Milla Martikainen

Fictive University of the Arts

Ambience Performance, University, Collective

— PROJECT NAME

Fictive University of the Arts


— WEBPAGE

www.taideyliopisto.com


— ROLE

Part of the Fictive University of The Arts Collective


What Is the Fictive Art University?


The Fictive University of the Arts (FU) can be summarised in the following, proposedly modular, stratagems:


1. The FU is a means to realise visions of what the University of the Arts Helsinki could potentially be. Operations can combine fiction and everyday realities, in any means imaginable. The FU permits the mixing of the existing and the non-existent in order to achieve a desired situation, whether it concerns lectures, people, the structures of studies, work posts, art movements or chronologies. One can create one’s own framework within the framework of the FU.


2. The FU spreads around the University of the Arts Helsinki providing richer polyphony and a platform for discussing it’s many speculative futures. The models it presents are challenges not only for the University of the Arts Helsinki alone, but also for arts and other forms of education in general.


3. Activities are open for everyone on every level; anyone can contribute from within the university or from outside it.Working within the framework of the FU is a collective way of reimagining the entire university and its undertakings. The central question is how to work creatively with/within/around the registers of the surrounding structures.


4. The FU can appropriate anything and redefine its orientation. Any event can be redefined as being also organised by the FU. Any person can work simultaneously for the FU and other institutions, whether they are aware of this or not.


5. The FU is a public proposal, a cultural gesture. All of our social conventions, including the university and its practices, are formations that have only later ossified into conventions, rules and institutions. Fictions reimagine such societal structures. In this sense, fiction wields a lot of power and is highly meaningful; once something is imagined into existence it can take part in discussions on the development of cultural practices.