Bachelor ArtScience

Programme description

The full-time Bachelor ArtScience focuses on an interdisciplinary approach and teaches you how to connect and transcend various art forms and areas of expertise. The programme contains amongst others the following educational components: research projects, individual coaching, (often combined) theoretical and practical courses.

During your four year of study, you are encouraged to test different ways of working and to encounter contrasting ideas about what (artistic) research can be. Experimentation, uncertainty and reflection are understood not as obstacles to research but as productive parts of it. You don't always need to know in advance what your experiment will become. Research here is not always a straight line. It can loop, wander, collide, stall, mutate and begin again. ArtScience gives you room to test, fail, rebuild, follow unexpected connections and invent methods when existing ones are not enough.

Your education combines practical and theoretical courses, workshops, collaborative projects, individual coaching and independent research. As you progress, you are given increasing freedom and responsibility to shape your own trajectory. You learn to connect experiments made in different courses, critically reflect on your methods and choices, and gradually develop an artistic practice that is recognisably your own.

The programme's Sense-Making Studios form an important backbone for this process. Here, different strands of your work come together through dialogue, critique, experimentation, presentation and reflection. The studios help you understand how different questions, materials and methods can become part of a developing practice.

You are also encouraged to look beyond the department for knowledge and expertise. You can take courses elsewhere at KABK, for example at Fine Arts and IMD, and students regularly follow minors or electives at institutions such as Leiden University, TU Delft and the University of Amsterdam. Through collaborations with cultural organisations, festivals and independent initiatives, including Rewire, Zaal 3, iii and RADIUS, you encounter different contexts in which an ArtScience practice can operate. These collaborations may take the form of workshops, research projects, performances, exhibitions, fieldwork, interventions or other public experiments.

ArtScience also has a long history of collaboration with the Royal Conservatoire. We maintain a close relationship with the Master ArtScience and work with students and staff from Sonology and Composition. During the joint “Exchange Weeks”, students from all departments come together for intensive workshops, experiments and collaborations across different practices. The curriculum explicitly treats this kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration, negotiation, and shared authorship as part of the learning process. The result is a community that is small-scale, exploratory, collaborative, self-directed, intellectually curious and, at times, slightly unruly.