The ArtScience Research Group of Center Leo Apostel for Transdisciplinary Studies (CLEA) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).
A free-thinking laboratory for art, science, education, and play.
The Center Leo Apostel (CLEA) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel is a rare space where science, philosophy, and the arts work side by side. From its founding, CLEA was imagined as a place to bring worldviews into dialogue, rather than treating art as an add-on to research.
In the ArtScience Department, artists, scientists, and philosophers explore the edges where methods overlap—experimenting with ways of thinking and making that neither field could reach alone. What emerges is a community testing how knowledge might look when curiosity is shared across disciplines, and when imagination is taken seriously as a tool of research.
https://clea.research.vub.be/
Who we are
Our research and practice are grounded in cybernetics, systems theory, complexity, and ecology, fields that emphasise process, interaction, relation, and emergence. In ArtScience, we expand on these ideas by making them tangible, embodied, and collective by connecting them with play, experimentation, and creativity. This forms a new methodology that brings together complexity science, artistic practice, and play to create a space where new ideas, connections, and possibilities can emerge. Our approach encourages unconventional methods that enable us to better understand and creatively tackle the complex challenges facing our world today.
What we do
At CLEA ArtScience, we engage in practice-led research, involving play, embodied experience, and theatre as methodologies that complement the traditional research methods. Our approach explores the relational similarities between artistic practices—such as embodied play and performance—and the dynamics of complex adaptive systems, including ecosystems, social structures, and living ecologies. This creates a feedback loop, where practice informs theory and theory in turn reshapes practice, cultivating creativity and deepening insights in both art and science. Through workshops, events like Systems At Play and the Imaginary Institute, artistic interventions, theatrical pieces, as well as academic writing, we facilitate transdisciplinary exchange, making scientific ideas accessible to artists, artistic ideas accessible to scientists, and opening collective creativity and relational thinking to the wider public. CLEA ArtScience also serves as a space, supporting and nurturing research collaborations that embody this experimental and relational spirit.
Laboratories for collective intelligence
& imagination
We believe that education has a critical role in developing our capacity to understand complex, interconnected systems. The challenges of our time—from climate change to technological impacts and social inequality—cannot be addressed through reductive, mechanistic thinking. By teaching cybernetic principles and systems perspectives, we aim to help people navigate complexity, see relationships rather than parts, recognise feedback loops and emergent properties, understand ourselves as embedded within living networks, and grasp how actions ripple through interconnected systems. This relational literacy is essential for transitioning to more sustainable modes of existence, where we recognise our entanglement with ecological and social systems and can imagine alternatives to our current models. Through a practice of embodied play, we engage our whole beings in systems thinking. This experiential approach aims to awaken an intuitive understanding of complex systems.
Education
At CLEA ArtScience, we create Laboratories for Collective Imagination, urgently needed spaces where people from diverse backgrounds and disciplines can engage in rare opportunities for artistic risk-taking, intellectual experimentation, and embodied play. Here, academic rigour from the Center Leo Apostel and broader university research meets the intuitive and imaginative practices of art, theatre, fiction, and music, forming a living, collective organism. Initiatives such as Systems At Play and the Imaginary Institute act as transdisciplinary contact zones, fostering dialogue, self-organisation, emergence, and collective intelligence. By integrating scientific rationality with creative intuition, CLEA ArtScience invites participants to move beyond fixed notions of "what is," exploring instead the open-ended possibilities of "what else could be," ultimately enabling novel and necessary ideas to emerge.
Practice-led Research
Learn more about our approach to ArtScience here.
Upcoming Events
Past Events