Æstetisk Seminar Efterår 2013 OBS! Ændring i program Torsdage kl. 1415 lokale 124, bygning 1584 Aarhus Universitet, Kasernen Langelandsgade 139, Aarhus C 12.09.2013 JUST LIKE THAT: William Forsythe || Between Movement and Language Erin Manning & Brian Massumi In Just Like That, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi explore how movement and language cocompose in William Forsythe’s ballet Woolf Phrase (2001). How are techniques in the Forsythe Company’s process capable of agitating language to the limit so that it begins to move, movement reciprocating by taking on the inflections of language? Asking, with Forsythe, “where movement starts and stops,” we wonder what manner of phrasing is native to movement, in its disjunctively synthesizable difference from language and from other registers of experience. And we inquire into the ways in which language, in movement, is capable of reorienting questions of body-schema and “implicit knowledge” key to the discourse of embodied cognition. 26.09.2013 Life as an Instrument of Art Oron Catts Realizing that (the concept of) life is going through some radical transformations, artists have been experimenting with ways of articulating these shifts. This talk will cover some of the strategies and projects that artists at SymbioticA have employed to deal with life as both raw material and an ever contestable subject of manipulation. Looking at all levels of life – from the molecular to the ecological this talk will attempt to present the need to develop a new cultural language where words seems to be no longer appropriate. 03.10.2013 Image Theory across Arts and Sciences Aud Sissel Hoel Ernst Cassirer is one out of very few twentieth-century philosophers to have made a serious effort to mediate the intellectual tensions between scientific and humanistic philosophical traditions. For this reason, if one aims to broaden the notion of aesthetic to include non-art images, or alternatively, if one aims to develop a theory of images that works across the boundaries of arts and sciences, Cassirer’s comprehensive notion of symbolic function provides a promising starting point. Drawing on Cassirer’s functional approach to symbolic forms and technology, this talk develops a notion of images that conceives of images as mediating apparatuses that stand in a generative – and what I shall refer to as a “measured” and “differential” – relation to the phenomena they target. What I hope to show is that images, whether they are artistic or epistemic, operate by enacting a specific and targeted division between figure and ground. I substantiate my case by examples from medical imaging and contemporary art. 31.10.2013 A non-successive Approach to the History of Optical Media Jens Schröter In Jonathan Crary’s famous study Techniques of the Observer the history of vision is described in a sequential fashion: While geometrical optics is the ‘classical regime’ it is superseded in modernity by physiological optics, centered around knowledge on the bodily conditions of vision. In Crary’s view this knowledge is the precondition of modern media technology, e.g. cinema. Based on his book 3D: History, Theory and Aesthetics of the Transplane Image Jens Schröter will discuss why Crary’s claim is problematic and offer an alternative understanding of the history of optical media. The presentation will draw on case studies from the history of technology and a few examples from the arts. 05.11.2013 NB! Tuesday 7 pm at Kunsthal Aarhus, J. M. Mørks Gade 13, 8000 Aarhus C Forensis Eyal Weizman Weizman will present a set of investigations and critical reflections that employ the term forensis to designate a condition by which intensified forms of material and spatial analysis transform the ways political struggles are understood and engaged with. Architecture is employed as a field of knowledge and as a mode of interpretation, one not only concerned with buildings but rather with an ever-changing set of relations between people and things across multiple scales: from the human body to human induced climate change, from the scale of a single home to the scale of the earth as the ultimate home, understood as both a planetary scale architectural construction site and a potential ruin. The courts in which forensics is asked to perform embody of course the logic of the states that established them. But forensis could become a counter hegemonic practice that could invert the relation between individuals and states, helping to challenge state and corporate violence and the tyranny of their truth. 14.11.2013 Somatic Materialism: Affect, Performance and Archiving Susan Kozel This talk will be an exploration of somatic materialism. Initially a visceral response to speculative materialism, somatic materialism unfolds both in thought and in practice: in philosophical reflection, in artistic practice dealing with affect, and in somatic practices of attention and non-knowing. The phenomena of performative re-enactment will be viewed somatically thereby challenging the distinction between liveness and mediation, this will open onto a notion of somatic archiving. 