Responding to the open call on the theme: 'Artists, Designers and the Philosophers we Love'
Artists
have long been interested in the field of philosophy; it has been
subject to both fascination and scepticism. Artists are found quoting
nuggets of philosophy as inspiration and as context for their work. For
some, philosophers are names to conjure with, to add theoretical ballast
to their perspectives, whereas for others philosophy is a vital of
source of criticality, offering a new perspective on an individual's art
and the context in which we find ourselves. For generations, artists
have looked to philosophers of the Frankfurt School to understand the
art-society-politics nexus and their role in it, and artists, such as
Joseph Kosuth, engage with the Analytic tradition. In Art After Philosophy (1969) Kosuth responds to AJ Ayer.
Philosophy
comprises one aspect of an art education at BA and MA levels, and for
many, a Doctorate in Fine Art practice, requires a serious engagement
with philosophy in addition to theory, history and other disciplines.
Can artists contribute meaningfully to philosophy? Can there be a
productive relationship between art practice and philosophy that goes
beyond name-checking the Good and the Great, and merely illustrating a
well-honed philosophical phrase? What is it for an artist to love a
philosopher? In this workshop, we want to explore the relationship
between art and philosophy from the perspective of practicing artists.
Our aim is to examine how art can engage with, and contribute to the
theoretical problems of philosophy, and offer a critical rethinking of
philosophies re-imagined and interrogated through art practice. The
symposium is open to both senior and early-career artists and scholars
who are planning or conducting projects in philosophy and art.
20-21 June 2019
School of Creative Arts, College Lane, Hatfield
|| Tickets available through
UHArts || £10 and nothing for students ||
Thurs 20 June
16.15 KeynoteDr Kerry Power (PhD) : How can diffraction support art making process?
Monash University | Melbourne | Australia
17.15 Teodora Sinziana Fartan : Hyper Chaos - Exploring New Media Art through the Lens of Science Fiction, Speculative Realism and Weird Science
MFA ; student | Goldsmith’s College | University of London
17.35 Stephen Sewell : The Impoverishment of Truth
Independent Artist | USA
17.55
Prof Simeon Nelson : Process and Materiality - Solid Speculation in a Fluid World
University of Hertfordshire | UK
18.15 Q+A panel discussion
18.30 Drinks Reception
Fri 21 June
10.00
Kerry Purcell : Risking Love - Encountering the universal through the local
University of Hertfordshire | UK
10.20
Dave Ball : Doing Things Alphabetically - Sartre’s Autodidact and Tactically Absurd Practice
PhD candidate | Winchester School of Art | UK
10.40Lisa Taliano : Disorientation Re/presentation
Independent Artist | USA
11.00 Q+A panel discussion
11.20 Break
11.40Alison Pasquariello : Verbier Art Summit: a multi-directional exploration of Philosophy and Art
Verbier Art Summit | Switzerland
12.00Shannon Forrester : Can painting be words? Can the philosophical be material?
PhD candidate | Royal College of Art | UK
12.20Dr Anna Walker (PhD) : The haptic visual - making sense of the world through touch or being touched
Plymouth University | UK
12.40 ;Q+A panel discussion
13.00 Lunch
14.00Chicks on Speed : Facing the Gesamtkunstwerk foot first
Prof Alexandra Murray-Leslie (PhD) | Trondheim Academy of Fine Art p;| Norway
Sophia Efstathiou | Postdoctoral Fellow in Applied Ethics | Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Prof Tina Frank | University of Art and Design, Linz | Austria
14.20 Yamu Wang : A Reader’s Response to A Thousand Plateaus’ Introduction to Rhizome - & ICH & I & CH &
Zurich University of the Arts | Switzerland
14.40Jaspal Birdi : Being connected is less costly than being engaged
Independent Artist | Italy
15.00 Q+A panel discussion
15.20 Break
15.40Maria Patricia Tinajero : When Dirt Becomes Soil - Ecological Art Practices as a New Philosophy of Praxis in Age of the Anthropocene
PhD candidate | Institute for Doctoral Studies in Visual Art Philosophy in Portland, Maine | USA
16.00 Dr Sebastian Mühl (PhD) : On aesthetic indeterminacy
Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt | Austria
16.20Mimi Cabell : I'll work out tomorrow
Assistant Professor | Rhode Island School of Design | USA
16.40 Q+A panel discussion17.00 end
Abstracts
Kerry Power : How can diffraction support art-making process?
