The AION experimental research programme is launching its second edition to continue delving into the intersections between art, science, technology and society. With the aim of transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries, the programme seeks to incorporate conceptual and methodological frictions between epistemic and aesthetic, sensitive and rational, material and abstract knowledge.
The 2026 edition unfolds two parallel work processes that address, from complementary perspectives, the conditions and practices of hybrid research.
On the one hand, the artist Maria Rojo and the ICFO scientist Eugènia Almacellas make up the tandem that will explore the vector of intuition. Through autoethnography exercises, shared work sessions and reciprocal visits to their workspaces, they will investigate how intuition operates in scientific and artistic research and what possibilities it opens up to address what escapes the established conceptual and methodological frameworks of knowledge. Simultaneously, AION promotes a collaborative design process of a practical device aimed at facilitating hybrid research based on the vectors of error and uncertainty, the axes of the first edition of the program. The process is developed through three intensive days of co-creation and prototyping that will bring together an interdisciplinary team of artists, scientists and academics. The sessions will allow us to work collectively on the development of the device, test its possibilities and review it based on the contributions of the participants.
This second edition gives continuity to the learnings and the documentary body generated during the 2025 pilot test, which worked around two vectors: error, understood as an unexpected stimulus for creation, and uncertainty, as a shared condition that places us on the threshold between what we know and what we do not yet know. Lara Campos, Margherita Gallano, Markus Teller and Pedro Torres participated in that first experience. The results and the materials generated can be consulted in the project’s Digital Garden .
