Applications for the summer semester 2027: Faculty of Music, selected study programmes, 1–30 November 2026; Master's programme Integrated Design (Faculty of Art & Design), 1 December 2026 – 11 January 2027.
As the only art and music university in the BMBF funding line, the HfK explores our own diverse mobility needs, their practicable implementation and strategies for building acceptance for sustainable mobility in an application-oriented and practice-oriented manner as part of the process of self-transformation with the sharing project ‘Transformational Paths for Sustainable Universities’.
The project focusses on the development and testing of prototypes that arise from very specific needs in a solution-oriented manner. But we also respond to the needs of entire city districts in an exemplary way. Divided into three sub-projects, each of which is supervised by Prof. Alexander Sahoo, Prof. Andreas Kramer and Prof. Ingo Vetter, the project is dedicated to the design of special cargo bikes, innovative micro-mobility formats and –as part of an international cooperation with the Heritage Space in Hanoi – fundamental questions of mobility from an artistic perspective.
The HfK Bremen has been a founding member of the Network of Universities of Music since 2012, funded at the time by the Teaching Quality Pact of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Since August 2021, the Network 4.0 has been funded as a nationwide joint project with 18 universities of music in the programme ‘Strengthening university teaching through digitisation’ of the Foundation Innovation in University Teaching. The host university and network coordination centre is the Detmold University of Music. The network sees itself as a strategic alliance and works in eleven sub-projects to jointly develop the potential of digitalisation for studying and teaching at universities of music. The funding is initially limited until 31 July 2024.
The interdisciplinary exploration project ‘From analogue principles to digital practices’ aims to examine the two exemplary systems of architecture and fashion together for the first time in a synopsis. Both disciplines have experienced fundamental changes in their processes through digitalisation in the area of materials and tendencies towards the individualisation of body and spatial concepts. The project furthermore tests initial methodological and application-related approaches for the investigation of intelligent and automated interfaces between the two ‘worlds’ of the free, creative design process and individualised, automated digital production technology and aims to develop them for further applications based on materials research and AI.
How do digital interaction patterns change analogue spaces of experience? How do they influence social relationships, ethical judgments and collective processes of knowledge generation? How do digital structures hierarchise different forms of knowledge?
As part of the research project, performative-artistic settings are developed, carried out, analysed and documented in the sense of participatory experimental arrangements, which open up opportunities for collective and individual experience and reflection for audiences and researchers alike.
Through scientific theory formation and artistic practice, the project explores which alternatives to established visual codes and norms can be developed in order to shape and design – by means of an avant-garde culture of illustration and animation, comics and cartoons – the digital transformation between 2D and 3D, from hand drawing to moving images and augmented reality, such as experiments in virtual space, to be able to design them methodically and practically.
Impulses for research projects
Project leader: Dr. Cornelia Lund Short title: Digitisation in documentary moving images
The project is a preparatory step for a DFG application for a grant/individual project on ‘Documentary work in audiovisual live performances’ (working title). On the one hand, it is intended to serve the content-related and methodological work in order to develop a viable research design. On the other hand, it aims to support the establishment and consolidation of an international network for discursive exchange on the ‘Effects of digitalisation on documentary work in moving images’. Documentary moving images are a central instrument for analysing history and the relationship between the individual and society. The possibilities of digital work have changed the circumstances of production and reception and expanded the linear formats of documentary work established in analogue film, e.g. with non-linear, transmedia or real-time formats. The changed media environment, in which documentary images have become almost ubiquitous, is leading to a changed approach to content, which in turn ultimately has an impact on questions of the individual and society, as the current debates about fake news, alternative facts and the post-truth society show. Documentary works at the interface of cinema and art contexts counter this crisis of credibility and thus of documenting (Fahle 2020: 13) by questioning the representation of history and reality under the new media conditions and thereby detaching themselves from traditional forms of reality reference (Lind/Steyerl 2008: 25).
The planned DFG proposal is part of this approach of renegotiating documentary work in the moving image, which the proposed project would like to address.
Literature cited:
Fahle, Oliver. Theorien des Dokumentarfilms. Zur Einführung. Junius, Hamburg 2020.
Lind, Maria / Steyerl, Hito (Hg.). The Greenroom. Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1. Sternberg Press, Berlin/New York 2008.
