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Aesthetics Today

Marking the 10th anniversary of the Aesthetics Research Centre (ARC) at the University of Kent, Aesthetics Today will begin with a symposium on June 5 aiming to generate discussion concerning the most general principles and questions preoccupying philosophical aesthetics today. The symposium will be followed on June 6 by a postgraduate/early career workshop co-sponsored by Debates in Aesthetics (formerly the Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics). Both events are supported by the British Society of Aesthetics and the Analysis Trust.

Session 1: Film, Art, and the Third Culture Jerrold Levinson (Maryland), Catharine Abell (Manchester), Dominic Topp (Kent), Murray Smith (Kent).

Session 2: Conversations on Art and Aesthetics Michael Newall (Kent), Derek Matravers (OU), Dawn Wilson (Hull), Hans Maes (Kent).

Session 3: Roundtable – Aesthetics Today Jerrold Levinson (Maryland), Catherine Abell (Manchester), Dominic Topp (Kent), Murray Smith (Kent), Michael Newall (Kent), Derek Matravers (OU), Dawn Wilson (Hull), Hans Maes (Kent)

Aesthetics Today will take advantage of the publication this spring of two books by the co-directors of ARC: Hans Maes’ Conversations on Art and Aesthetics, and Murray Smith’s Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (both published by Oxford). Both books are characterized by their broad scope. Maes’ volume is comprised of extended interviews with ten eminent aestheticians (Noël Carroll, Gregory Currie, Arthur Danto, Cynthia Freeland, Paul Guyer, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Jerrold Levinson, Jenefer Robinson, Roger Scruton, and Kendall Walton), in which Maes probes them on their own arguments as well as their views on aesthetics and the philosophy of art as a discipline, thereby engaging them in discussion of a wide range of specific debates in contemporary aesthetics. Smith’s monograph seeks to defend a naturalistic approach to aesthetics, principally through the exploration of film as a medium of art, but with a sustained comparative dimension incorporating discussion of literature, music, painting, and photography. In elaborating and defending a version of naturalized aesthetics, Smith inevitably addresses fundamental questions concerning the assumptions, methods, and boundaries of aesthetics. Both works connect fundamental principles with concrete cases in a wide range of artforms, and together we hope will form a strong platform for discussion of the general state of aesthetics today. The symposium on June 5 will bring together four invited speakers (Catharine Abell, Manchester; Jerrold Levinson, Maryland; Derek Matravers, OU; Dominic Topp, Kent; and Dawn Wilson, Hull) with ARC faculty, as well as postgraduate students working in aesthetics and related disciplines at Kent and beyond. The postgraduate/early career workshop taking place the following day, June 6, will feature research presentations by Ryan Doran (Antwerp/Sheffield), co-editor of the BSA journal Debates in Aesthetics and Alaina Schempp (Kent), editorial assistant of Film Studies(MUP). The workshop will conclude with a forum on publishing in aesthetics and related fields.   The postgraduate/early career workshop on June 6 is co-sponsored by Debates in Aesthetics (formerly the Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics). Both events are supported by the British Society of Aesthetics and the Analysis Trust. Debates in Aesthetics is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal for articles, interviews and book reviews. Published by the British Society of Aesthetics, the journal’s principal aim is to provide the philosophical community with a dedicated venue for debate in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. The British Society of Aesthetics (BSA) aims to promote study, research and discussion of the fine arts and related types of experience from a philosophical, psychological, sociological, historical, critical and educational standpoint. The Analysis Trust is committed to implementing and maintaining the BPA/SWIP Good Practice Scheme for learned societies and journal editors. Analysis is the most established and esteemed journal for short papers in philosophy.

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Anne Eaton – Propaganda, Pornography, Pictures, and Persuasion

Monday 12th: Propaganda, Pornography, Pictures, and Persuasion

It is a curious fact about the philosophical literatures on both propaganda and pornography that they tend to talk about these phenomena as if they were primarily linguistic. Yet by far most pornography today is pictorial and most propaganda has a significant pictorial component. This paper aims to shift the focus in the conversations to pictures and begins to think through some of the implications of this shift singulair dosage. In particular, I’ll be developing a peculiarly pictorial model of persuasion that better suits the work that pornography and propaganda can do. Along the way, I’ll use some examples of highly persuasive pictures from the Italian Renaissance.

