Application window: July 4–August 12
The Escola Superior Artestica do Porto (ESAP) and The New Centre for Research and Practice have announced the start of an international postgraduate program in the arts. The Visual Arts and Research degree will be a one-year theoretical and practical survey that will allow students to develop their own paths in the arts. The first cohort will begin in October 2022, and applications will be accepted from July 4 to August 12.
The Postgraduate Degree in Visual Arts and Research, conceived as a space for open dialogue with internationally renowned intellectuals, provides solid foundations for the study of the arts through the relationship between philosophical concepts, new technologies, and contemporary aesthetics in the broadest sense. ESAP and The New Centre will run the program virtually and in English, while J.-P. Caron, Anna Longo, Cécile Malaspina, Jason Mohaghegh, Reza Negarestani, Mohammad Salemy, and Klaus Speidel will give the program’s primary courses in an exclusive capacity to the selected cohort.
ESAP is a non-profit, autonomous art school in Porto that offers undergraduate, postgraduate, and master’s degrees in the arts, media, and architecture. ESAP is a gathering space for artists, scholars, curators, critics, and other intellectuals, and it functions as a collective of a research-fostering community. Through organizing conferences, publishing publications, and hosting exhibitions and residencies, ESAP is intellectually connected to a number of universities and cultural institutions across the world. ESAP’s teaching technique is supported by a variety of methods that configure high-level, contemporary arts practices while remaining inspired by novel reimaginings of the art world and its structures.
The New Centre for Research & Practice has established itself in the last decade as the leading institution for online graduate-level learning in philosophy, art and curation, architecture and design, and transdisciplinary humanities. The New Centre seminars are lead by renowned artists and intellectuals, including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Julieta Aranda, Elie Ayache, Ray Brassier, Benjamin Bratton, Yuk Hui, Maria Lind, Patricia Reed, Anne-Françoise Schmid, Moses Serubiri, Nick Srnicek, Tiziana Terranova, and Fernando Zalamea. The New Centre community of friends, members and researchers includes individuals and institutions from all over the world. The New Centre is partly responsible for major shifts in the intellectual environment of the humanities in the last few years, pioneering debates on movements like neorationalism, accelerationism, and the new materialisms. The New Centre students are often admitted to prestigious PhD programs and receive acclaimed fellowships and awards, in addition to having gone on to work for reputable institutions. They regularly contribute to The Centre’s own platform, &&& (Tripleampersand), which runs both an online journal and a publishing house. They organize and participate in The Centre’s parallel academia events, such as last spring’s HyperAnnotations 2.0 at Venice Biennale.
ESAP and The New Centre have come together to offer this postgraduate because both institutions understand the gaps in traditional art pedagogy, given that the official academic procedures often stunt or even at times prevent rigorous intellectual developments. Both institutions believe that a truly transdisciplinary education involves providing practical and conceptual tools to younger and emerging thinkers and artists so they can arrive at new horizons while establishing strong networks and fields of reference. While most available graduate-level art education focuses on technicalities, ESAP and The New Centre, on the contrary, have developed a program that encourages speculative explorations in what is most advanced in current artistic research while simultaneously maintaining an uncompromised precision in relation to the history of art, methodologies of creation, philosophy, science and technology, blending historiography, critical theory and practical digital laboratories.
ESAP and The New Centre encourage you to explore and participate in defining the future of art education through the postgraduate program in Visual Arts and Research.