Conference – presentation of the results of FFA Specific University Research 2025, 27 Jan 2026 10:00, TIC Gallery

We are pleased to invite you to the faculty doctoral conference, at which the results of Specific University Research projects for 2025 (SpV) will be presented. The conference will take place on Tuesday, 27 January 2026, from 10:00 to 14:00 at Galerie TIC (Radnická 4, Brno). Vegan refreshments will be provided. We look forward to your participation.

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Short annotations of the presented projects:

Barbora Ilič, Stranger's Gaze in Algorithmic Space
The research examines the contemporary aesthetics of nostalgia within AI-generated images on social media, where algorithmic systems co-create and stabilise self-referential nostalgic narratives. It interweaves themes of nostalgia, alienation, and algorithmic production, and through the concept of negative punctum points to how the very limits of AI-generated imagery are reflected in our relationship to the past in an environment marked by an inflation of its representations.

Jakub Polách, TikTokariát
Their engagement is chronically online. Their adversaries are haters, reaction channels, trolls, and the hegemony of the cultural layer of neoliberalism. Czech streamers balance on the edge between national glorification and digital oblivion. Within the TikTokariát project, we conducted long-term observation of selected precarious entertainers or their haters and engaged them in dialogue. Together with sociologist Ludmila Rašková, through semi-structured narrative interviews, we focused on the stories they tell about themselves and on how digital interactions within live-streaming environments transform their lives.

Tereza Vinklárková, Neurotopias and the Ephemerality of Neural Maps
The research project Neurotopias and the Ephemerality of Neural Maps explores possibilities for the visual and lyrical articulation of invisible bodily and nervous-system processes in relation to emotions, memory, and addiction. Drawing on situated imagination and an autoethnographic approach, it renders biological and affective bodily processes accessible, develops its own visual and narrative language, and reveals phenomena neglected by both scientific and social discourse. At the same time, it asks whether such approaches can contribute to a deeper understanding of bodily and emotional experience beyond traditional categories of knowledge.

Zuzana Žabková, The Night of Dark Angels
The Night of Dark Angels is an artistic research project that interweaves performance, somatic practices, and collective play (LARP) as tools of artistic inquiry. Working with figures of mystics and queer vampires as images of desire, vulnerability, and resistance, the project explores how embodied experience can open up new forms of political and social imagination. The research develops in collaboration with other artists and included a public performative presentation realised at the Venuše ve Švehlovce theatre.

Matěj Pavlík, Archive of Social Conflict
The contribution addresses the question of how to productively examine infrastructures of surveillance today that were formed by subcultural, activist, or civic initiatives with the aim of making visible individuals and groups connected to both neo-Nazi and left-wing circles, with monitoring taking place across the political spectrum. The analysis of these archival practices is conceived as a critical reflection on the liberal myth of civil society. The contribution thematically follows on from the audiovisual essay Public Enemy of Historical Masochism and further develops new contours of so-called investigative aesthetics.

Jiří Žák, Critical Fabulations in Artistic Practice
What parallels can be drawn between the fiction-based historical method of critical fabulation developed by Afro-American theorist Saidiya Hartman and the practices of contemporary art? Where do artistic approaches intersect with methods of decolonial historiography? And what problems arise when these methods are applied to topics such as violence, war, or the arms trade? In addition to these questions, the contribution will present two outputs of the SpV project: the book We Love Shooting (Display Publishing and FFA) and a scholarly article.

Valentýna Landa Filípková, Collaborative & Conscious Material Design: An Exhibition with a Critical Catalogue and a Series of Workshops
The project responds to the absence of interdisciplinary practice and environmentally oriented design disciplines within Czech higher education. Through the implementation of material-based workshops, it connected students of design, science, technology, and the humanities, thereby testing and further developing a concept proposed within doctoral research. In parallel, the project presented examples of good interdisciplinary material practice through an exhibition accompanied by a critical catalogue. The aim was to motivate university students towards interdisciplinary collaboration and to introduce sustainable approaches to design and materials to both specialist and wider publics in the Czech Republic.

Tamara Spalajković (FFA BUT), Kateřina Singer (FA BUT), Marek Hlavička (FA BUT), Planýrka: A Case Study of a Post-Cultural Landscape
The interfaculty research team will present the results of a case study of the Planýrka area in Brno, focusing on multispecies coexistence in an urban environment, phenomena of ecosystem resilience, the emergence of new forms of collectivity, and their relationship to the architectural development of the site. The presentation will demonstrate the potential of artistic and architectural research in advocacy processes as well as approaches to urban planning that take into account the multispecies inhabitants of the area. It will also focus on the creation of alternative scenarios and video production as possible tools for moving beyond anthropocentric thinking about landscape.

Martin Mazanec, Pavel Ryška: Processing and Utilisation of the Written Estate of Radek Pilař
Radek Pilař (1931–1993) was an artist working across commissioned and autonomous production as well as across different media. He left behind a legacy that is layered, diverse, and internally interconnected. It is not easy to grasp as a whole; rather, it tends towards hierarchical ordering and the creation of separate categories. For these reasons, it also presents a challenge for archivists, curators, and theorists who ask how to approach the estates of intermedial creators, and how such estates should be preserved, processed, and presented to the public.

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Author	doc. MgA. Filip Cenek
Published	2025-12-16
Short URL	https://www.favu.vut.cz/en//f26745/d313324

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