Project leader: Joosten Müller (PhD candidate)
When dealing with the visual representation and communication of the Covid-19 pandemic, it stands out that the communication of science is increasingly relying on digital structures. In contrast, there are classic media of knowledge transfer such as physical (static) models that are used in school- and extracurricular learning spaces. These arise from a complex tradition of their own and are often tied to the time, their contemporary state of knowledge as well as the places in which they were created.
The focus of the impulse project is the historical model of an intestinal cell, which has evolved from a publicly accessible, museum artefact and teaching object (Overseas Museum Bremen) to a restrictedly accessible, historical object in the premises of the Department of Biophysics (University of Bremen). The research project will explore ways in which such a material artefact can be re-contextualised and made accessible through digitalisation, and will also examine how the characteristics of materiality in hybrid space can be opened up to experiences and research. Thereby questions also emerge on how digitalisation can contribute to creating tangible knowledge communication and equal participation in knowledge in times of changing relationships between society, knowledge and science. How do we want to comprehend and shape science in a world that is no longer divided into the analog and the digital, but in which both types of experience mix?
Project leader: Harm Heye Coordes (PhD candidate)
The project investigates, as initial field research and in the synopsis of digital (self-)design practices and analogue, direct participation of cross-generational target groups, to what extent digital technologies and strategies contribute to increasing the design, production and communication of sustainability in dealing with fashion (design) via low-threshold forms of access.
Based on an expanded concept of sustainability that is not limited to production and materials alone, but defines sustainability as a conscious experience, the project raises two fundamental research questions: How do digital programmes such as CLO3D facilitate making the potential that fashion has for social transformation more accessible and more attractive and thus open sustainability discourses to a broader audience? To what extent can digital technologies be used in such a way that direct analog access and experience structures are generated that create more inclusive participation and a more individualised body image?
Critical Instruments is an artistic and design research project that explores the production and use of electronic-digital musical instruments as a form of critical thinking and action (critical design).
The research project is based on the assumption that music is a social, empowering and participatory phenomenon. Furthermore, Critical Instruments works from the premise that music can serve as a catalyst for aesthetic and social transformations (e.g. subcultures). But unlike what is commonly seen, the project attempts to remove the design, production, research, testing and use of musical instruments (including their composition) from the sandbox of music (e.g. concert halls or music academies) and to explore it as an active social agent. A special focus is not only placed on music itself and playing music as an activity, but is also deliberately expanded to include the invention and production of (electronic and digital) musical instruments.
LIPS is the conjunctive formation of three digitally based projects that all are in connection with the HfK in Bremen, investigating how different aspects of online teaching can be used constructively within the artistic context. Our main question formulation is to explore if and how demands concerning audiovisual and 3D renderings, representing the main forms of expression used in this context, can form unique possibilities both in the teaching and creation offered by the digital environment.
This application concerns budgets for the development of a unifying structure, in connection with the three existing projects, based on the experiences from our previous collaboration, in the form of an initial workshop.
As part of the summer school ‘Painting, Drawing and the Digital in Public Space’, practice-oriented teaching projects, reflections and artistic articulations are used to examine the possibilities of image creation that painting and drawing have in the age of digital media and how painting and drawing manage to position themselves in engagement and/or collaboration with digital media in the public sphere.
The topic ‘Painting, Drawing and the Digital in Public Space’ offers a wealth of starting points and challenges in the area of tension between analog painting/drawing on the one hand and the transfer to the digital sphere on the other, but also in the area of tension between the participating universities themselves, the DUT Durban and the HfK Bremen. The project aimed to facilitate discussion, research and testing of the levels on which these areas of tension manifest themselves in practical work and in reflective discussions in the class. The project then also explored whether there is a complementary or a categorically different understanding of painting/drawing on hand and to what extent the transfer into the public sphere also results in a different relationship and interplay between the perception of space and the work of art.
Despite a long, historically complex tradition in the arts and design, formal study and training opportunities in the field of visual communication – particularly graphic design – hardly exist in Iraq and the Iraqi higher education system. This lack of institutionalised education and training offers is in stark contrast to a dynamically developing, rapidly growing creative and cultural sector that has a high demand for specialised professionals in the field of graphic design.
The initiation journey of a five-person specialist delegation, consisting of four specialist representatives from the Integrated Design Faculty as well as a representative of a senior organisational unit at the University of the Arts Bremen, to Iraq from 11 to 23 November 2022, was dedicated to explore, prepare and to create a contractual agreement to establish a structure of university cooperation. The long-term goal of this cooperation is to establish a structured study programme in design at Iraqi state universities, including capacity training for lecturers.
