Venture Team Kultur supports students in developing artistic start-up projects.

With its pilot program STARTER, Venture Team Kultur has supported students at Bavarian art colleges in developing artistic ideas with entrepreneurial potential. At the final Demo Day on February 4, 2026, at Wavelab—the innovation lab and start-up center of the HMTM—five teams presented the concepts, prototypes, and formats developed in the program to the public for the first time.
The Demo Day turned into an impressive and varied evening: participants took part in sports activities, enjoyed a live concert, listened to a conversation with composer Fanny Hensel, who was brought to life digitally, and had the opportunity to explore innovative instruments and technologies.

STARTER is aimed at students who want to develop their own project ideas, test them, and take the first steps toward implementation – regardless of whether they involve event formats, product concepts, or artistic-technical developments. In addition to financial support of up to €2,500, participants received access to workshops and individual coaching. In the first round of the program, five projects by students from HMTM and AdBK Nuremberg were funded, all of which pursue innovative approaches to combining artistic practice with new formats for communication, products, and events:

• Studis für Schülis – Elena Horlau (AdBK Nuremberg) developed a platform through which students of fine arts and art education can offer courses for children and young people.
• The Sweat Set – Isabella Stricker and Fabian Graf (HMTM) combine an intensive workout with the experience of a live concert in which movement and music merge in time with the beat.
• Sonolith32 – Maximilian Schwarzer and Daan Wilms (HMTM) explore the connection between sound and stone and open up new perspectives for contemporary percussion literature.
• ComposerMeet – Celest Lang (HMTM) developed an audiovisual communication format between concert, conversation, and research, in which historical composers can be experienced as source-based AI dialogues.
• BassChrom – Miloš Pavićević and Alexander Heller (HMTM) developed an active guitar attachment that allows for greater comfort, endurance, and freedom of play when making music.

Venture Team Culture
Venture Team Culture is based at the AdBK Nuremberg and is a joint center for start-up support within the Hochschulverbund Kunsthochschule Bayern e.V. (Bavarian University of Fine Arts Association). This association comprises the six state-run Bavarian art colleges: AdBK Nuremberg, AdBK Munich, HMTM, HFF Munich, HfM Nuremberg, and HfM Würzburg. As part of the Bavarian High-Tech Agenda, the State Ministry of Science and the Arts is providing personnel and material resources until 2028 to promote start-up activities and establish a start-up culture at Bavarian art colleges.
With STARTER, the Venture Team Culture tested for the first time a specific funding format to support students in the early stages of developing artistic project ideas.

Venture Team Culture 
for Bavarian art colleges
Contact: ventureteam@adbk-nuernberg.de