Thomas Brennan
Thomas Brennan is a Stockholm-based visual and performance artist, educator, and researcher whose work unfolds at the intersection of installation, opera, and hybrid media. His practice explores how bodies, voices, and technologies intertwine to generate new modes of expression, with a focus on disability, posthumanism, and technological embodiment. The current project, Puppet Hospital, is an experimental opera that fuses operatic tradition with electronic soundscapes, prosthetic augmentation, and AI-generated presence. It positions performance as a critical space where embodiment and disembodiment, tradition and contemporaneity, converge to reimagine how art encounters the fragile, mediated body.
Brennan’s trajectory bridges artistic practice with pedagogy, artistic research, and cultural exchange. Trained in both the arts and education, with a Master’s in Education focused on global pedagogical practices and cross-cultural learning, he approaches teaching as an extension of his artistic ethos: to create structures of experimentation that prepare students to navigate an interconnected and unstable world. As a former Head of the BA Program at Stockholm University of the Arts, and as a lecturer in postproduction, color grading, and mediated storytelling, he has developed curricula that intertwine artistic practice with critical inquiry, inviting students to imagine new possibilities for collaboration, technology, and sustainability.
Internationally, he contributes to artistic and scholarly dialogues on technology, sustainability, and pedagogy. Recent presentations at PQ Symposium (Prague), LANACOM (Alexandria), and AR@K (Oslo), as well as workshops across Europe and the Middle East, reflect his commitment to building transnational conversations that situate artistic research within a global and ecological framework. His membership in organizations such as Fylkingen and the Color Society International, alongside leadership roles within NordFilm and CILECT’s Developing Technologies Steering Committee, reinforce his investment in creating networks where artistic innovation and critical reflection mutually inform one another.
As an artist, educator, and researcher, Thomas approaches creative practice as a form of problem-solving that resists fixed boundaries. Whether through film postproduction, projection design, or performance, he is drawn to the porous spaces where disciplines, traditions, and technologies overlap. His aim is to cultivate performance as a site of transformation: a place where art not only mirrors our world but reconfigures the ways we might inhabit it, together, with greater attentiveness to embodiment, ecology, and the possibilities of the more-than-human.
Madeleine Karlsson
Madeleine Karlsson is a Stockholm-based choreographer, performer, and artistic director with over 30 years of international experience spanning dance, film, and performance art. Her artistic research explores the intersection of embodiment, identity, tradition, and transformation - often through improvisation, collaborative practice, and cross-cultural dialogue. She is the founder and artistic director of MAKA DANCE PRODUCTION, a platform for multidisciplinary and research-based performance.
Working across live performance, installation, film, and text, Karlsson’s practice situates the dancing body as a site of knowledge, memory, and resistance - interrogating norms around age, belonging, and temporality. Her work frequently engages with artists from diverse disciplines and cultural contexts, reflecting a commitment to both tradition and innovation.
The World Falls Silent (2023), her most recent stage work, centers the lived experiences of older professional dancers. Emerging from an age-critical, practice-led research process, it investigates how aging bodies navigate artistic environments shaped by youth-centric values. Through improvisation, memory, and text, the work challenges ageism while foregrounding embodied knowledge as a resource for ongoing creative agency. Drawing on Andersson’s theory of ageism (2008), Martin’s somatic learning (2017), and cross-cultural understandings of dignity in aging (Hansen & Kenny, 2019), the piece invites reflection on how tradition and experience shape contemporary performance practices.
In Shades (2022), an award-winning short dance film, Karlsson explores the thresholds of perception and movement through haptic visuality (Marks) and embodied affect. The work resists fixed narrative structures, offering instead a tactile cinematic experience that speaks to pre-verbal memory and intuitive knowing.
Her ongoing project with Australian artist Maitland Schnaars - a triptych on Belonging - interlaces performance, literature, and hybrid film. Through poetry, movement, and cultural exchange, the work questions how belonging is shaped, lost, and remembered. The project, premiering in Perth in 2027, reflects a long-term commitment to intercultural dialogue and decolonial perspectives within contemporary practice.
Education
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MA in Choreography, Stockholm University of the Arts
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Ballet Academy Stockholm (Professional Dancer Training)
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Teacher Certification in Contemporary Dance
International networks & collaborations(Selected)
Karlsson is a member of international networks such as IDOCDE and LEAP, and has led research collaborations on embodiment and artistic methodologies across Europe and Australia.
PRESENTATION OVERVIEW
Researching Puppet Hospital: Opera meets AI
Puppet Hospital is an artistic research project which is exploring the development of an experimental hybrid opera that interrogates the performativity of identity from a disabled and post humanist perspective. Research findings over the past three years have been presented in the form of opera scenes, mixing the power and heightened emotion of opera singers with electronic music compositions, poetic phrasing, kinetic scenography and costuming. Our most recent funding from the Stockholm University of the Arts takes our research into the realm of AI modeled voices, and projections of choreographed movement. Madeleine and I are focused on a shared exploration with post humanist scholars, electronic music composers and AI technologists to deepen the authenticity of the human voice and disabled body, and to question how the body is redefined within technological and existential frameworks.
In our work, liminal instants- whether triggered by trauma, prosthetic integration, or medical intervention- become performative events where identities are simultaneously dismantled and reconstituted. The opera form employs interdisciplinary strategies that weave together live performance, AI generated characters, dance, improvisation, and rigging-based staging with multi-sensory technologies. Prosthetic augmentation is explored not only as a medical extension of the body but also as a choreographic and dramaturgical tool, allowing performers to navigate themes of control, liberation, and transformation. The integration of artificial intelligence introduces an additional layer of performativity: an AI-generated holographic character, triggered by muscle contractions from the artist’s residual limb, emerges as a spectral presence that both accompany and destabilize the live performers. These apparitions blur the boundary between human and machine, autonomy and dependency, evoking questions central to post- humanist inquiry.
The critical approach of Puppet Hospital is grounded in the lived experience of amputation and disability. By reframing the disabled body not as a site of lack but as a locus of resistance and continual reinvention, the project destabilizes traditional narratives of passivity and dependence. Instead, it foregrounds disabled embodiment as a generative site of knowledge, artistry, and transformation.
By bringing together operatic tradition, contemporary technology, and disability-led aesthetics, Puppet Hospital contributes to broader conversations about how performance can articulate and transform lived experiences of bodily change. The project aims to open a dialogue on the evolving relationships between performers, audiences, and machines, positioning hybrid opera as a critical and imaginative space where tradition and contemporaneity converge.
Our presentation will include an introduction and framing of the project within disabled and post humanist fields, followed by a description of our choreographic and AI modeling explorations, and our intentions behind such study. Additionally, we will show excerpts of our findings to date, introduce other main collaborators and their contributions, and offer a roadmap of possible futures at Puppet Hospital.