equitable carbon credits. Outputs feed UN climate forums, with student-led hackathons prototyping resilient infrastructures inspired by Potsdamer Platz’s rebirth.
Research Hubs: Incubators of Innovation
BICA’s infrastructure pulses with purpose. The Centre for Computational Creativity (CCC), a 2,000 sqm hive in our Charlottenburg wing, equips with GPU clusters and haptic suites for probing perceptual computing. Here, interdisciplinary pods—coders, sculptors, economists—coalesce on grants like the VW Foundation’s ‘Digital Transformation’ call, birthing tools like an open-source GAN for ethical image synthesis.
The Sustainable Materials Atelier (SMA) ferments futures in vats of algal inks and recycled textiles, partnering with TU Berlin’s materials scientists. Outputs: peer-reviewed papers in ACS Sustainable Chemistry, plus pop-up labs in Tempelhof Field where publics co-design waste-derived wearables.
Global Dialogues Forum (GDF) hosts quarterly symposia, virtual and visceral, convening voices from Lagos to Lima on decolonial tech. PhD fellows curate, their dissertations evolving into monographs with Sternberg Press—e.g., ‘Pixels of Protest: Street Art in the Algorithmic Age’.
High school integration? Our Junior Research Collective seeds micro-projects: teens analyse Instagram’s aesthetic filters through critical lenses, presenting at youth TEDxBerliner sessions. It’s scaled serendipity: a 16-year-old’s query on emoji equity sparking faculty-wide ethics workshops.
Funding and Fellowships: Fuel for the Fire
Sustainability demands strategy. We navigate DFG’s excellence clusters, securing clusters like ‘ArtTech Berlin’ (€1.2m over three years) for AI-art hybrids. EU Marie Curie fellowships lure international postdocs, while internal seed grants (€5,000-20,000) nurture nascent ideas—say, a VR simulation of Bauhaus pedagogy for remote learners.
Our Ethical Review Board, comprising artists, ethicists, and alumni, vets proposals for inclusivity, vetoing extractive methodologies. PhD stipends (€2,200/month) include travel for fieldworks—from Siberian permafrost art residencies to Dakar design fairs. We track impact not in citations alone but in ripples: a thesis influencing Berlin’s Smart City blueprint, or a prototype adopted by refugee aid NGOs.
Outputs and Impact: Echoes in the World
Dissemination is democratic. BICA Press publishes hybrid tomes—print editions with QR-linked AR supplements—distributing 5,000 copies annually. Journals like our Berlin Art-Tech Review (open-access, Scopus-indexed) amplify voices, with 2024’s special issue on ‘Post-Pandemic Performativity’ garnering 10,000 downloads.
Exhibitions electrify: annual ‘Research Unfolded’ at Kraftwerk Berlin showcases 50+ works, from sonic sculptures decoding migration data to policy games on cultural funding. Alumni loops sustain: a 2018 PhD grad’s startup, BioWeave, now scales mycelium fabrics globally, crediting BICA’s labs.
Collaborations cascade: with ZKM Karlsruhe on media archaeology, or the British Council’s ‘Creative Futures’ for UK-German exchanges. We measure not triumphs alone but the tender tensions—the cross-cultural misfires that birth deeper understandings. In BICA’s research realm, inquiry isn’t endpoint but invitation: to question, to queer, to quilt the world’s unfinished fabrics into futures fiercely our own.