TVAD symposium 2019

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.

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 UK and 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

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.

Lisa Taliano is an artist based in New York City. She received an MFA from Boston University in paintings, and an MA from Indiana University, Bloomington, in philosophy.

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) prototypes we examine, demonstrates that gesamtkunstwerk provides a method to explore the possible roles that the feet can have in society. We use fashionable costume design, pop music, dance choreography, visualisation, 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 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.

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 touched
For 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.

Alison Pasquariello : Verbier Art Summit: a multi-directional exploration of Philosophy and Art
What 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 breakthroughs 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.

Yamu Wang : A Reader’s Response to A Thousand Plateaus’ Introduction to Rhizome
In this presentation, I will first shortly introduce my name and a work done earlier this year 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 I will present A Reader’s Response to A Thousand Plateaus’ Introduction to Rhizome, a text that was first written down in 2015 as my response to an assignment of a theory class at my university. As suggested in the title, it shares my personal relation to A Thousand Plateaus’ introductory session to the idea of Rhizome, and I believe, or hope, it is in itself a rhizomatic text. The next work I will present after the reading is & ICH & I & CH &, done in 2018. It can be considered as a follow-up of this text as it was inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “and.”

Yamu Wang is an artist who has a particular interest, or sensitivity, in examining and exploring subjectivity and how it is conditioned by using her personal experience as case study. She mainly works with language, may it be the subject matter, medium, and/or material in part because it conditions her very being. Her work has been shown at Museum für Gestaltung Zurich (2017) and Kunsthaus Langenthal (2018). She was nominated for Helvetia Art Prize (2018) and awarded the Bachelor Förderpreis (2017) for her BA thesis work. She studied Literature at National Taiwan University and Fine Arts at Zurich University of the Arts. From October on, she will serve as a fellow in the Home Workspace Program 2019-20 at Ashkal Alwan, the Lebanese Association for Plastic Art in Beirut, Lebanon.

Jaspal Birdi : Being connected is less costly than being engaged
Being 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 sensitivity. 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 Anthropocene
The 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 co-author 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 indeterminacy
Ever 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 indeterminacy 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