ARS BIOLOGICA: Summer school 2025

ARS BIOLOGICA is an international transdisciplinary platform connecting experimental art, design, technology and science with a focus on permaculture thinking and practice. The project forms one of the main pillars of the Budweis European Capital of Culture 2028 and involves artist residencies, an independent study programme, an annual symposium and other events, culminating in the Ars Biologica festival in 2028.   

This year, the Ars Biologica Independent Study Programme (ABIS) offers a special four-day summer school inviting artists, designers, researchers, scientists and students interested in transdisciplinary exploration of permacultural concepts and practices. The summer school is structured into four thematic tracks and includes a diverse programme of workshops, lectures, and co-creative research sessions inspired by permacultural principles—such as valuing small and slow solutions, integrating rather than segregating, cultivating diversity, or responding creatively to change. 

The Summer School will take place in Prague from July 21–24 (Section 1) and in České Budějovice from August 21–24 (Thematic Sections 2–4).

On August 24, all participants will gather in České Budějovice for the Ars Biologica Symposium 2025, held as part of the Země Živitelka fair. The symposium will provide a space for sharing experiences from the Summer School and exploring ideas for future collaboration.

Who is it for?

The Summer School is open to artists, designers, researchers, scientists, and students interested in connecting art, science, and design within the context of permaculture. We welcome all those who wish to explore sustainable approaches, develop transdisciplinary collaboration, and seek creative responses to contemporary challenges.

The program, divided into four thematic sections, offers workshops, lectures, and collaborative research sessions grounded in permaculture principles—such as supporting small and slow solutions, integrating rather than segregating, embracing diversity, and seeking creative responses to change.

Thematic tracks:

Track #1: PermaPrompting with Feral (AI)gents

Time & Place: 21–24 July 2025, Prague – AVU Veletržní Hall

Tutors: Enrique Encinas, Lenka Hámošová 

Contributors: Ramón Alvarado, Andrej Boleslavský, Markéta Dolejšová, Jana Bernartová, Zdeňka Němcová, Štěpán Kleník & Artur Magrot

Language: English (but some tutors speak Czech, so no mega-advanced EN skills needed)

AI prompting – the act of shaping how machine learning systems like ChatGPT generate content – is becoming a widespread everyday practice for creativity and connection but also control, exclusion, manipulation and environmental devastation. In light of the disruptive presence of AI tools, how do we build literacy around their inner workings and develop collective strategies that challenge proprietary infrastructures? Machine learning use, transform or refuse? 
Co-organised by the Ars Biologica Independent Study Program (ABIS) of the Budweis – European Capital of Culture 2028, the Academy of Fine Arts Prague’s (AVU) Doctoral Research Department, and the Uroboros collective, this 4-day summer school invites artists, designers, researchers, and students of varied backgrounds to experiment with co-creative approaches to prompting and building AI agents. Taking permaculture principles as a critical and generative framework, we will explore whether everyday human–AI interactions can be reimagined through the lenses of interdependence and contextual sensitivity, rather than personal efficiency and scale.

The Open Call for Thematic Section 1 has been closed.

Track #2: Permacultural Thinking in Multispecies Research

Time & Place: 21–24 August 2025, České Budějovice

Tutors: Markéta Dolejšová, Tereza Stehlíková, Michal Hořejší, Filip Holub, Eva Semančíková, Tamara Spalajkovič, Kluk forest

Language: Czech and English (flexible, depending on selected participants)

The summer school track Permacultural Thinking in Multispecies Research invites participants from across art, design, and science to co-creatively explore multispecies relations and tensions shaping the landscapes in and around us. During the four-day collaborative process, we will begin by mapping various methodological approaches to researching multispecies ecologies. Through experimental fieldwork in local forests (Kleť Nature Reserve) and other wilderness (Země Živitelka fair), we will then explore how these approaches might complement and support each other—or, conversely, conflict and interfere. Working both intuitively and analytically, sensorially and verbally, spontaneously and systematically, we will explore various methods of gathering and interpreting multispecies experiences and data. Our point of departure will be permacultural practices and principles, which we will reflect and consider as a critical lens to engage with multispecies inquiries and ways of relating. To document our collaborative process, we will use our sensory perception, observations, memories, shared stories, and other media. This collected data will feed into the making of an Almanac of Multispecies Research—an open-access fanzine publication offering insights into how we might cultivate interdisciplinary sensitivity in research on multispecies coexistence.