The application of diffraction in a theoretical context is supported by
the physical phenomenon The physical phenomenon occurs around us just
as light, sound or water for example encounter matter Picture a single
light source illuminating an object and casting a shadow. The shadow
fringe displays overlapping light waves that intensify at the edge.
Similarly, waves of light can compete and cancel each other out,
creating a diffractive pattern. This example can be used as a starting
point to understand how diffraction can be used as a conceptual model
and applied to knowledge formation (Barad, 2007).
In the keynote
presentation, I work through Karen Barad’s (2007) theorisation of
diffraction and interrogate my application as an art-making tool. My use
of diffraction in this context demonstrates a combustible sum of
melting, active, sifting and overlapping applications to embrace
difference as co-constitutive or intra-active (Barad, 2007). My artwork
is projected throughout the presentation to support this process.
Kerry
Power works in the faculty of education at Monash University,
Australia. She has taught early years, primary and secondary pre-service
teachers educational research and art education. She is a practicing
artist and researcher working primarily in the field of digital
artmaking, educator virtual intra-action and new materialism.
Teodora Sinziana Fartan : Hyper Chaos - Exploring New Media Art through
the Lens of Science Fiction, Speculative Realism and Weird Science
This
paper aims to explore the newly-formed grey areas where emergent new
media art practices overlap with speculative realism tendencies, weird
science ideologies and futuristic perspectives. Taking cues from
thinkers such as Eugene Thacker, Simon O’Sullivan, Raymond Williams and
Gilbert Simondon, this research aims to highlight the ways in which new
forms of media art question, interpret and attempt to invent the future,
both at a macro and micro level, sometimes even rethinking its entire
ontological status.
With a particular focus on ideas of fictioning,
fabulating and creating alternative imaginaries in order to disseminate
what it means to be human today, or perhaps better said, in a vague
tomorrow, this paper attempts to map the new speculative turn as
reflected in new media art practice, whilst highlighting the influence
of science fiction on speculative art tendencies. Ultimately, the aim of
this research is to map the intertwining of speculative and weird
realism with ideas such as O’Sullivan’s ‘science fictioning’ and new
forms of computational and electronic media in order to highlight the
ways in which these practices inform and enrich each other.
Teodora
is currently a graduate MFA student at Goldsmith’s, University of
London. Her research interests include speculative realism, materialism,
the weird,the Anthropocene, theology in the technological context,
myth-science, fictioning and sensing. Her previous work has been featured
in exhibitions across Romania, Hungary, the UKand Australia, and
features in both permanent and private collections. In 2016, she was
shortlisted for the Australian Contemporary Art Awards for her
exploration of the use of new materials within painting. Most recently,
she has exhibited at the ‘Echosystems’ Goldsmiths Computational Arts
Degree show in London, UK and participated in a panel discussing affect
titled ‘Working Things Through and Feeling Things Out: Six Statements on
Computation, Translation and Experience’ at the 2019 Transmediale
Festival of Art Digital Culture
Stephen Sewell : The Impoverishment of Truth
I
propose to discuss Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism and the need for
artists to engage in the making of truth claims. Drawing on Bhaskar’s
work the talk will first address the ways in which art/cultural
production does not exist in an autonomous relationship to historical
reality but is inextricably bound up in it. Furthermore it will
highlight the fact that at any specific historical conjuncture there is
always a dominant hegemonic power that structures the conditions of
political, economic, and social practices. If this dominant hegemony is
to be contested we need to be able to make claims regarding how it works
to reproduce itself and maintain dominance, why it is insufficient,
what an alternative project looks like and why it is necessary. Bhaskar
draws on Marx and Althusser to make a case for the existence of an
ontologically real space outside of our experience of it and the need
for a depth model of ontology in order to discover and understand the
structural forces/causal laws that determine our existence. Once
discovered they must be made knowable through a dialectical relationship
between epistemology and ontology. I will argue that the site of
art/cultural production is precisely where these structures can be
represented and made knowable in order to contest dominant ideological
and hegemonic forces while avoiding the essentialism and relativism that
has led to the current impoverishment of truth that marks our present
historical moment.