Die Anbahnungsreise einer fünfköpfigen Fachdelegation, bestehend aus vier Fachvertreter:innen des Studiengangs Integriertes Design wie einer Vertretung einer leitende Organisationseinheit an der Hochschule für Künste Bremen, vom 11. bis einschließlich 23. November 2022 in den Irak diente (??) der Sondierung, der Vorbereitung und dem vertraglich festgehaltenen Aufbau einer
The initiation trip of a four-member delegation of experts aims to establish a cooperation network with Colombian universities in the field of art and design, including new technologies, and thus to intensify international exchange in both directions (reciprocally to Colombia and Germany) in the graduate and postgraduate phases. To develop sustainable co-operation projects, the Universidad Los Andes (Bogota), Universidad Antioquia (Medellin) and Universidad del Valle (Cali) will be visited, each with a different focus in their design and artistic education.
DFG projects
The University of the Arts Bremen has a well-equipped fashion workshop with a basic set of dressmaking dummies, a 3-position ironing machine, a fusing press, sewing machines, various special machines, including for leather processing and shoe production, an analogue embroidery machine and two hand knitting machines. The hand knitting machines cover the basics of knitting techniques with medium to coarse gauge (i.e. yarn thicknesses that can be used accordingly) and on one machine with the option of simple jacquards. The fashion CAD workshop, which is also assigned to this area, complements the range of services with eleven computer workstations, various CAD programs in 2D and 3D for developing pattern cuts, a plotter and a digitising system.
In addition to the fashion workshop and the fashion CAD workshop, the flatbed knitting machine will have an impact on other workshops at University of the Arts Bremen, especially against the backdrop of advancing digitalisation. The obvious areas are digital media with a possible focus on eTextile and its competences and production possibilities in electronics/electrical engineering. A further field is opened up by the digital knitting machine in the area of product design. There is already a lively exchange here, but this can be greatly intensified with the new acquisition and the resulting new possibilities.
The scientific network ‘Entangled Histories of Art and Migration – Forms, Visibilities and Agents’ is funded by the German Research Society (2018–2022). It set out to conduct research on the interrelationship of migration and globalisation as an important phenomenon of social transformation in the 20th and 21st centuries and in its role for art historical research and artistic production. It enhanced the research on migration with art-historical perspectives and methodologies in a field that has been primarily focusing on social- and political scientific as well as anthropological studies.
The network connects therefore with recent international art historical migration research and outlines three central and overlapping fields of research that interweave histories of art and migration: 1. Forms and aesthetics of migration; 2. Actors in the field of migration; 3. Visibility: image politics and visualisation strategies in the context of migration.
With regard to these research fields, which relate in major terms to the research foci of the network members, a total of six international workshops at different institutes in Germany have been realised. The concluding publication will contribute to establishing a long-term and lasting engagement with migration research in global art history, not least as a research field within migration studies and with a national and international visibility.
The CCLC is dedicated to the practice, research, discussion and promotion of cartooning and low comedy. It sees cartooning not merely as an artistic form, but also as an ethical and intellectual stance, as a way of being in the world. Low comedy, in this context, means cartooning with other means, such as comics, animation, performance, comical objects, films, texts, music, sometimes even food or administrative regulations.
In the wake of a jointly identified problem - the disappearance of drawing as foundation studies in the curricula of higher art education despite demands for drawing as a transferable core competence in students and drawing’s demonstrated positive cognitive and therapeutic effects for innovation, visual-spatial skills and various professional fields – NDS as a network of six art universities aims to redefine and innovate the role of drawing in higher art education (HAE).
The project centres on the development of new and wide-ranging approaches, methods and formats for teaching, learning and utilising drawing, including animation and digital drawing technologies. NDS strives, as a main objective, to create innovative communities of practice as agile, inclusive environments or ecosystems for learning and didactic expertise. In turn, these communities and learning environments can then act as multipliers and ambassadors beyond the scope of HAE. This will provide access to results, resources and methodology in order to gain a wider impact throughout the different levels of education systems and in other fields. NDS intends to develop and put into practice didactic formats, materials, strategies and (blended) infrastructures for educators, students and administrators engaging in drawing at higher art institutions by building an educational network for (re)establishing drawing competences as key competences in HAI and beyond.
