The Centre for Aesthetics and Business Creativity (ABC) has its physical location at Lund University School of Economics and Management (LUSEM), but the people involved come from diversed fields, such as art history, theology, music and business administration.
To really understand what all this entails and is about, we took the opportunity to talk to Alexandra Huang-Kokina and Robin Porsfelt, both postdoctoral researchers about their role in building the ABC Centre. Alexandra and Robin are relatively new to the center, and while their specific roles and responsibilities are still being finalised, we got a glimpse into the plans for their involvement.
Alexandra joins us from the University of Edinburgh, where she wrote her PhD thesis, titled: Music Performativity in Early Twentieth-Century Piano Novels. Alexandra also holds a master’s degree in modern literature at the University of Edinburgh and in piano performance at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Alexandra is passionate about digital creativity and how to integrate AI into immersive opera theatre and has created and directed her first opera called AI Kaidan, that premiered in Edinburgh in March 2025. It is an immersive Japanese science-fiction opera where AI, human creativity, and the Kabuki theatre entwine in a haunting tale of love, betrayal, and digital immortality.
I welcome inclusive audience engagement, steering opera towards today’s digital entertainment cultures and making it accessible to a broader audience
Alexandra will continue her passion of combining AI and music to integrate this with her work within the ABC Center. She welcomes inclusive audience engagement, steering opera towards today’s digital entertainment cultures and making it accessible to a broader audience. Alexandra have received a grant from AI Lund Initiative, where she will continue her work and also serves as a first step toward creating an AI-driven innovation ecosystem for the live arts, aligning with the ABC Centre’s mission as an innovation hub for cultural and creative industries.
Robin joins us from Copenhagen Business School, where he wrote his PhD thesis, titled: Seeing through Signs: On Economic Imagination and Semiotic Speculation, with a background in both sociology and business administration.
I will look at the organisational, cultural, and imaginative processes of digitally translating live performances, and experiences, to new and old audiences.
Robin has a wide range of research interests, including the philosophy of fiction, the sociology of value, and most recently neo-craft work, as in the way current craft producers’ imagination of the past shapes their innovation towards the future. Within the ABC centre Robin will look at the organisational, cultural, and imaginative processes of digitally translating live performances, and experiences, to new and old audiences.
Shaping the Digital Concert Hall of the Future
Both Robin and Alexandra will be involved in the project Kalaudioscope at Lund University Digital Interactive Concert Hall. This project aims to revolutionise cultural experiences by creating the digital concert hall of tomorrow and focuses on placing the individual audience member’s experience at the forefront. Led by the Faculty of Arts at Lund University and supported by Future by Lund, this initiative is part of a thematic collaboration designed to foster innovation and development in specific societal challenges.
Kalaudioscope will explore how emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, can make cultural experiences more accessible, interactive, and personalised. The goal is to develop next-generation digital live performances that offer audiences greater choice and creative freedom, allowing them to tailor and share their cultural experiences in new ways.
Collective creativity
ABC Centre wants to drag aesthetics in from the weekend culture of spectatorship into the work-week. There is a need to develop a stronger ability to engage in conversations that balance both aesthetic and economic considerations, when organising collective creativity. The most effective example of collectively organized creativity is the modern business organisation. This is primarily where Business Administration is most distinct in the Centers work. Modern business organisation examines the challenges the future global citizen will face in trade and collaboration with Europe. As only 9% of the global population, Europe cannot compete with Asian economies on speed or cost, nor match North America in high-tech investment. Instead, Europe’s unique strength lies in the intricate intertwining of economics and aesthetics, an essential part of our global contribution in areas like fashion, art, music, and design.
Craft research plays an important role in this. The hands-on making of objects of crafts, whether that is ceramics, textiles, woodworking to make more meaningful things, that last, that can be maintained, that can be recycled, that can be inherited, that can be cared for.
What is in the future?
During the autumn one focus for the ABC Centre will be on literature and its relationships with imagination, creativity and innovation. This will be done together with the language department at Edinburgh University.
The ABC centre will also have two guests visiting, Jochem Kroezen and Nada Endrissat.
Jochem Kroezen is an expert on craft. Craft advocates making fewer and better things and has a different look on how production is done in our world. Producing things that will last and that can build meaningful relationships, and in relation to which we feel obliged to care.
Nada Endrissat has a background in studying innovation in the perfume industry, and will continue the craft-theme when visiting ABC in December. The primarily focus on her visit will be how entrepreneurship-, creativity- and innovation education can use art and aesthetic experiences more in learning processes. This reflects a long-standing interest in the relationship between entrepreneurship and learning. Professor Endrissat will help in developing innovative ways of integrating aesthetics into our educational perspective, and in the learning processes we design for students.