Stephen Sewell is a Brooklyn-based artist,
filmmaker and educator. He received his MFA from the University of
Washington and is an alum of the Whitney Independent Study Program,
Mountain School of Arts, and Art & Law Program. His works have been
exhibited nationally and internationally and he has lectured and
participated on panel discussions at Queens Museum, Pacific Northwest
College of Art, MoMA PS1 Print Shop, and Cornish College of Arts. He
currently works at the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Simeon Nelson: Process and Materiality - Solid Speculation in a Fluid World
I
will highlight the influence of the process/organismic philosophy of A.
N. Whitehead; his notions of pan-experientialism and critique of simple
location, the Radical Empiricism of William James in which relations
between things are as real and prominent as the things themselves
including the observer, and other significant sources and inspirations
including phenomenology, cybernetics and complex emergent systems.
The process view embraces the world, its relations, its process of
becoming and crucially one’s own being in that same world
simultaneously. This and the radical empirical view is that all
elements, however one divides them up for convenience and conceptual
clarity are intrinsically monistic. Subject and object, mind and matter
are parts of the greater whole and are of the same stuff. Object needs
subject in order to be so, and subject needs object in order to be so,
both are abstractions distilled from experience. I will touch on how
variations on this worldview in Neo-Platonism, Taoism and forms of
animism have influenced my work.
Process Philosophy must be seen in
relation to other schemas so as not to commit the naturalistic fallacy.
I am thrilled by its grandeur but I am also attracted to atomism as a
granular aesthetic and what I think of as an interface between
allopoiesis and autopoiesis - the self-regulating governor of a steam
engine.
I will conclude with creative limitation and freedom. I
think limitation and partiality are necessary for meaning while freedom -
a featureless rhizomatic hierarchy of infinite possibility imprisons
the imagination; a bifurcated or otherwise striated topology gives much
better grit: it is the very limitations of symbol, circumstance or
material that bestow power.
Kerry Purcell : Risking Love - Encountering the universal through the local
In
his 2009 book In Praise of Love, Alain Badiou begins with a description
of some adverts for the French dating site Meetic that he encountered
on the Paris Métro. These adverts carried the straplines ‘Get love
without Chance’, ‘Be in love without falling in love’ and ‘Get perfect
love without suffering’. This ‘safety first’ approach to love is
symptomatic of a culture that turns away from ideas of the universal
towards an identitarian position that one’s desires equate with what one
is willing to accept in the other. Badiou argues that love offers the
possibility of experiencing difference in its infinity. It is an
encounter that can be painful, but the outcome can be a rupture with the
established order (the self) that opens up a space for the radically
new. Like Mallarmé’s lampbearer, Badiou argues that one must remain
alert to the potential that love offers to challenge our deeply held
beliefs of the immutability of our identities.
This paper will
explore how Badiou’s thought offers a way of thinking about the idea of
love as a ‘unique trust placed in chance’ (Badiou, 2009: 16). It will
examine how such a stance can leave us open to individual experience as
universality. How love of the other (be that another person, a piece of
art, a book, a riot etc.) offers a possibility to encounter difference
in its unbounded sublimity.
Dave Ball : Doing Things Alphabetically: Sartre’s Autodidact and Tactically Absurd Practice The proposed paper presents my ongoing project
A to Z, drawing parallels with the activities of the Autodidact in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 novel
Nausea.
The presentation is informed by my practice-based PhD research into
absurdity, which is driven through the “tactical” use of absurdity in my
own work, situated within a wider field of contemporary art and
philosophical discourse.
A to Z is a project begun in 2011
based on the premise of visualising every word in the Concise Oxford
English dictionary in alphabetical order. Around 10,000 visualisations
will need to be made, taking around 35 years to complete. 1,788 images
have so far been made, the most recent being “damage”. The entire
sequence of A, B and C-words were recently shown at a solo exhibition A
to Z: The First Seven Years at Gallery Oldham, Manchester.
Sartre’s novel
Nausea
features a character known as the Autodidact, who is discovered to be
reading the books in the library in alphabetical order. His absurdly
systematic acquisition of knowledge is, for Sartre, a naïve humanist
folly – a misplaced faith in the betterment of the self through rational
learning.
Performed tactically, however, such absurdity can be
reimagined as a form of critical practice. A to Z enacts exactly this
kind of tactical absurdity, functioning less as Sartrean “bad faith”
than as playful disruption. The work thus “thinks” philosophically
absurd ideas in a context far removed from their existential origins.
