Ars Nova is a new experimental art school staged within the University of Tokyo (*1). Rather than treating “art” as a single discipline, it approaches art as ars——a shared name for techniques and ways of making, sensing, and thinking (*2).
The program reconnects diverse forms of ars already present across the university: from sensor technologies and engineering to plant-environment research, to media theory, to artistic and critical practice. By linking these domains, Ars Nova creates new circuits for learning and making, ones that don’t begin with fixed answers, but with shared experiments.
Courses are co-taught by instructors with different disciplines under the same course title. This isn’t just a division of labor; it’s a mise-en-scène in which instructors also learn from one another in real time. Students don’t only learn what teachers already know——they learn by watching teachers learn something they don’t know.
Ars Nova also invites practitioners from outside the university——artists, musicians, performers, engineers, editors, programmers, dramaturgs, and others——to join as collaborators in teaching and production. Whatever results would be made public through the Publication Division that runs in parallel to the classes (*3).
An art school will be established at the University of Tokyo. Although this may come as a surprise to some people in Japan, it is likely to sound entirely familiar to readers elsewhere: universities around the world have long treated artistic practice as an integral part of higher education. The question, then, is not why a university would engage in art education, but how and to what end.
We believe that opening new possibilities within the world we currently inhabit calls for more than ad-hoc solutions to given problems. It invites us to re-examine the premises under which problems take shape, to rebuild them collectively, and to create new circuits of activity and inquiry together.
We turn to art as a way of working that makes such endeavors possible. Rather than responding to predefined needs or existing evaluative frameworks, we see it as a practice for reworking those frameworks themselves. In doing so, art moves beyond art in the narrow sense, creating space to step back from the ways of thinking and working shaped within each specialized discipline such as science, engineering, the humanities, and the social sciences, to sometimes let them go, and to reorganize them toward new questions.
Ars Nova is a new forum of learning and practice to be launched within the University of Tokyo as a site for such efforts, bringing together students, researchers, practitioners, and various sites of activity. It is based on two operations, one rather conceptual and one rather organizational.
Unfolding Art into Ars
“Art” refers to a broad range of practices that, even without a fixed purpose, have opened new rooms and pathways of thought and sensibility, precisely through their indeterminacy. At a time when the term appears to be exploited and inflated to cover everything, we return to its foundations in order to reconsider what it can do, and what it might yet become.
To do so, we momentarily trace “art” back to its Latin root, ars: a system of techniques for achieving some purpose. Techniques for moving the body, for producing sound, for communicating with matter, for recording, for sensing the future, for collaborating with others——each ars is carefully observed, practiced, and re-examined. By deepening these individual ars, we come to recognize the significance of art itself as a paradoxical ars: one that has no fixed purpose. Art reappears as an indeterminate “hinge” that unsettles established frameworks of ars while reconnecting them in new ways.
In this sense, art is not defined by genres or industries but understood as a broad practice of (re)experiencing other(s’) experiences. Grounded in imagination and respect for different sensibilities, it offers ways of engaging with questions of inequality and discrimination, and of gently challenging assumptions shaped by economic rationality and growth-driven thinking.
Based on this understanding, Ars Nova is a program that invites participants to step back from the immediacy of the “here and now,” and to imagine futures together that are not confined by short-term returns. By unfolding art, returning it to ars, and reconnecting it anew, the program creates a common ground for learning, making, and thinking otherwise.
Weaving Resources Together
Ars Nova begins by drawing on the many kinds of knowledge and practice already present across the University of Tokyo, and by gently weaving them together in new ways. Sensor technologies developed in engineering or physics, research on plant environments in agriculture or biology, media theory from information studies, or studies in art history and aesthetics are brought into conversation, forming a curriculum that encourages recombination rather than specialization.
Each course is jointly taught by multiple instructors with different ars, working together under a shared course title. Through this co-creative process, instructors themselves gain opportunities to encounter ars they did not previously know and to expand their own learning. Students do not merely learn what instructors already know; they learn by observing instructors learning what they themselves did not know. By opening practices that are often confined within disciplinary boundaries onto the shared ground of ars, students, researchers, and practitioners from different backgrounds are able to meet, exchange perspectives, and develop richer forms of research and creation together.
In addition, practitioners of diverse ars from outside the university——artists, musicians, performers, engineers, editors, programmers, dramaturgs, and others——will also participate, supporting in a transversal manner the three movements of “making,” “questioning,” and “sharing.” Through these encounters, distinctions between teaching and learning, theory and practice, and inside and outside the university begin to loosen, allowing ars to be re-edited in more fluid and collective ways.
Looking outward as well as inward, Ars Nova will use the University of Tokyo’s overseas international offices and hubs as initial points of contact, with a view toward global circulation and dissemination of practice. In addition, an independent Publishing Division will be established within the program, securing a site responsible for “publication” in the broad sense——of “making things public”——including not only the printing of catalogs and books, but also the planning and presentation of exhibitions, records, video works, events, and symposia. Closely linked to the courses themselves, this division will promote the dissemination and sharing of the diverse outcomes generated by Ars Nova.
Ars Nova, The University of Tokyo
