THEME 2023: RESONANCE


The AHA! festival explores encounters between art and science during a two-day event at the Chalmers University of Technology, supported by the Departments of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Physics, Microtechnology and Nanoscience, Industrial and Materials Science and Communication and Learning in Science, and Health Engineering Area of Advance. It is an international festival intended to provide a stage for enlightening and surprising experiences, staging surprises, new thoughts and displaced perspectives that lead to alternative modes of thinking about exploring the world through art and science. We invite scientists (physicists, historians, astronomers, engineers), artists (dancers, musicians, painters, poets, acrobats) who reside in these borderlands and wish to share their vision and work.

PROGRAM

Coming shortly


ABOUT THE AHA! FESTIVAL

The AHA! festival explores encounters between art and science during a two-day event at the Chalmers University of Technology, supported by the Departments of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Physics, Microtechnology and Nanoscience, Industrial and Materials Science and Communication and Learning in Science, and Health Engineering Area of Advance.  It is an international festival intended to provide a stage for enlightening and surprising experiences, staging surprises, new thoughts and displaced perspectives that lead to alternative modes of thinking about exploring the world through art and science. We invite scientists (physicists, historians, astronomers, engineers), artists (dancers, musicians, painters, poets, acrobats) who reside in these borderlands and wish to share their vision and work.

HISTORY

The relation between science and art has become more complex, but is just as important to attend to. Their meeting is still that of theory and practice, but also something more: a meeting of causal connections and meaningful coherences, of given conditions and unsuspected possibilities, of the order of things and our own place within it.

Today, ”science” no longer refers to systematic knowledge, but rather to a highly professionalised, specialised and often technically advanced activity intended for the production of empirically secure facts. Similarly, ”art” is no longer a methodical ability, but rather a complex and autonomous activity comparable to science: the creation of images, sounds, and other forms of sensuous experience with a most immediate effect. Forms that grab hold, shake up, leave us at a loss. Experiences that make us question ourselves and the world around us.

By bringing together science and art, architecture has provided an ideal playing field for such a confrontation for the first two festival in 2014 and 2015. In 2014, October 21–23, the first festival investigated the theme ‘embodiment.’ In 2015, November 2-4 the festival explored numbers, an underlying element in our lives. In year 2016 the festival was a joint voyage between the Departments of Architecture and Department of Physics to explore the theme ‘uni-verse,’ the fabric of life. All festivals offer three days of seminars, workshops, conversations, exhibitions, concerts, performances, and mingles, through thought-provoking experiences, hands-on surprises, itinerant perspectives, and savoury ideas. The festival welcomes students and researchers from all universities, and the general public, to turn the searchlight onto the relation between two different– but equally important – human activities; ’Science and art.’

AHA! 2022

AHA! 2021

AHA! 2019

AHA! 2018

AHA! 2017

AHA! 2016

AHA! 2015

AHA! 2014

FIND AHA!

The AHA! festivals main location is in the Volvo foyer (Volvofoajén) on the second floor of the student union building, at Chalmers Campus Johanneberg.

Click Here to open directions to the Volvo foyer on your phone

Chalmers Conference Centre
Chalmersplatsen 1
412 58 , Göteborg, Sweden

THE AHA! TEAM

Peter Christensson

Peter Christensson is project leader for the AHA!festival and sculpturer. Christensson is lecturer in Architecture and Engineering, at the department of archtecture and civil engineering.

Michael Eriksson

Michael Eriksson är koordinator vid enheten för Extern samverkan, forskning- och innovationsstöd, och har arbetat med AHA!festivalen sedan år 2016.

Sanna Dahlman

Sanna Dahlman är Produktdesigner MFA och är anställd som konstnärlig lärare på avdelningen för Design & Human Factors, IMS, Chalmers. Sanna undervisar på programmen Teknisk Design och Design och Produktutveckling.

Fredrik Höök

Fredrik Höök is a professor of nano and biophysics, researching and teaching in biological and medical physics. His special interest is sensors for use in diagnostics and drug development, but also how biological sensors give us our senses.

Joar Svanvik

Joar Svanvik, MD, PhD, a surgery professor em. in Sweden has served at Sahlgrenska Hospital in Gothenburg, University Hospital in Linkoping and also at UCSF in SanFrancisco and in South Africa and is now active part time at the Transplantation Center, Gothenburg.

Contact

Contact the AHA! team at info@ahafestival.se
Courtesy of Chalmers University of Technology
Web production: Sebastian Christensson
Logo: Thomas Asplund