The presentation will be accompanied by images from A to Z
Dave
Ball is an artist based in Berlin and Wales; he was
educated at Goldsmiths College, London (MA), and the University of Derby
(BA), and is currently researching the use of “tactical absurdity” in
critical (fine) art practice at Winchester School of Art (PhD). He is
represented by Galerie Art Claims Impulse, Berlin
Lisa Taliano : Disorientation Re/presentation The
human race has become a geological force. Ecological problems are no
longer just an issue of our impact on the environment, they’re about our
impact on the earth’s system. The magnitude of the accelerated
transformation has turned ecological questions into questions of
survival and has disoriented us in space and time. The newness of the
situation and its complexity makes it difficult to fully know what the
issues are. For that reason, philosophers like Bruno LaTour, Timothy
Morton and Donna Haraway call on artists to work across disciplines to
help visualize, come up with a new cosmology, myths, and representations
of the world to render us sensitive to these issues.
This talk
will focus on the success and failure of Bruno LaTour’s
interdisciplinary performance lecture – Inside. The performance lecture
is the result of his working with artists to find a new way of
representing the world from the inside, as opposed to the world
represented as a blue globe from outer space. Given that life exists
within a very thin layer of activity on the earth’s crust, a feeling for
the sensitivity of this skin is difficult to represent when you imagine
it from the outside. We are not in a globe, we are on top of a very
thin layer of the earth. Everything we see and encounter in life exist
in this tiny critical zone. The artist’s role in the
scientific/political philosophical situation will be to find ways to
render ourselves sensitive to this layer.
Alison Pasquariello : Verbier Art Summit: a multi-directional exploration of Philosophy and ArtWhat
structures will enable meaningful relationships between Philosophy and
Art? What is the potential in establishing channels for productive
discourse between the two disciplines? The Verbier Art Summit is an
international non-profit platform for discourse, bringing together
thought leaders and leading art world figures in Verbier, Switzerland.
Each year, the Summit invites a group of speakers with a shared interest
in an annual theme, in collaboration with a rotating museum director,
for a weekend of dialogue. In this discussion, Project Manager at the
Verbier Art Summit, Alison Pasquariello, will present on the impact of
bringing together philosophers, artists and art world professionals into
one dialogue.
At the Verbier Art Summit, philosophers have
introduced academic concepts into the discourse surrounding art,
deepening conversations whose philosophical grounding was once
restricted to summarised quotes by the ‘Great’ philosophers. Terminology
such as ‘indeterminacy’ and ‘ineffability’, having long been studied
within philosophical disciplines, beautifully facilitated conceptual
break-throughs among an audience of art world figures at the Summit. Yet
what does the philosopher have to gain from these encounters, and how
can cultural projects attract philosophers and keep them engaged? If art
picks up where Philosophy ends, then we must ask—what is the role of
Philosophy at art’s end?
Alison will review key examples of
cross-disciplinary dialogues engaging with Philosophy through innovative
approaches, in order to investigate the potentialities for
collaboration within the Philosophy and Art symbiosis.
Alison
Pasquariello graduated from Boston University with a Bachelor’s in
Philosophy and Mathematics in 2015, where she conducted original
research in Libreville, Gabon under the Karbank Fellowship for
Philosophy Research. In 2017, Alison earned her Master’s in Logic from
the University of Amsterdam, publishing her interdisciplinary thesis at
the Institute of Logic, Language, and Computation on interactions
between culture and cognition, with a focus on time. In November 2017,
Alison joined the Verbier Art Summit team, where she is now the Project
Manager. The Verbier Art Summit is a non-profit, international platform
for discourse in a non-transactional context. The Summit connects
thought leaders to key figures in the art world to generate innovative
ideas and drive social change.
Shannon Forrester : Can painting be words? Can the philosophical be material?These
questions offer a way into imagining what art might offer philosophy
and what philosophy might offer art. Art has been a major subject of
philosophy, not because art is somehow uniquely ‘philosophical’ but
because philosophy, perhaps especially new materialism, is uniquely
art-like. New materialism examines the dynamic material of life and the
universe. Reparative painting, a theoretical framework that traces ways
of looking at and making paintings which seek to subvert marginalization
based on race, gender, and sexuality bias, while also considering
socio-political and psycho-emotional dynamics of the individual and the
matter of their circulation in the assemblages that form existence.
