Ars Nova Tokyo

【The University of Tokyo】

Official Social Media

Project Objectives

Ars Nova Tokyo begins from the belief that opening new possibilities requires more than solving existing problems; it requires rethinking the assumptions that produce them. We turn to art as a practice for reworking those frameworks themselves. To do so, we trace “art” back to its Latin root, “ars”: techniques for sensing, making, communicating, collaborating, and imagining. By examining and recombining diverse ars, art reappears as a paradoxical ars without a fixed purpose—an indeterminate hinge that unsettles established ways of thinking while reconnecting them in new ways. Bringing together students, researchers, and practitioners across disciplines, Ars Nova Tokyo creates a shared ground for learning, making, and imagining futures beyond the constraints of disciplinary boundaries and short-term returns.

Project Approach

Ars Nova Tokyo brings together diverse forms of knowledge and practice across the University of Tokyo, encouraging recombination rather than specialization. Each course is co-taught by instructors from different fields, enabling students and teachers alike to learn through collaboration. Participants engage with “ars” such as sensing, interfaces, virtual reality, future-summoning, modeling, and instrument-building, alongside “meta-ars” such as investigation, economy, dramaturgy, and theory, which help connect and transform different forms of knowledge and practice. Through collaborative production teams, students, researchers, and practitioners bring multiple ars into relation, developing projects that circulate within and beyond the university. In doing so, Ars Nova Tokyo fosters an ongoing cycle of learning, creation, public engagement, and collective inquiry across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

The University of Tokyo

Ars Nova Tokyo is a new experimental art school staged within the University of Tokyo. Rather than treating “art” as a single discipline, it approaches art as ars——a shared name for techniques and ways of making, sensing, and thinking.
The program reconnects diverse forms of ars already present across the university: from sensor technologies and engineering to plant-environment research, to media theory, to artistic and critical practice. By linking these domains, Ars Nova Tokyo creates new circuits for learning and making, ones that don’t begin with fixed answers, but with shared experiments.
Courses are co-taught by instructors with different disciplines under the same course title. This isn’t just a division of labor; it’s a mise-en-scène in which instructors also learn from one another in real time. Students don’t only learn what teachers already know——they learn by watching teachers learn something they don’t know.
Ars Nova Tokyo also invites practitioners from outside the university——artists, musicians, performers, engineers, editors, programmers, dramaturgs, and others——to join as collaborators in teaching and production. Whatever results would be made public through the Publication Division that runs in parallel to the classes.

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