FREEDOM TO CREATE 2025 Conference Programme Announced
On May 8–9, 2025, Vytautas Magnus University (VDU) will host the 4th student conference FREEDOM TO CREATE. This year’s conference, titled “Sonata of Science and Culture,” is dedicated to commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Lithuania’s most famous composer and painter, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911).
Conference Programme.
On May 8, the conference will open with the concert “North” — a transmedia project combining an audiovisual music concert by Titas Petrikis and paintings by media artist and painter Rimantas Plungė.
The concert will take place at 6 p.m. in the VDU Great Hall. Admission is free.
The project invites the audience on a journey of thoughts and feelings to the Arctic North, where a person contemplates their existence. The music and visualizations specially created for this concert, together with a series of paintings, reveal the grandeur of nature and the human connection to it, as well as a personal Lithuanian attachment to this remote region. Traveling through the Arctic, where every form of life fights more for survival than against each other, people must be persistent and learn to accept things as they are in the constant gusts of wind.
The creative foundation of the project relates to M. K. Čiurlionis’s interdisciplinarity and media synthesis, where music and visual art become equally expressive forms. In Čiurlionis’s works, elements of nature gain a metaphysical dimension connecting humans with cosmic order, and “North,” through the synthesis of sound and image, also seeks to convey the grandeur of nature and human existential reflection. Čiurlionis experimented with transferring musical structure into painting, creating visual symphonies and sonatas — similarly, “North” uses soundscapes and visual projections to expand the boundaries of artistic experience.
The concert is a performance lasting over an hour, blending live and electronic music with visualizations. Before and after the concert, in the foyer adjacent to the hall, as part of the transmedia art, Rimantas Plungė’s paintings will be exhibited, creating an expanded narrative context and deeply immersing the viewer in the overall experience of the “North” project.
Artistic team:
- Music: Titas Petrikis
- Painting: Rimantas Plungė
- Visualizations: Matas Gineika
- Scenography and Art: Artūras Šimonis
- Lighting Technology: Viktoras Vaičikauskas
- Sound Director: Matas Jančauskas
- Music Directors: Arūnas Zujus, Vytautas Bedalis
- Performers: Alanas Užemeckas, Aistė Mikutytė, Miglė Šoliūnaitė, Kristina Zubrickaitė, Gabija Bikulčiūtė, Aurelija Turskytė
- Additional Music Recordings: Antanas Taločka, Vytis Nivinskas.
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On the second day of the conference, May 9, traditionally a Friday, VDU students will present reports and performances reflecting this year’s conference keywords: liberal arts, interdisciplinarity, creativity, sustainable development, visionary thinking, multilingualism, and artificial intelligence (AI).
Conference Programme.
The conference will be held at V. Putvinskio St. 23. Admission is free.
The conference will open with two presentations in English. Professor Rimantas Plungė (VDU Faculty of Arts) and Professor Titas Petrikis (VDU Faculty of Arts) will present “Echoes of the North: M. K. Čiurlionis’ Legacy in Transmedia Art,” followed by a presentation by Greta Katkevičienė, a student at VDU Faculty of Humanities and a museologist at the M. K. Čiurlionis Collections Department of the National M. K. Čiurlionis Art Museum, titled “Multifaceted Reflections of M. K. Čiurlionis”
More information is available on the FREEDOM TO CREATE page https://www.vdu.lt/en/freedom-to-create/
The conference is presented by the first work of synergy of future science and art in the world, created in 2022 by VMU alumni, geneticists Lukas Žemaitis and Ignas Galminas, and painter Tadas Sokolovas – “DNA Painting No. 1”.
The conference is part of a series of events, projects, and initiatives that will take place throughout 2025, dedicated to Vytautas Magnus University’s presidency of the “Transform4Europe” (T4EU) alliance. The alliance, uniting eleven European universities, aims to create joint structures, programs, and platforms for research and innovation, with the main goal of strengthening the T4EU’s future vision, identity, and cooperation.