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Just A Game? The Aesthetics and Ethics of Video Games

IMG_5053
Kendall Walton
IMG_5051
Katherine Thomson-Jones

 

24-25 June 2016

A philosophical conference on the aesthetics and ethics of video games. 24-25 June 2016, University of Kent, Canterbury.

Video games have become one of the most popular forms of entertainment today. Many of them possess a wide array of artistic and aesthetic qualities and there is growing consensus now that they constitute an emerging new art form. At the same time, video games have raised important ethical questions and the debate on their moral status and impact has now gone well beyond the traditional academic context and community.

This international conference, organised by the Aesthetics Research Centre, will seek to explore relevant connections between the ethics and aesthetics of video games, thereby also drawing on insights from the philosophy of mind, philosophy of information, and feminist philosophy.

Schedule

Day one

9.15 – 9.45 Registration (coffee & tea provided)

9.45 – 10.00 Welcome

10.00 – 11.00 Shelby Moser, University of Kent. Can My Avatar Teach Me?: VR Gaming and Empathy.

11.00 – 12.15 Jon Robson, University of Nottingham, The Beautiful Gamer? On the Aesthetics of Videogame Performances.

12.15 – 2.00 Lunch (not provided)

2.00 – 3.30 Paper Sessions

2.00 – 2.30  C. Thi Nguyen, Utah Valley University. Games and the Aesthetics of Instrumentality.

2.30 – 3.00  Jack Davis, UCL. Fictional Immorality.

3.00 -3.30 Stephanie Patridge, Otterbein University. Where Are All the Women? On Videogames, Gender, and Invisibility.

3.30 – 4.00 Break (coffee & tea provided)

4.00 – 5.15 Mari Mikkola, Humboldt-Universität (Berlin). Objectification and video games: A Feminist Examination.

5.15 – 6.30 Aaron Meskin, University of Leeds. Videogames and Creativity.

7.30   Conference dinner at The Parrot

Day two

10.00 – 12.00 Paper Sessions

10.00 – 10.30 James Camien McGuiggan, University of Southampton. Manipulation and Indeterminacy in Video Games.

10.30 – 11.00  Kathryn Wojtkiewicz, City University of New York Graduate Center. More than Moral: Sexism as an Aesthetic Flaw in Video Games.

11.00 – 11.30 Al Baker, The University of Sheffield. The Extra Credits Machine: Videogame ontology and the role of the player

11.30 – 11.45 Break (coffee & tea provided)

 11.45 – 12.15  Nicolas Olsson-Yaouzis, UCL. Should feminists play Grand Theft Auto V?

12.15 – 12.45 Richard Woodward & Nathan Wildman, University of Hamburg. Video Games, Interactivity, and Fictional Incompleteness.

12.45 – 2.15 Lunch (not provided)

2.15 – 3.30   Katherine Thomson-Jones, Oberlin College. Understanding Interactivity in Art, Videogames, and Art Mods.

3.30 – 4.45 Kendall Walton, University of Michigan. Me, Myself and My Avatar.

 5.00 Wine reception (complimentary)

 

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Confined Projections

Confined Projections is a curatorial design project by Eleen Deprez, postgraduate research student in History and Philosophy of Art.

As part of the International Festival of Projections (March 2016) we built six contemporary Mutoscopes with work of contemporary artists and filmmakers. A mutoscope is an early motion picture device. The device is hand-operated by one person at a time showing a reel of 1000 images. This project investigated the conjunction of public/private, visibility/invisibility, and proximity/distance in the film experience. The Mutoscope dominated the coin-in-slot peep-show business in Britain during the turn of the century. Operating on the same principle of a flipbook —showing a reel of 1000 images— the device is hand-operated by one person at a time. The viewer is thus able to influence the cinematic temporality of the film, creating his/her own unique viewing experience in a tactile relationship with the cinematic apparatus.

With work by:

Photography by Perpetua Ajuma Abalaka
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Symposium on Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Pornography

Thursday 3rd March 2016, 9:30am – 4pm, Darwin Lecture Theatre 3, University of Kent

Clarissa Smith – Professor of Sexual Cultures in the Centre for Research in Media & Cultural Studies University of Sunderland
Clarissa Smith – Professor of Sexual Cultures in the Centre for Research in Media & Cultural Studies University of Sunderland
Petra van Brabandt – Lecturer at the St Lucas School of Arts Antwerp “Wet Aesthetics and Queer Pornography”
Petra van Brabandt – Lecturer at the St Lucas School of Arts Antwerp
“Wet Aesthetics and Queer Pornography”
Eliza Steinbock “Look! But also, Touch! Theorizing Images of Trans Eroticism Beyond a Politics of Visual Essentialism”
Eliza Steinbock
“Look! But also, Touch! Theorizing Images of Trans Eroticism Beyond a Politics of Visual Essentialism”