Track #3: Permacomputing and Digital Infrastructures

Time & Place: 21–24 August 2025, České Budějovice

Tutors: Michal Kučerák & invited guest contributors

Language: English

For the most part, digital infrastructures are invisible, abstract systems that silently fuel society’s day-to-day operations, from cloud storage to global networks. Permacultural thinking provides an alternative lens that focuses on sustainability, resilience, and profound interconnectedness between systems and the ecological and social arenas in which they are embedded. Applying these principles to digital technology promotes decentralization, energy awareness, repairable systems and local expression. Instead of speed and infinite scale, it is about regenerative cycles, deliberate pace and mutual adjustment.

A powerful biological analogy for us to follow is found in the mycelial network of mushrooms - a subterranean, decentralized network that serves forest ecosystems by exchanging nutrients, communicating and collaborating with trees. Like fungi, any digital systems based on permacultural principles would be networked, adaptable, and symbiotic. They would prioritize longevity over novelty, ecosystem health over the extraction, and care over control. These are systems with an aesthetic of organic roughness, an embrace of imperfection, an ethic of resourcefulness, of material consciousness.

In this environment, concepts behind permacomputing are not simply a design strategies but co-produce space for a “mycological imagination”, where digital tools are grown like crops, integrated into particular ecologies, and nurtured through collective care. This view makes space for us to think again about technology not as an industrial mechanism, but as a part of a living, relational web in which, code, soil, data, spores and microbes co-evolve.

Track #4: Pomalé obvody

Time and Place: August 21–24, 2025, České Budějovice and the garden colony opposite the Stecher Mill

Lectors: Nikola Brabcová / Janek Rous / Karin Šrubařová / Michal Kindernay / MAK / Slavomíra Ondrušová / Hana Šantrůčková / Aliaksandra Yakubouskaya / (+biolog*žka - v procesu)

Language: Čeština

How can collective and process-based forms of knowing transform the ways we perceive and shape the world? What unfolds at the intersection of scientific methods and artistic experience? How can we perceive an environment through a combination of sensory and cognitive exploration?

A gathering in a riverside garden creates space for a shared experience of perceiving and exploring a place as a sensitive living system—on the threshold between the urban ecosystem and the open landscape. The permaculture process here serves as a research framework, and time spent together becomes a method in itself.

The garden naturally extends into the surrounding landscape, just as the boundaries between knowledge, practice, and experience begin to blur. This creates a space for slow, locally and bodily situated learning that gives room to what is often overlooked or remains invisible.

The Summer School connects scientific and artistic approaches with the collective experience of temporarily inhabiting a space. We will engage in expert-led walks, observation, and listening to soundscapes, as well as distilling scents. We will collect plants, draw, build temporary structures that will become part of the garden, cook, and explore forms of shared knowledge through dialogue and the mapping of connections.

In an environment where everything grows, we will learn to perceive soil as a living organism, imagine its relationship with plants, the flow of nutrients, and the exchange of energy. We will become part of the subtle balance between place and landscape.

The program will be announced soon.

Things to Note

• All summer school tracks are organised as in-person events.
• Participation is free of charge, but accommodation and travel expenses are covered by participants themselves. The organisers can assist in finding affordable accommodation (the daily programme begins at 10:00, making it possible to commute from other cities).
• The summer school process will be presented at the Ars Biologica Symposium organised as part of the Země Živitelka fair. All participants will receive free entry to the event.
• Coffee breaks will be provided throughout the programme. Lunch is arranged individually by participants.
• The language of Summer School is Czech and English (see details under each Track description).
• Participants from all disciplines and backgrounds are warmly welcomed to join.

Summer School Partners

• Uroboros Collective
• The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU)

Contact

Project manager: Zita Čechová - zita.cechova@budejovice2028.cz
Ars Biologica art & science residency program: Laura Welzenbach - laura.welzenbach@ars.electronica.art
Ars Biologica studies program: Michal Kučerák - michal.kucerak@tba21.org