Interdisciplinary Conference

TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

in Art & Science

Vienna, September 14-17 2027

CALL

TTT2027 Vienna: Call for Papers, Artist-Talks and Artwork Presentations

Submission of abstracts/descriptions: 11.11, 2026
14-17 September 2027 | University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria

The seventh international conference Taboo – Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science (TTT2027 Vienna) will take place on 14-17 September 2027 at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Angewandte). Seven years after TTT2020 Vienna/Online was conceived as an umbilical cord between what would be and what it is, we return in person to Vienna, with TTT2027 conceived as a placenta. Our invitation to participate comes with an unapologetic reminder that narratives of autonomy, mastery, and limitless growth often try to conceal. Life begins through dependence. It survives through relationships. And the conditions that allow something to live are never guaranteed. Inspired by a temporary organ, we hope that TTT2027 Vienna will be a moment of nourishment in which an encounter, a conversation, a gesture, or a temporary community can alter what happens next. But innocence apart, after sustaining life, it can become research material, therapeutic resource, cosmetic ingredient, biological data within systems of ownership, appropriation, circulation, and profit.

Whose bodies are expected to nourish, reproduce, care, endure, and remain available to others? Who is allowed to need care? Who gets to reproduce, transition, refuse reproduction, make kin, withdraw, end treatment, or survive differently? The placenta is not maternal innocence. It is a contested infrastructure of attachment. What happens when nourishment itself becomes extractable? The question is as biological, as it is also social. Artistic practices nourish communities, institutions, technologies, cities, and markets, while the people producing that cultural value are often expected to work with too little time, money, security, or support. Care must also extend to artistic autonomy and to practices that cannot, or do not want to, be reduced to content, visibility, productivity, impact, or market value. Excessive care can become uneven, exhausting, imposed, withheld, commodified, politicized, or refused when protection becomes control, when dependency becomes violence. Care is not limitless intervention. It may mean sustaining, repairing, feeding, or protecting, but it may also mean knowing when to stop, when to withdraw, or when to accompany rather than intervene.

TTT is not an escape from a damaged world, nor does it pretend that a conference can repair it. But the temporary matters. The encounter matters. The possibility of being together at a particular moment matters. Between the forbidden and the accepted, body and technology, organism and environment, human and nonhuman, science and fiction, norm and deviation, life and death, TTT2027 Vienna, engages with nourishment, extraction, care, interdependence, and the conditions that allow artistic and scientific practices to continue or to end. We invite artists, scientists, researchers, curators, performers, technologists, activists, and practitioners working between disciplines to contribute and we are particularly interested in work where art and science disturb, complicate, infect, transform, and/or nourish each other.

Submission Topics

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

Nourishment, care, and Artistic Intelligence
The placenta: fragility, temporality, exchange, and attachment
Feminist, queer, and trans practices of care
Reproductive justice and bodily autonomy
Gestation, birth, abortion, infertility, and reproductive technologies
Human tissues, biological materials, ownership, consent, and commodification
Euthanasia, assisted dying, palliative care, and the ethics of ending life
Creative labour, cultural extraction, and care for the artist
Cultural individuality, artistic autonomy, and the right to remain difficult
Chosen kinship and more-than-human relations
Invisible labour and economies of care
Symbiosis, parasitism, mutualism, and dependency
Bioart, mutation, hybridization, and DIY/DIWO biology
Artificial Intelligence, Artistic Intelligence, and synthetic agency
Cyborg bodies, prostheses, augmentation, and technological dependency
Toxicity, contamination, immunity, and biological borders
Food, hunger, fermentation, digestion, and metabolism
Water, soil, air, seeds, and infrastructures of sustenance
Rewilding, ecological repair, and damaged environments
Migration, borders, displacement, and hospitality
Biopolitics, necropolitics, and lives made disposable
Witchcraft, healing, and situated knowledges
Death, decomposition, composting, and regeneration
Repair, refusal, mutual aid, and collective survival

We also welcome proposals that do not fit neatly into any of these categories.

Submission Guidelines

TTT2027 invites proposals for: Papers, Artist-Talks and Artwork Presentations. All submitted abstracts/descriptions are reviewed by the TTT Scientific-Artistic Committee, which is responsible for the selection of proposals. Accepted papers and artist-talks will be grouped into sessions of three to four participants. Each presentation is allocated 15 minutes, followed by an additional 15-minute collective Q&A at the end of each session. Acceptance of artwork presentation proposals depends on available space, time, technical resources, safety requirements, and curatorial considerations. Each abstract or artwork description should be submitted through the TTT digital platform by November 11, 2026. English is the working language.

Disclaimer

TTT remains a free conference. There are no registration or participation fees for committee members, presenters or attendees and no guaranteed support for the travelling costs of participants. When possible we have lunch and coffee breaks provided at the venue, because remaining together between sessions matters, and we try to develop local partnerships to support accommodation. We also welcome voluntary initiatives to help participating artists and speakers meet travel and accommodation costs.

The organization of these events is an equal opportunities initiative and ensures that its selection procedures by a qualified international artistic-scientific committee do not discriminate on any ground such as sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age, gender identity or sexual orientation. Selection criteria are the proposed project and relevant experience to the object of the call demonstrated in the application.

The activities developed during TTT conferences will be documented for archiving and dissemination purposes.

Please check LOCATION and DATES before SUBMISSION. All accepted contributions should REGISTER [no fee and opening soon] and consider contributing to the PROCEEDINGS. For your convenience, our team has prepared a few practical TIPS to help you prepare to join us in Vienna.