Reparative painting, the elemental matter that forms it and in a way
becomes its voice through its human-material-conceptual formation,
reaches towards an exit from dynamics of exclusion so prolific in the
contemporary. If we consider Karen Barad’s description of matter as “…
an imaginative material exploration of non/being, creatively
regenerative, an ongoing trans*/formation. Matter is a condensation of
dispersed and multiple beings-times, where the future and past are
diffracted into now, into each moment.” we can begin to understand just
how painterly new materialism might be, as painting transforms, subverts
time, presents complexity, intensifies and disperses, puts experience,
knowledge, and material in a dance echoing the fabric of life and the
universe.
Shannon Forrester is an international artist working in
the expanded field of painting and a practice-led researcher developing
reparative turn theory in painting. Forrester has a BFA from School of
the Art Institute of Chicago, an MFA Painting as well as a Graduate
Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGS) from Boston
University and is currently at RCA completing Reparative Painting,
Identity, Society, and the Individual, a practice-led PhD dissertation.
Their interdisciplinary work incorporates painting, curation, and
writing at the intersection of WGS, new materialism, and cultural
studies. It traces the potential of the reparative turn in painting,
aesthetics, and narrative to subvert dynamics of gender, sexuality, and
race that suppress human flourishing.
Anna Walker: The haptic visual - making sense of the world through touch or being touchedFor
this paper. I will explore an inextricable link between art and
philosophy. In some instances, they are so intertwined that it becomes
impossible to separate one from the other without a loss of sense,
sensation and therefore meaning. Layering Derrida’s theories of
spectrality upon Laura Marks’ exploration of the haptic visual I will
discuss the Deleuzian concept: "when sight discovers in itself a
specific function of touch that is uniquely its own, distinct from its
optical function' (2005, p.109). I will also address the Freudian notion
of Nachträglichkeit—the concept of deferred action, to experience what
yet remains to come: a ghost of or from the future. The spectral for
Derrida does not arise out of social or biological death, rather it
emerges from a future absence where the ghost is neither present nor
absent, but both at the same time—a presence negated by absence. In his
words:
To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to
introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every
concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time (Derrida, 1994,
p.13).
Phenomenologically, the haptic is a form of the visual that
muddies intersubjective boundaries (Marks, 2002: 17), whilst
psychoanalytically it is an aspect of the visual that moves between
identification and immersion. Marks emphasises the tactile and
contagious quality of haptic imagery as something viewers brush up
against like another body. She writes: "The words contact, contingent,
and contagion all share the Latin root contingere, ‘to have contact
with; pollute; befall’’ (2000, p. xii). This paper will be accompanied
by sound/ and or moving imagery.
Anna Walker, PhD, is an artist,
writer and researcher working in multi-media, primarily sound and moving
imagery. She was awarded an MA in Fine Art from Southampton University
in 1998, and a certificate in Psychotherapy from CBPC, Cambridge, in
2010. An interest in the effects of trauma on the body, developed during
her work as a psychotherapist, led her to a PhD in Arts and Media at
Plymouth University, which she completed in May 2017. Her arts-practice
balances the auto-ethnographic with the critical, utilising personal
experiences to facilitate a greater understanding of memory, trauma and
its wider cultural implications. She has been exploring trauma in her
work for many years, how the body responds to overwhelming traumatic and
stressful situations and how it reorganises itself to cope with or
manage the trauma. Most recently research has focused on
intergenerational trauma, i.e. what gets passed down from generation to
generation. For example, the moving Image work: ‘Breathe Wind into Me,
Chapter 1’ (2018-2019), exhibited as part of Making Space at Fabrica
Gallery, Brighton, is a loosely, flowing, stream of consciousness that
questions what arises physically and philosophically when life is
stripped back to the bare essentials. She is a contributing researcher
of Transtechnology Research at Plymouth University.
Chicks on Speed : Facing the Gesamtkunstwerk foot first
Our talk investigates the scope of common ideas about the human body
through ‘gesamtkunstwerk’—all-embracing artworks that adopt and make use
of many art-forms and disciplines. The collaborating authors from the
fields of pop music, visualisation and philosophy suggest that
philosophical concepts can be extended and expressed simultaneously
through music, data visualisations, costume, choreography and
performance, adding new faces to the meaning and expression of
philosophical ideas.
