5th to 8th May 2026
Future Follows Past – Creating a Gesamtkunstwerk together for Arts and Aesthetics Research
About IAEA
The International Association for Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA) is a non-profit organisation promoting the scientific study of all aspects of aesthetics. The goal of the organisation is to give scientific research on aesthetics an international forum for discussion and exchange. Organisation members employ a wide range of empirical methods from psychology and other social sciences, as well as computational, biological, and neuroscience techniques; these target research questions in traditional aesthetic domains (visual art, music, performing arts), as well as newly emerging domains (video, computer animation), and broader, domain-general or everyday questions on the nature of beauty and aesthetic experiences.
About IAEA Jena 2026
From 5th – 8th May 2026 the IAEA congress will take place in Jena, Germany. Under the theme of Future Follows Past – Creating a Gesamtkunstwerk together for Arts and Aesthetics Research we invite you to share your research, ideas, thoughts, and discussions with us. We welcome interdisciplinary submissions from both researchers and artists in relation to the arts and aesthetics.
Gesamtkunstwerk is a German concept that translates to ‘total work of art’. It refers to the idea of integrating multiple artforms (visual arts, architecture, design, music, performance, etc) into a single unified artistic expression. By adopting this as a theme, we aim to create not just a conference but a collaborative aesthetic experience- where researchers, artists and designers come together to explore and co-create across disciplinary boundaries. We invite you to be a part of this Gesamtkunstwerk at IAEA 2026 in the spirit of Bauhaus innovation. For those interested, we will organise a pre-conference visit to the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar on 5th May.
IAEA 2026 is organised by aesthetics researchers based in Germany, Austria, the UK, and Canada.
If you have any questions regarding the congress please email us at mail@iaea-jena2026.org.
coming soon
Future Follows Past
(loosely based on Form Follows Function)
we invite you to create a Gesamtkunstwerk at Jena 2026