Philosophy and Art links

[Marshall]

Does anyone have some choice links relating to Philosophy and Art that they'd like to share? This thread is not meant for discussion, which belongs in the Art forum, but just as part of a prototype "Link Library" covering several areas, that we might assemble here in the Internet Resources department.

[Voiceless Mermaid]

These links are from the January 4, 2014 symposium at the Fridericianum museum in Kassel, Germany on philosophy and art. The talks are about one hour long, followed by a panel discussion at the end. The project was entitled Speculations on Anonymous Materials, apparently taking its name from the relatively new philosophical currents called "speculative materialism", or "speculative realism", and the title of the book published in 2005 by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani, "Cyclonopedia: Complicity with anonymous materials" which seems to have caused a good deal of commotion in philosophical circles.

1) Introduction: Susanne Pfeffer, Armen Avanessian

http://youtu.be/z1DIcaWoWTE


2) Marcus Gabriel: Realism and Materialism

http://youtu.be/wX1YMMKuSgs


3) Maurizio Ferraris: Why Matter Matters

http://youtu.be/WUgBt_1N8s8


4) Iain Hamilton Grant: The Construction of Matter and the Deep Field Problem

http://youtu.be/cMoTh3HpO0E


5) Robin MacKay: Matter, Material, Immaterials: Art-Philosophy-Curating 30 Years after Lyotard

http://youtu.be/tsPOTOLBe4o


6) Reza Negarestani: Frontiers of Manipulation

http://youtu.be/Fg0lMebGt9I


7) Panel Discussion

http://youtu.be/cKdb9ZBHF9E

For those that might want to check out some of the exhibitions both prior and after the symposium: http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/201 ... ericianum/

[dandelion]

Moving Beyond Materiality: MIT Visiting Artist Tomas Saraceno http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoZXt7ilkDo

Arts at MIT Published on Nov 28, 2012

Tomas Saraceno is the inaugural Visiting Artist at MIT's new Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). An artist trained as an architect, Saraceno deploys theoretical frameworks and insights from engineering, physics, chemistry, aeronautics and materials science. His residency at MIT focuses on advancing new work for the ongoing Cloud Cities series, in which Saraceno creates inflatable and airborne biospheres with the morphology of soap bubbles, spider webs, neural networks, or cloud formations, which are speculative models for alternate ways of living.

(Others are referenced by Saraceno as well, but for example, Saraceno is referenced here-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj7EDMRJrbU)

[Marshall]

The Saraceno slides are amazing!
It is the inaugural presentation for MIT's center for arts science technology (cast) in 2012.

I would skip to minute 12 which is when Saraceno comes on.

Up to minute 2 it is just slides that the CAST management puts up to advertise future CAST events, installations, visiting artists.

Then from minute 2 to minute 12 the DIRECTOR of CAST talks about some abstract ideas and he places Saraceno work in the landscape of his (the director's) ideas about art, society, architecture, education, technology, so he INTRODUCES Saraceno to the audience. this is potentially interesting (the director of a new to-be-influential Center at a prestigious leading-edge institution tells you his philosophy of art society and everything) but it is not what you came for.

Then at minute 12 Tomas Saraceno comes and in a fumbling halting sensitive humorous way establishes rapport with the audience. he makes the persons in the audience aware of their surroundings (e.g. the light in the room, the interaction of them with the speaker) by unobtrusive offhand imaginings and remarks.

Because his art is about interaction within the environment and with the environment

Only about minute 14 (if I remember right) does he show the first slide!

It is not his greatest, it is very modest. It is a small installation where the wind takes a picture of itself. A windmill operates a camera.

This is a very subtle way to begin because it is is humble and gauche minor art and sets your expectations low.

Then he springs on you, around minute 16. Photographs taken at a salt lake in Bolivia. I will not comment.

Then around minute 18, an installation in Milan, that is about air
and I would say about air=geometry=gravity
and the interaction of people IN the installation WITH the geometry because interacting with the air.

John Wheeler (an early quantum relativist) said very simply matter tells geometry how to curve [and wave], geometry tells matter how to flow. Carlo Rovelli would have liked that Saraceno piece very much, if he ever saw it.

I like the Dandelion post partly because I never heard of Saraceno or saw any piece of his. What I am seeing is that a work by Saraceno can EMBODY PHILOSOPHY about us and the natural world.

So this is very good new information for me. thanks.
http://www.tomassaraceno.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROqL-8h_7DM#t=63

Published on Nov 28, 2012
Tomas Saraceno is the inaugural Visiting Artist at MIT's new Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). An artist trained as an architect, Saraceno deploys theoretical frameworks and insights from engineering, physics, chemistry, aeronautics and materials science. His residency at MIT focuses on advancing new work for the ongoing Cloud Cities series, in which Saraceno creates inflatable and airborne biospheres with the morphology of soap bubbles, spider webs, neural networks, or cloud formations, which are speculative models for alternate ways of living.

It's possible the person who introduced Saraceno was not the director of CAST but was one of these two MIT faculty/administration: Nader Tehrani, or Anton Garcia-Abril. Still don't have it sorted out.

[dandelion]

I’m very pleased it was enjoyed, and very happy with the sentiment about embodied philosophy, and all the other comments, especially about science and geometry. And yes, Tehrani is Professor of Architecture and Head of Department and Garcia-Abril, who spoke just before Saraceno, is a Professor of Architecture.

[Voiceless Mermaid]

Fascinating concepts. With the concept of immaterials, he broaches on a wider philosophical topic, also touched upon by Robin Mackay in the link I provided above. Philosophy and architecture could have very well been another thread of links here, but this talk was more than just "Philosophy and… " as Marshall calls them, it was "Philosophy and… and…"
Reza Negarestani too, delves a lot on architectonics, I'll see if I can find any online links to his works.

