The MARes in Hybrid Arts program (Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University) invites you to the public online defense of the Master’s thesis Spectrasomatics: Remixing Wellness via Chakra-Informed Art by Anna Laura Hafner, supervised by Emmanouel Rovithis, on Friday, 25 September 2026 — 6 pm (Greece time), via Zoom. The thesis develops the art-life concept of the Spectrasomatics methodology, examining how it can be applied while situating the work in relation to contemporary artistic practices and healing methods associated with the research.

The MARes in Hybrid Arts program (Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University) invites you to the public online defense of the Master’s thesis Where The Water Flows: Land Carries What It Was Told To Forget by Myrto Papadopoulos, supervised by Maria Chalkou, on Friday, 25 September 2026 — 13:00–14:30 (Greece time), via Zoom. This research focus on whether sustainability can be understood as an ecological question alone, or whether it must also encompass the people whose labour and knowledge sustain the land.

The MARes in Hybrid Arts program (Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University) invites you to the public online defense of the Master’s thesis The 8 Museum by Berry Sullivan, supervised by Dalila Honorato, on Thursday, 24 September 2026 — 6 pm (Greece time), via Zoom. This research bringing speculative museology into dialogue with object-oriented ontology and media archaeology, it examines the relationship between philosophical commitments and the lived experience of encountering objects.

The MARes in Hybrid Arts program (Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University) invites you to the public online defense of the Master’s thesis A Flower in the Dark Casts no Shadow: Drama, Digital Performance and Uncommon Sense in the Age of AI by Christos Tolis, supervised by Bill Psarras, on Thursday, 24 September 2026 — 3 pm (Greece time), via Zoom. This research examines what happens to authorship and agency when machine agents become active participants within a performative system.

The MARes in Hybrid Arts program (Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University) invites you to the public online defense of the Master’s thesis A Fungal Hack for Other-than-Human Learning: Speculative Design Fiction and Tabletop Roleplay as a Fungal Pedagogy by Anne Vlaanderen, supervised by Dalila Honorato, on Wednesday, 23 September 2026 — 3 pm (Greece time), via Zoom. This research examines under what conditions temporarily inhabiting a fungal perspective might unsettle assumptions about the human world and the ways knowledge is produced within it.

The MARes in Hybrid Arts, Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University, announces the first week of public Master’s thesis presentations for September 2026, taking place online from 23 to 25 September 2026. Across three consecutive days, MARes candidates will present research-creation projects that reflect the interdisciplinary and experimental scope of Hybrid Arts, bringing together fungal and more-than-human pedagogies, speculative design, digital performance, artificial intelligence, speculative museology, embodied and archival practices, visual storytelling, ecology, sound, movement, and interactive performance. The presentations are open to the public and will take place online via Zoom.

The MARes in Hybrid Arts, Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University, announces the first week of public Master’s thesis presentations for September 2026, taking place online from 15 to 18 September 2026. Across four consecutive days, MARes candidates will present research-creation projects that reflect the interdisciplinary and experimental scope of Hybrid Arts, bringing together artistic research, ecology, interspecies design, bio-based practices, critical cartography, computational processes, curatorial practice, degrowth, and slow media. The presentations are open to the public and will take place online via Zoom.

The MARes in Hybrid Arts program (Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University) invites you to the public online defense of the Master’s thesis Applying Principles of Degrowth and Slow Media in Curatorial Practices by Foteini Vergidou, supervised by Daphne Dragona, on Friday, 18 September 2026 — 6:00 pm (Greece time), via Zoom. This research examines how degrowth and slow media principles can inform curatorial practices in response to the accelerated pace, resource intensity, and pressures of constant visibility that shape contemporary art production.

The MARes in Hybrid Arts program (Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University) invites you to the public online defense of the Master’s thesis Carrying the Residue: From Ancestral Gesture to the Biodigital – Bio-Material Translocation and Situated Biochemistry by Elizabeth Henrietta Scholtz, supervised by Daphne Dragona, on Thursday, 17 September 2026 — 5:00 pm (Greece time) / 4:00 pm (South Africa), via Zoom. This research-creation project introduces Bio-Material Translocation (BMT) as a framework for tracing how biological materials move across artistic making, biochemical processes, computational encoding, and public encounter. Emerging from The Illuviation Project (2025), the research follows a lithic-to-biodigital trajectory.

The MARes in Hybrid Arts program (Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University) invites you to the public online defense of the Master's thesis LivArch: A Living Archive towards a Living Architecture: Developing an Interspecies Design Methodology with Apis Mellifera by Vaia Tsiokou, supervised by Adam Zaretsky, on Wednesday, 16 September 2026 — 7:00 pm (Greece time) / 12:00 pm (New York), via Zoom. This research-creation project explores how architectural and computational design might move from designing for other species toward designing with them. Working with honeybees (Apis mellifera) as autonomous agents capable of accepting, modifying, rejecting, or abandoning designed conditions, the project develops LivArch as an interspecies design methodology and Living Archive. Bringing together honeybee ethology and colony intelligence, ecological time, hive microclimate, material ecotoxicity, computational design, digital fabrication, artistic research, and cultural interpretation, the thesis proposes an Ecology of Reproductive Care as an alternative to approaches that reduce living systems to controllable functions.

The MARes in Hybrid Arts program (Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University) invites you to the public online defense of the Master's thesis The Amphibian Atlas: Ways of Knowing a River by Nicolás Parise Schneider, supervised by Tania Tsiridou, on Tuesday, 15 September 2026 — 6:00 pm (Greece time) / 12:00 pm (Argentina & Chile), via Zoom. This research-creation project explores how different forms of knowledge can contribute to understanding and representing the Biobío River in Chile. Bringing together geography, artistic research, critical cartography, illustration, field encounters, and editorial practice, the project takes the form of The Amphibian Atlas, an illustrated publication that creates encounters between ecological and scientific knowledge, territorial experience, community-based environmental monitoring, mapping, observation, drawing, and narrative.

The Department Assembly of the Department of Audio and Visual Arts, Ionian University, has approved that the next call for applications to the MARes in Hybrid Arts programme will be for the 2027–2028 academic year. The official call for applications will be published in Autumn 2026 and will include detailed information on admission requirements, the application process, important dates, and the programme curriculum. We look forward to welcoming a new cohort of artists, researchers, and creative practitioners to the MARes in Hybrid Arts community.

The MARes in Hybrid Arts would like to inform students, applicants, alumni, and collaborators that the Administrative Services of Ionian University will be closed for the summer recess from 3 August to 21 August 2026, following the University's official summer closure. The MARes Secretariat will not be processing administrative enquiries during the summer closure. Emails received during this period will be attended to after 24 August 2026.

We are pleased to continue the MSG Talks, an online platform where MARes postgraduate students share their ongoing research, artistic practices, and emerging inquiries with the broader academic and artistic community.

The MARes in Hybrid Arts is pleased to announce The CHAKRA TUNNEL, an interactive sculptural installation by Anna Laura Hafner, currently on view at Spiral House Park in Saugerties, New York, through 27 July 2026. Developed as part of Hafner's Master of Research (MARes) in Hybrid Arts thesis at the Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University, The CHAKRA TUNNEL forms part of a broader body of work and holistic artistic methodology titled SPECTRASOMATICS. The installation invites visitors to walk through each colour of the rainbow, engaging with the corresponding chakras through a series of guided movements and sound experiences presented in an accompanying video. The project showcases work developed as part of the artist's MARes thesis, supervised by Emmanouel Rovithis.