Metapunkt gets support from NTNU Discovery

From Forward Remembrance research tool to public-facing platform

In December 2025, Synesyn received NOK 200,000 in pilot development support from NTNU Discovery. The six-month grant supports the further development of the Synesyn Framework, originally created as part of Forward Remembrance: Exploring Latent Utopias, the PhD artistic research project by Ayodele Arigbabu at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, NTNU.

The grant marks an important step in the evolving Metapunkt trajectory. Metapunkt began as a speculative vehicle for the Forward Remembrance research project: a fictional organisation, public-facing frame, and metafuturist staging ground for exploring how societies imagine possible futures. Through the NTNU Discovery pilot, that speculative frame is also being tested as something that could support a more durable public tool, and possibly a future organisational form.

Synesyn is the central operational tool in this development. It began as a custom research apparatus for working with generative AI, scenario-making, symbolic structures, and collaborative imagination. The Discovery-supported pilot focuses on moving Synesyn from a research tool used within artistic inquiry toward a framework that can be used more broadly by publics, cultural organisations, municipalities, facilitators, and other future-facing communities of practice.

The core activities supported by the grant include strengthening Synesyn’s architecture for stability and performance, improving the user interface for broader accessibility, embedding expert foresight facilitation into AI copilots, running two structured pilots with cultural and municipal partners, and clarifying the open-core licensing and contributor pathways needed for longer-term development.

The funding primarily supports developer time for product refinement and integration. This includes work on the platform’s reliability, usability, traceability, and ability to support structured collaborative processes outside the original research setting.

For Forward Remembrance, the Discovery grant is also a way of testing whether an artistic research apparatus can travel beyond the exhibition, workshop, and thesis contexts in which it first emerged. For Metapunkt, it is a careful step from speculative organisation toward possible public infrastructure. The aim is not to announce a finished product, but to validate whether the framework can work in real-world settings and prepare it for scalable, inclusive deployment.

Event: NTNU Discovery pilot grant
Awarded: December 2025
Amount: NOK 200,000
Duration: Six months
Project: Synesyn Framework / Metapunkt
Research context: Forward Remembrance: Exploring Latent Utopias
Purpose: Pilot development, platform refinement, public usability, real-world validation, and open-core preparation