Panel Discussion

This one-day symposium focuses on the intimate relationship between cinema, embodiment, and pornography. By bringing together an interdisciplinary range of speakers, originating from disciplines such as philosophy of art, film and media studies, and cultural studies we investigate the relationship between cinema and the senses. From investigating the “cinema of attractions” in early cinema, to the “haptic visuality” apparent in intercultural and feminist film, and “body genres” such as horror, melodrama, and pornography; in very different ways film scholars have argued against the conventional emphasis on vision and visibility and in favour of an understanding of embodied spectatorship. In relation, recent research in analytic aesthetics has focused on the multimodality of perception as well as definitions of erotic art and pornography. This symposium explores in what ways different pornographies engage with the sensate, tactile, and visceral experience of sexuality. By instigating a dialogue between scholars from different approaches we hope that this symposium will advance scholarly engagement with the “carnal aesthetics” of pornography.

 

Programme:

9.30am – 9.45
Opening remarks by Dr Hans Maes, Senior Lecturer, History of Art, University of Kent

9.45 – 10.45
Clarissa Smith – Professor of Sexual Cultures in the Centre for Research in Media & Cultural Studies University of Sunderland
“More Than Just Flesh: The Porn Performer’s Body in Action”

10.45 – 11.45
Ingrid Ryberg – Filmmaker and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Media Studies of Stockholm University 
“Feeling Wasteland: Utopianism and Backwardness in Queer Porn”

11.45 – 12.00
Coffee and tea

12.00 – 13.00
Petra van Brabandt – Lecturer at the St Lucas School of Arts Antwerp
“Wet Aesthetics and Queer Pornography”

13.00 – 14.00
Lunch (not provided)

14.00 – 15.00
Eliza Steinbock – Assistant Professor and postdoctoral researcher at the Film and Literary Department of Leiden University
“Look! But also, Touch! Theorizing Images of Trans Eroticism Beyond a Politics of Visual Essentialism”

15.00 – 16.00
Panel Discussion with Eliza Steinbock, Petra van Brabandt, Ingrid Ryberg, Clarissa Smith, and Pandora Blake.

The symposium and film screening are two of the components that make up the cross-disciplinary project Confined Projections, which is part of the International Festival of Projections taking place at the University of Kent 18-20 March 2016. The project also includes the exhibition of six custom-made mutoscopes, showing work by national and international artists and filmmakers. Taking the mutoscope as leitmotiv, this project investigates the tension between public and private, visibility and invisibility, and proximity and distance in the film experience, revealing interesting connections between this early form of cinema and more recent developments in erotic filmmaking.

With the generous support of:

The British Society of Aesthetics
The Aesthetics Research Centre, University of Kent
The Centre for Film and Media Research, University of Kent

Further information and registration: https://confinedprojections.wordpress.com

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Berys Gaut – The Value of Creativity

Wednesday 24th February, 5pm – 7pm, Grimond Lecture Theatre 2 (GLT2), University of Kent 

The Value of Creativity

Creativity is generally regarded as an invariably valuable trait. But is that true? There seem to be cases of ‘dark’ creativity: for instance, a torturer may be creative, but his creativity makes the world a worse place. I develop a definition of ‘creativity’ in terms of an agential disposition to produce new things that are valuable of their kind, and employ this account to show that creativity has instrumental value, final value (value as an end), but only conditional value, i.e., it is valuable only under some circumstances. I also argue for a constitutive connection between creativity and spontaneity and show how spontaneity contributes to the value of creativity. An upshot of the argument is that sometimes enhancing creativity is a bad thing.

 

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Julian Hanich: I, You and We

 

Ideas for a Phenomenology of the Collective Cinema Experience

Isn’t watching a film with others in a cinema crucially different from watching a film alone? When we laugh together, this amplifies the enjoyment. When we watch a film in communal rapt attention, this can intensify the experience. When annoyed by talking neighbors, we are distracted. Attending a film in a cinema implies being influenced by others – an influence that is particularly noticeable once affective responses play a role. Film scholars have almost always taken the relation between individual viewers and films as default. However, this is an artificial abstraction click here to investigate. Without considering the effects of collective viewing our understanding of the cinema experience remains incomplete. This talk tries to sketch some ideas toward a phenomenology of the collective cinema experience.

