Course content

Artistic Entrepreneurship argues for an agency that involves and engages new combinations and new forms of cooperation among researchers, concepts and ideas, technologies, resources, and machines. It paves the way for a different kind of entrepreneurship in the truest sense of the word: Rather than just a business model, it is the undertaking or new beginning of acting together across sectors, across actors and across disciplines, to inspire people to tackle the challenges society faces.

What if Artistic Entrepreneurship is the new Punk rock?

What if we understand Artistic Entrepreneurship as a studio practice—where the "studio" is the messy, real-world environment of everyday life? This course invites you to explore that question through collaborative, place-based work, recognising that "everyone is an expert" and each of us brings our own expertise and perspective.

Together, we will develop skills for navigating complexity and making sense of the patterns it reveals. The course combines artistic practice with critical discourse, using collective sense-making and dissemination projects linked to key areas of the MFA programme. Here, "dissemination" includes publishing and other formats that question and expand what exhibiting can be as a form of learning.

We will use "what if?" as an orientation for opening new combinations of arts, materials, technologies, ideas, ecologies, heritage, politics, and community. Through this, you will build an ethic of care for social relations—an essential foundation for creative collaboration, collective forms of entrepreneurship, and alternative ways of organising. The course offers insight into how fine art practices connect to, and circulate within, diverse contexts inside and outside the academy. It also examines how social, cultural, political, and environmental conditions shape both artistic positions and their public reception.

You will work on a shared group project, developing strategic artistic agency, teamwork, and documentation methods. Collaboration with external partners from different professional fields may also form part of the course, providing opportunities to reflect on the varied roles and responsibilities artists hold in society.

Your own artistic practice and potential collaborations with peers will be central. Through working around a shared theme, students collectively develop research methods, artistic formats, and documentation techniques that support both individual and group learning.

Learning outcome

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Participate effectively in a group project and understand professional engagement within cultural, scientific, or other relevant contexts.
• Contribute to a collective presentation format and communicate ideas clearly with others.
• Use the Research Catalogue as a tool for documenting and sharing artistic work, and its processes.
• Reflect on their own artistic practice and the practices of others in relation to professional environments.
• Explore and use new arenas for the presentation and integration of artistic projects.
• Develop an awareness of how to navigate complexity and recognise when situations call for more generative and adaptive approaches.
• Engage in relational forms of discovery, exploration, production, and exchange.
• Build creative confidence by becoming more comfortable with uncertainty, ambiguity, and paradox as productive spaces for collaboration.
• Strengthen individual and collective capacities for reflection and speculation, and understand how these contribute to collective intelligence and co-agency.

Learning methods and activities

The course is organised in cooperation with external partners at NTNU, in the city, in Norway, and/or abroad. Whenever possible, it will connect with relevant conferences, festivals, or professional networks. Teaching combines theoretical and practical work through lectures, screenings, guest presentations, field trips, group discussions, and readings.

Additional details will be provided at the start of the semester.

A key part of the course is learning how to work with different actors, activities, materials, and institutions as part of emerging creative ecosystems. This helps students build the capacity to respond to the urgencies and complexities of the present moment.

The project format is central to our work. Through learning by doing, students explore, test, and share possible directions for their practice. This process can be guided by three elements: time-travel, experimentation, and speculation.

Students will take part in expanding approaches to the public presentation of their research and artistic outcomes, e.g. using the Research Catalogue and the department’s video studio as platforms for production and dissemination

Specific conditions

This course is offered to international master’s students. Language of instruction is English.

Approved compulsory assignments are valid in the current semester.

Compulsory assignments

• Participation in course activities
• Assignment

Specific conditions