On the other hand, Saraceno's cloud cities reminded me of Benjamin Bratton's analysis of the city and the cloud (as in internet, online cloud) in his paper, "The Black Stack," a talk which I was saving for when Marshall decided to create a "philosophy and technology" thread instead of "philodophy and AI". Around minute 34 in the present talk Bratton talks about AI and bypasses the question of the Turing test as unimportant, though in an interesting twist. The talk is as regards Geo-politics, and has many implications on how we view the interaction between politics (the state) and technology, with issues of address, location, privacy etc. being raised throughout it. Marshall said that these political questions concerned him, and so, I wanted to address them in the "Death of Philosophy" thread, but haven't been able to make time. Before getting into those issues I wanted to get a bit into the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard however, (and perhaps briefly to Walter Benjamin), which would afford a passage into the work of Negarestani, and his use of "polytics" as different from "politics".

Anyway, here is Bratton's talk: "The Black Stack"

http://youtu.be/3c3jXPBG-NY

[owleye]

Before getting into those issues I wanted to get a bit into the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard however, (and perhaps briefly to Walter Benjamin), which would afford a passage into the work of Negarestani, and his use of "polytics" as different from "politics".

1. On this politics vs. politics difference, I couldn't help but think of Derrida's différance vs. différence in which defer and differ are both rooted, though of course the former is a deliberate misspelling. Probably not relevant, though.

2. I hope you can bring Baudrillard to this forum. He's definitely one I favor, though I confess it's more because of what he says about (recent) technology.

[Voiceless Mermaid]

1. On this politics vs. politics difference, I couldn't help but think of Derrida's différance vs. différence in which defer and differ are both rooted, though of course the former is a deliberate misspelling. Probably not relevant, though.

Not so irrelevant as it may seem at first. Would you like to try yourself and establish the links between différance/différence and polytics/politics?

[Marshall]

..., Saraceno's cloud cities reminded me of Benjamin Bratton's analysis of the city and the cloud (as in internet, online cloud) in his paper, "The Black Stack," a talk which I was saving for when Marshall decided to create a "philosophy and technology" thread instead of "philodophy and AI". Around minute 34 in the present talk Bratton talks about AI and bypasses the question of the Turing test as unimportant, though in an interesting twist. The talk is as regards Geo-politics, and has many implications on how we view the interaction between politics (the state) and technology, with issues of address, location, privacy etc. being raised throughout it.
…
...Anyway, here is Bratton's talk: "The Black Stack"

http://youtu.be/3c3jXPBG-NY

This passage by Mermaid incited me to open a thread where one could assemble interesting [url] links about Philosophy and Technology.

Incidentally later in the same post Mermaid mentions Walter Benjamin tangentially which reminded me of a quote by W.B. about history. It is a paragraph from *Theses on the Philosophy of History* the final essay from his book Illuminations
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805202412/,
I was able to read it in the product sample. It is in section IX of the essay, on page 257, essentially an image of "the Angel of History" or the spirit of history which the multimedia performance artist named Laurie Anderson has often quoted.
Here is Anderson's paraphrase, and (down at the bottom) Benjamin's original:
http://blogs.dharma.art.br/2011/12/laur ... he-future/

[dandelion]

Regarding the two names mentioned, e.g., in the 7th post, just in connection with the topic, one link is an example of Baudrillard’s photography, and the other link is about a film in which Derrida played himself.
http://archivio.fotografiaeuropea.it/20 ... illard.jpg
http://thehauntologicalsociety.blogspot ... ullen.html

[Marshall]

Regarding the two names mentioned, e.g., in the 7th post, just in connection with the topic, one link is an example of Baudrillard’s photography, and the other link is about a film in which Derrida played himself.
http://archivio.fotografiaeuropea.it/20 ... illard.jpg
http://thehauntologicalsociety.blogspot ... ullen.html

There was the ghostly image of something that was not a seashell, but rather a human's shell, pretending to be a strip of bark with a water soaked leaf in the reflection of an old stone bridge on a pool of water stirred by the wind

and the hauntology blog gave further links:

There was a funny story told here about experiencing an imaginary film directed by the ghost of Kafka:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG_JA6SJD8k

But there was also an INTERVIEW about this experience and related matters conducted, mostly silently, by Pascale Ogier:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nmu3uwqzbI

Ogier, who dosed her life over at 26, not long after conducting this interview, is the subject of this montage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yrCbcwuins

[dandelion]

https://pienaarspace.wordpress.com/tag/anton-zeilinger/
“Art and Science United by Chickens”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgXM0m9JNY
("This is not a chicken..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images)

[dandelion]

https://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/Mar ... slater.msp
IDENTITY CRISIS
Turning Aristotle into Law.

[dandelion]

http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1518?locale=en
Gilbert & George have been creating art for almost fifty years. Describing their relationship in life and work, they have said, “It’s not a collaboration. . . . We are two people, but one artist.” George, born in Devon, England, in 1942, and Gilbert, born in the Dolomites, Italy, in 1943, met while studying sculpture at St. Martin’s School of Art, London, in 1967. One day while taking photos of each other holding their small-scale sculptures, and then without, the artists realized that they could dispense with them altogether. What was most interesting was not the objects themselves, but their presence as “living sculptures” within the images. They summed up their newly conceived position as artists succinctly: “Art and life became one, and we were the messengers of a new vision. At that moment that we decided we are art and life, every conversation with people became art, and still is.”