 

Professor Julian Hanich is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Groningen. From 2009 to 2012 he held a position as postdoctoral research fellow at the interdisciplinary research center “Languages of Emotion” at the Freie Universität Berlin. He studied North American Studies and Film Studies in Berlin, Berkeley and Munich and was a visiting researcher at UCLA and the University of Amsterdam. In 2010 he published a monograph on the phenomenology of fear at the movies, entitled Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers. The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear (Routledge). He also co-edited a volume of the German online journal Nach dem Film on Laughter in the Movie Theater and a book on filmic suggestion and the viewer’s imagination entitled Auslassen, Andeuten, Auffüllen. Der Film und die Imagination des Zuschauers (Fink). His articles have appeared in Screen, Projections, Necsus, Cinema Journal (forthcoming), Film-Philosophy,Movie, Jump Cut, The New Review of Film and Television Studies, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts,Montage/AV, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft and Amerikastudien/American Studies.

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Sarah Cardwell: research seminar

 

Monday 26th October, 5pm – 7pm. in KS14

‘Framing television: the dramatic implications of aspect ratio’

Within television studies, and even within television aesthetics, ‘aspect ratio’ is frequently overlooked or naively characterised. Yet it plays a fundamental, determining role in forming and framing television’s dramatic spaces and in turn, its stories and meanings. A balanced reappraisal of television’s varied aspect ratios and its impact upon TV’s unique dramatic and aesthetic possibilities can enhance our close analyses and further our understanding of television’s fascinating ‘art history’.

In this paper I will challenge some residual myths, misunderstandings and preconceptions about TV’s aspect ratios and their spatial properties. I would like to counter prevailing pro-widescreen rhetoric, by tracing some of the dramatic and aesthetic qualities of 4:3 that have been lost in the movement to 16:9; in pursuit of this, I’ll consider the example of Marion and Geoff (BBC, 2000 & 2003). I aim to make the case for more overt and sustained attention to be paid to aspect ratio within television aesthetics.

Dr Sarah Cardwell is Honorary Fellow in the School of Arts, University of Kent, where she was previously Senior Lecturer. She is the author of Adaptation Revisited (MUP, 2002) and Andrew Davies (MUP, 2005), as well as numerous articles and papers on film and television aesthetics, literary adaptation, contemporary British literature, and British cinema and television. She is a founding co-editor of ‘The Television Series’ (MUP), Book Reviews editor for Critical Studies in Television, and on the advisory board for the new series ‘Adaptation and Visual Culture’ (Palgrave Macmillan).

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16-18 June: Aesthetics, Art, and Pornography

An interdisciplinary conference 

16-18 June 2011
Institute of Philosophy, London

This conference will bring together philosophers and aestheticians, art historians and film theorists to investigate the artistic status and aesthetic dimension of pornographic pictures, films, and literature. Its interdisciplinary approach is intended to lead to a more accurate and subtle understanding of the range of representations that incorporate explicit sexual imagery and themes, in both high art and demotic culture, in Western and non-Western contexts.

 

Plenary and session speakers* (mainly day 3) with chairs and coorganisers (l-r): Back row: Petra van Brabandt*, Jesse Prinz*, Jerry Levinson*, Tzachi Zamir*, Ed Winters*, Mimi Vasilaki, Mahlet Zimeta*, David Davies*, Nick Zangwill*. Middle row: Edward Miller*, Camile Henrot*, Hans Maes, Hazel Donkin*, John Tercier*. Front row: Aiste Griciute, Gabriela Ochoa, Sara Protasi*, Mari Mikkola*, Katrien Schaubroeck, Marghrete Bruun Vaage, Shahrar Ali. (Photo by S Ali)
Plenary and session speakers* (mainly day 3) with chairs and coorganisers (l-r): Back row: Petra van Brabandt*, Jesse Prinz*, Jerry Levinson*, Tzachi Zamir*, Ed Winters*, Mimi Vasilaki, Mahlet Zimeta*, David Davies*, Nick Zangwill*. Middle row: Edward Miller*, Camile Henrot*, Hans Maes, Hazel Donkin*, John Tercier*. Front row: Aiste Griciute, Gabriela Ochoa, Sara Protasi*, Mari Mikkola*, Katrien Schaubroeck, Marghrete Bruun Vaage, Shahrar Ali. (Photo by S Ali)