We focus on common ideas around the feet, and
how these become transfigured, found and founded into a series of
art-and-science works: the series of Computer Enhanced Footwear (CEF)
prototypeswe examine, demonstrates that gesamtkunstwerk provides a
method to explore thepossible roles that the feet can have in society.
We use fashionable costume design, pop music, dance choreography,
visualization, scenography, kinesiology and 3D fabrication practices.
Resulting in a unified body of work, gesamtkunstwerk shows that shoes
and feet are more than simply tools to help carry our bodies around.
They can be reimagined through the act of performance and the
application of audiovisual technology to make a statement, semantically
communicate social-political concerns and facilitate free, spontaneous
expression. Explorations of different founded concepts of the feet and
footwear as activists, as citizens and liberators illustrate the vast
potentials for the feet for social change.
Alexandra Murray-Leslie
is an artistic researcher, performer, poly-artist and co-founder of the
international art collective Chicks on Speed. Her current artistic
research & practice explores designing, fabricating & performing
computer enhanced footwear for a new theatrical, audiovisual
expressivity of the feet. Alex’s work has been discussed in publications
such as Creating Artscience collaboration (Schnugg, 2019), Explorations
in Art & Technology (Candy & Edmonds, 2018), Akward Politics
(Smith Prei & Stehle 2017) as well as periodicals such as New Yorker
(2006), The Wire (2015), Art Forum (2013), Financial Times (2013) &
New York Times (2002). Her work has been shown in major biennales,
festivals and art institutes such as; Ars Electronica, ZKM Centre for
Art and Media, 56th & 57 Venice Biennale, MoMA NY, Centre Pompidou,
Museum of Modern Art Australia, Turner Prize Tate Britian, ArtScience
Gallery Dublin & Singapore.
Sophia Efstathiouis is a Postdoctoral
Fellow in Applied Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and Religious
Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
Sophia’s work develops philosophy and art-based approaches to
responsible innovation, informed by her embedded humanistic research
within scientific projects. Sophia has published on seaweed, systems
biology and the use of everyday ideas in science as found science by
analogy to found art. She has contributed with performance lectures in
the Athens Biennale (2013, 2017).She is a Council member of the
International Society for History, Philosophy and Social Studies of
Biology (ISHPSSB).
Tina Frank is an Austrian designer, artist, and
professor at the University of Art and Design, Linz where she is
heading the Department Visual Communication at the Institute for Media.
Since 1995 she has established three design companies, working for a
wide range of clients creating websites, signage systems and album
covers. As an artist, Tina Frank collaborates with musicians and creates
audio-visual performances shown live all around the world, such as Ars
Electronica, Linz; Centre Pompidou, Paris; ICC, Tokyo, etc. She received
the Diagonale Prize for Innovative Cinema. Her current focus in
teaching is on digital publications, data visualisations and
synaesthetic experimentation.
Yamu Wang : A Reader’s Response to A Thousand Plateaus’ Introduction to Rhizome - & ICH & I & CH &In
this presentation, I would like to first shortly introduce my name and
Maya, Mayu, Muya, Muyu, Yama, Yamu, Yuma, Yumu, an art work which was
drawn from auto corrections of my name, either by a word processor or in
people’s memory, as its combination of vowels and consonants seems
rather unfamiliar to the alphabet system.
Then, the presentation will
be followed by a reading of A Reader’s Response to A Thousand Plateaus’
Introduction to Rhizome, which shares my personal relation to the
Rhizome text, as suggested in the title, and I believe, it is in itself a
rhizomatic text.
& ICH & I & CH & was inspired by
Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “and.” “Ich” is the first-person singular
pronoun in German, equivalent to English “I.” “CH” is the abbreviation
of Latin “Confoederatio Helvetica,” meaning “Swiss Confederation,” the
official name of Switzerland. As someone who mainly communicates in
English, the experience of living in German-speaking Switzerland allows
me to fuse the German “I” with an English component. Meanwhile, it also
deals with my artistic subjectivity, which makes it possible to
articulate the “I” in an exhibition context, is dependent on the
institutional framework and support.
Yamu Wang has a particular
interest, or sensitivity, in examining and exploring subjectivity and
how it is conditioned by using her personal experiences as case studies.