21.11.2013 Museerne og det kontroversielle Britta Tøndborg Forelæsningen vil tage afsæt i en række kontroversielle museumsudstillinger og forsøge at definere, hvad det kontroversielle betyder i en museumssammenhæng. En række udstillinger har gennem tiden været opfattet som kontroversielle, og de har affødt en mediestorm, som de implicerede museer sjældent var forberedte på. Resultatet for museerne har været repressalier og magtkampe. Samtidig ses der en klar tendens i nyere museumsformidling til, at kontroversielle emner betragtes som ideelle afsæt for dialogiske former for engagement med besøgende. Hensigten med forelæsningen er at analysere denne udvikling og samtidig diskutere de udfordringer, der ligger i museets forvandling fra tempel til forum. 05.12.2013 Det frie, det bundne, det nye. Rytmiske sonderinger i samtidslyrikken Jakob Schweppenhaüser Med afsæt i en række analytiske nedslag præsenterer forelæsningen en refleksion over rytmens og metrets rolle i nutidens såvel skriftlige som mundtlige – reciterede, sungne, rappede – lyrik: hvilke funktioner udfylder friversets uforudsigelighed, til hvilke formål anvendes den metriske regelmæssighed? Og ikke mindst: hvorledes interagerer disse to principper i dag, det frie og det bundne, det kaotiske og det ordnede, variationen og gentagelsen? Oron Catts is an artist, researcher and curator whose work with the Tissue Culture and Art Project is considered a leading biological art undertaking. He is the founding Director of SymbioticA (since 2000), an artistic research centre at The University of Western Australia. Catts was a Research Fellow in Harvard Medical School, a visiting Scholar at the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor at Aalto University, Helsinki, where he help to set up a biological art lab called BiofiliA – Base for Biological Art and Design. Aud Sissel Hoel is an Associate Professor of Visual Communication in the Department of Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). She is currently heading the interdisciplinary research project Picturing the Brain: Perspectives on Neuroimaging (20102014). Hoel's research interests revolve around science images and branch out to topics such as photography, scientific instruments, symbolic mediation, medical imaging, and visualisation. See www.audsisselhoel.com. Susan Kozel works at the convergence between philosophy, dance and digital technologies. She is a Professor of New Media at Medea and the School of Arts and Culture at Malmö University. She has an active artistic research practice, writes on topics from performance to ubiquitous technologies to electronic music, teaches for the Interaction Design programme, and is currently Project Leader of the large interdisciplinary research project “Living Archives.” Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the director of the Sense Lab (www.senselab.ca). Publications include Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (2009), Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (2007), and Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada (2003). Her forthcoming cowritten manuscript is entitled Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Brian Massumi specializes in the philosophy of experience, art and media theory, and political philosophy. Publications include Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (2011), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), and A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (1992). He is editor of The Politics of Everyday Fear (1993) and A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (2002). With Erin Manning he edits a book series entitled "Technologies of Lived Abstraction." Jens Schröter is professor of the theory and practice of multimedial systems at the University of Siegen, Germany. He is director of the graduate school “Locating Media”. He is co-director of the research project “TV Series as Reflection and Projection of Change”. Recent publications: 3D. Geschichte, Theorie und Medienästhetik des technisch-transplanen Bildes (2009, in English 2013). Verdrahtet. The Wire und der Kampf um die Medien (2012). Visit WWW.MULTIMEDIALESYSTEME.DE. Visit WWW.THEORIE-DER-MEDIEN.DE. Jakob Schweppenhäuser er ph.d.-stipendiat ved Nordisk Sprog og Litteratur, Aarhus Universitet. Han arbejder især i det intermediale felt mellem sprog og musik og har udgivet en række artikler om mundtlig lyrik, herunder sangtekster og rap. Schweppenhäuser er desuden udøvende kunstner. Britta Tøndborg Eyal Weizman er postdoc tilknyttet Center for Museologi ved Aarhus Universitet. Tøndborg har en årrække været ansat som henholdsvis museumsinspektør, konstitueret afdelingsleder og museumsdirektør, på Statens Museum for Kunst og på Trapholt. Hun har en MA og ph.d. i museologi fra Courtauld Institute of Art. is an architect, Professor of Spatial & Visual Cultures and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2011 he also directs the project, Forensic Architecture – on the place of architecture in International Humanitarian Law. Since 2007 he is a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. His books include Mengele's Skull (2012), Forensic Architecture (2012), The Least of all Possible Evils (2009), Hollow Land (2007), and the co-edited A Civilian Occupation (2003). Arrangør: Forskningsprogrammet i Medialitet, Materialitet, Æstetisk betydning Forskeruddannelsesprogrammet i Kunst, Litteratur og Kulturstudier og Fællesæstetisk Forskergruppe, Aarhus Universitet