Keynote Speakers

Martin Kemp – History of Art, Oxford University (Emeritus Research Professor)
Jerrold Levinson – Philosophy, University of Maryland
Jesse Prinz – Philosophy, City University of New York
Elisabeth Schellekens – Philosophy, University of Durham
Stephen Mumford – Philosophy, University of Nottingham
Pamela Church-Gibson – Film & Cultural Studies, University of the Arts London
David Davies – McGill University

See dedicated website

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Beyond Art: A symposium on the work of Dominic Lopes

 

Derek Matravers
Diarmuid Costello

 

Maria Jose Alcarez Leon

 

Muray Smith

This one-day symposium focuses on Dominic McIver Lopes’s forthcoming book, Beyond Art. Dominic Lopes (University of British Columbia, Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Warwick) is among the foremost contemporary philosophers of art. In addition to Lopes, participants include María José Alcaraz León (University of Murcia), Stacie Friend (Heythrop College), Derek Matravers (Open University and University of Cambridge) and Jean-Marie Schafer (EHESS, University of Paris).

In his new book Lopes proposes that the traditional difficulties around defining art – as well as other related problems such as those around aesthetic appreciation – can be solved once they are transferred to individual art forms. Thus, aesthetics should turn its attention beyond art, towards art forms. This original and controversial proposal will be considered and critiqued by the symposium’s other participants, and Lopes will speak about the book’s project and reply to his critics.

The Aesthetics Research Centre is grateful to the British Society for Aesthetics, the Leverhulme Foundation, and the School of Arts and Faculty of Humanities at the University of Kent for supporting this event.

Schedule

10.00 – 10.15

10.15 – 10.30

10.30 – 11.45

 

11.45 – 12.00

12.00 – 13.00

13 click to find out more.00 – 14.30

14.30 – 15.45

 

 

 Welcome

Dominic Lopes, Remarks on Beyond Art

Stacie Friend, “The Arts as Appreciative Kinds”

Jean-Marie Schaeffer, title tba

Coffee

Response by Dominic Lopes + discussion

Lunch

María José Alcaraz León, “Some Concerns About the Viability and the Informative Character of the Buck Passing Theory of Art”

Derek Matravers: “Is ‘Art as Art’ a Specific Art Form?”
15.45 – 16.00

16.00 – 17.30

17.30

 Coffee

Response by Dominic Lopes + discussion

Drinks reception

Abstracts

  • Stacie Friend, “The Arts as Appreciative Kinds” 
    I am in fundamental agreement with Lopes’s argument  in Beyond Art that we should pass important questions about artworks and art generally to accounts of the individual arts, and that we should conceive of individual arts as appreciative kinds. In this paper I articulate some challenges to Lopes’s positive proposals for defining and individuating the various arts as appreciative kinds. I further argue that given his own commitments, Lopes should recognise a closer connection between aesthetic appreciation on the one hand, and those appreciative kinds that constitute arts on the other. 
  • Jean-Marie Schaeffer, tba
  • María José Alcaraz León, “Some Concerns about the Viability and the Informative Character of the Buck Passing Theory of Art”
    Lopes’s project of a buck passing theory of art is supposed to be designed in a way that renders the theory informative and viable. The theory is informative only if it is able to deal with the ‘coffee mug’ objection. It is an essential aspect of Lopes’s reasoning that an answer to the ‘coffee mug’ objection shows that the coffee mug and a piece of Bizen ware from a sample of Walmart belong to different appreciative practices. I aim at showing that Lopes fails to offer good reasons for this claim and that this threatens the informative character of the buck passing theory. Secondly, I try to explore the cogency of the characterization of the art form named in Lopes’s work ‘art-as-art’. If works like Fountain –and other allegedly similar free agents- are harmless to the constitutive project of the buck passing theory because there is such a thing as an art form with no associated medium profile, there seems to be a lack of resources to explain what appreciation might consists in when dealing with items belonging to this special art form. 
  • Derek Matravers, “Is ‘Art as Art’ a Specific Art Form?”
    Dominic Lopes resolves a potential problem for his account of art by construing some of the ‘hard cases’ of the avant garde as belonging to their own art form: that of ‘Art as Art’. This paper will look at Lopes’s argument, and argue that it bears similarities with a move made by Institutionalist Theories. In both cases on might wonder if there is still a question left to answer.