She works with installation, video, text, and performance; she also
creates discursive situations where different social bodies can meet and
talk. Language is a recurrent element in her works, may it be the
subject matter, medium, and/or material in part because it conditions
her very being. She considers herself a subject-in-process, both inside
and outside the art field. The production process, as well as the
condition, are often revealed thus in her works. She often wishes to
employ the presence of the audience’s body in a certain way, and that
constitutes an integral part of her work. A bigger concern for her is
what the work does, in contrast to how they look, even though she is
fully aware that their looks determine what they could possibly achieve.
Jaspal Birdi : Being connected is less costly than being engagedBeing connected is less costly than being engaged— Zygmunt Bauman
Technological
innovations simultaneously create better understandings of our
surroundings while impairing the distinction between illusion and
reality. With social interactions increasingly lived through a screen
visually crisp and informative as real-time and space; as history
progresses, the ratio of implicit knowledge on the
evolution/flaws/limits of technology decreases.
As a Visual Artist, I
perform a painting process which seeks to eliminate the difference
between a window and screen though glitches. Often playing with paint’s
loose, chromatic, and photo realistic qualities versus rigid and
realistic impressions of thinly collaged digital photography, my works
reveal similarities and contrasts between the real and abstract:
questioning the physicality of our realities—the value of time as it
shapes our understanding of the space we live.
My research often
begins visually, utilizing a ludic process I found with technology to
draw attention to the machine extension of human hands as it reaches its
breaking point and seems to imitate human ensitivity. Parallel to
visual practice, I read works by philosophers to draw my attention to
patterns within my documentation and experimentation which I feel are
reflective of present day phenomena. In the occasion of the 2019 TVAD
International Symposium, I would be eager for the opportunity to share
how my visual research draws clarity from philosophy, most recently in
particular, Zygmunt Bauman’s book Liquid Love
Jaspal Birdi is a
multi-disciplinary artist inspired by dynamic environments she
experiences in reality and virtually. Often mixing with photography with
painting, Jaspal Birdi’s works question the physicality of our
realities — the value of time as it shapes our understanding of the
space we live. Holding a Bachelors of Fine Arts: Drawing & Painting
from OCAD University, a Masters in Arts Management from Istituto Europeo
di Design (IED), and a Specialization in Curating Contemporary Art from
Venice School of Curatorial Studies, Jaspal Birdi has participated in
solo and group exhibitions in Canada, Italy and Germany. Recipient of
awards and honours such as the Arte Laguna Prize, Premio Stonefly, and
Premio Francesco Fabbri, her works have been featured in publications
such as Artribune, Exibart, Zoomers Magazine Canada, Corriere Della
Sera, IO Donna, Repubblica, and BOOOOOM. Currently based in Milan,
Italy, Jaspal Birdi is an artist in residence at ViaFarini
Maria
Patricia Tinajero : When Dirt Becomes Soil: Ecological Art Practices as
a New Philosophy of Praxis in Age of the AnthropoceneThe
1970’s is a benchmark for when changes in our own ways of interacting
with the planet could have made substantial difference nonetheless it
seems that the environmental movement lost its opportunity. Is it too
late today? This study does not provide a solution for the global
environmental crisis. Rather, it is a point of reference to begin to
imagine alternative philosophical frameworks to answer the trauma of the
planet’s material substrates.
Ecological art practitioners are the
stewards for aesthetic reclamation, remediation, and conservation of
soil, and their goal is to develop ethical-aesthetic perspectives that
engage art and environment through concepts, language, praxis, and
theory to uncover the underpinnings and attributes that take place in
soil. Through these embodied ethical-aesthetic perspectives ecological
art practices are situated at the cracks left by the international
environmental movement. I argue that redistribution is a material
philosophical system, and that fermentation is its method for thinking,
for acting, and for transforming soil’s material properties and, to
access the potentiality for philosophical endeavours with soil.
Fermentation and redistribution follow two axis, interconnectivity and
urgency, contributing with new definitions and procedures to address the
problem of soil’s sustainability. The analytic focus of redistribution
through the process of fermentation activates emergent contributions to
the fields of art, aesthetics and ethics by triggering the manifold
processes of soil’s reclamation and remediation as part of a larger
metabolic exchange and ecological thinking
Maria Patricia Tinajero
is a visual artist and a PHD candidate at the Institute for Doctoral
Studies in Visual Art Philosophy in Portland, Maine. Her academic and
creative research focuses on social justice and the
environment.Currently, Tinajero is researching ecological art practices
and soil at the intersections of art, biology and philosophy. Tinajero
is coauthor in several publications in the field of ecological sound
composition and ecological art practices, including her most recent
essay, “Ethical Grounds: The Aesthetic Action of Soil,” published in the
anthology Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene, edited by Julie
Reiss, at Vernon Press. Tinajero received an affiliate fellowship from
the American Academy in Rome for “Aqua Circular” (2010). In fall 2018,
Tinajero was part of the exhibition “Making Migration Visible” at the
Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art in Portland.
Sebastian Mühl: On aesthetic indeterminacyEver
since artists in the 1960s (e.g. Marcel Broodthaers) started to use
strategies of imitation, adaptation and fictionalization to adopt
scientific protocols and their modes of visualization, science and
philosophy themselves have become a matter of reflection, transformation
and critique through contemporary art. But according an epistemological
status to contemporary artistic knowledge production means to challenge
the differences between art, philosophy and science. Artistic
production reaches a point of indeterminancy when it mimetically tries
to imitate the epistemological claims of philosophy and science. There
should rather be an acknowledgement of the distinction between the
theoretical, practical and aesthetic forms of experience and
rationality. The determination of art is constituted by an aesthetic
logic, differentiating art from non-aesthetic phenomena. Thus aesthetic
experience does not relate directly to propositional understanding which
is fundamental to scientific knowledge and philosophical argument. It
rather breaks free with the determinations of theoretical experience and
leaves thinking open to an infinite process of indeterminacy. Even
though in the light of the recent rise of artistic research production
in contemporary art as well as aesthetic epistemologies in contemporary
philosophy, there remains a fundamental break between what we could call
the „truth procedures“ (Badiou) of art, science and philosophy. An
aesthetic experience of art thus undermines the clarity of any
epistemological content potentially present in artworks. Where
indeterminacy can be identified in the experience of art, it points
towards the core of what an aesthetic experience ultimately means —
namely the structural potentiality and negativity that challenges our
determining (theoretical and philosophical) judgments. By discussing
some recent examples of artistic research (e.g. the work of German
artist Emanuel Mathias), my paper will try to clarify this argument by
drawing on some theoretical assumptions of authors such as Alain Badiou,
Christoph Menke and Martin Seel.
Dr. des. Sebastian Mühl is an
artist and researcher based in Berlin and Klagenfurt, Austria. His
research focuses on the political dimensions of contemporary practices
and on the politico-aesthetic implications of artistic perceptions of
modernity. He finished a phd thesis on the revival of utopian thought in
contemporary art. The project was a critical research into
modernological, participatory and art activist strategies in the visual
arts since the early 1990s. His films and film-based visual art projects
focus on the effects of the politico-aesthetic utopias of modernity.
Sebastian is currently preparing a postdoc research project on „crisis
as form“ in digital environments. Further research interests: Critical
Theory, Aesthetics, Theories of Democracy, Artistic Research and
Aesthetic Epistemologies.
Mimi Cabell : I'll work out tomorrow
I’ll Workout Tomorrow is a 33-minute video that uses as material 80
pairs of underwear, all size XS, from the Victoria’s Secret ‘Pink’ line —
a junior line marketed to college age women. Additionally, I only
purchased underwear on which language appears — phrases like “Hey Hey,”
“I Want Everything And More,” “Unwrap Me,” “No Peeking,” “Wish You Were
Here,” or “Cheers,” to name a few. I then interviewed multiple people
and recorded their reactions as they sifted through the underwear. The
video is comprised of selections from these interviews. For “Artists and
the Philosophers we Love” I will screen a 10-15 minute excerpt of this
video along with a brief presentation about the process of making the
piece and the ideas that drove its production.
Without drawing
conclusions, Workout is reflective and dialogical; it engages ideas of
desire and performance, gender, sexuality, and capitalism’s co-option of
cultural and political movements, and would work well in the context of
other work in gender and queer studies, performance studies, and
investigations into the influences of markets on cultural practices. The
video is an ethnography, and the content points to work done by
theorists like Angela Davis, Sara Ahmed, and Judith Butler. Ultimately,
Workout represents an investigation into how one is both produced by a
culture, at the same time as producing, co-producing, or re-producing
that same culture
