Cartographies of Sensation -
ABSTRACTS
Franco
Berardi
Imaginining what cannot be seen
Notes on the concept of
imagination.
Imagination as recombination of what has been seen.
Seeing and imagining.
Different levels of Seeing: visible, invisible, transvisible.
Art as imagination of what cannot be seen.
Divisionism: seeing the matter of light.
Cubofuturism: seeing the movement.
Art and genetic imagination, today. Seeing the epigenetic process.
What can be seen and what cannot be seen in the becoming-life
Zero-dimensional (genetic Information) and multi-dimensional (the
organism in time).
Consciously and unconsciously Visual Art has been working on the
relationship between sight and imagination, between projection and
perception in Vision. My lecture will be dedicated to the
reframing of the concept of imagination by this point of view.
Starting from the Sartre’s definition of imagination, I’ll try to
connect this notion with the notion of vision.
The process of seeing will be examined by the neurophysiological and by
the psychological point of view in order to reframe the relationship
between what we can see, what we are forbidden to see, and what we are
seeing but not re-cognizing.
Divisionism, Cubism, Generative Art will be reconsidered, and compared
to the new paradigm coming from the bio-genetic research.
Reinhold Bertlmann
The aesthetic dimension of physics
Aesthetics as a sensual perception plays an important role in the
construction of a physical theory and is not considered to be in
contrast to mathematical
rationalism.
On the basis of quantum theory the aesthetic dimension of physics will
be demonstrated. In particular, it will be shown how the quantum states
of
modern quantum information, the entangled states of the observers Alice
and
Bob, can be illustrated in an abstract space which exhibits an
amazingly simple and
elegant geometry.
Patricia Pisters
Multiple Screen Aesthetics, Neurothrills and the Affect of Surveillance
This presentation deals with
the aesthetics and affects of Deleuze’s control society.
Surveillance cameras and far reaching biopolitical technologies are all
processed through multiple screens. Contemporary audio-visual culture
addresses these issues of the control society frequently and explicitly
in films and television series such as Enemy of the State (Tony Scott,
1998), Code 46 (Michael Winterbottom, 2003) and The Last Enemy (BBC,
2007). While the political implications of control, safety and loss of
freedom raised by these films and series are very important to address
in order to create a critical conceptual framework for developing these
aspects of the control society, I will look at the aesthetic and
affective implications of contemporary control society.
By analyzing and comparing two contemporary surveillance films, Red
Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006) and A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater,
2007) I will address the implications of a “multiple screen
aesthetics.” Ranging from raw realist aesthetics in Red Road to
“hyperrealist rotoscope” aesthetics in A Scanner Darkly the screen is
“multipresent” in quantities and qualities with various effects. The
affective implications of surveillance technology will be addressed by
relating Deleuze’s concepts of affect to the latest findings in
neuroscience on affect and emotion. Through a transdisciplinary
approach of ‘fear’ that is expressed in the above mentioned films I
will map a diagram of paradoxical feelings, emotions and affects that
move between positions behind and in front of the surveilling camera
eye.
Tyyne Claudia Pollmann
Mental Mappings
My artistic production is structured in the form of projects, which I
realize in cooperation with specialists in other knowledge fields. Up
to 2000 I dealt with issues within the field of biosciences, in
particular the analysis and transformation of basic organizational
structures and their implications. In the projects and
collaborations that followed, I considered the role of the
computer and its possibilities and limitations in relation to the
acquisition and transformation of the real. These studies lead to
research in the fields of physics and theoretical mathematics.
My latest project, Stop Counting, a cooperation with the theoretical
Physicist Dr. Thoralf Chrobok, deals in particular with the
field of topology, in which geometrical relationships are defined
outside of the Cartesian coordinate system. Concepts such as frontier,
neighbohood, interior, path and open set become crucial for handling
bodies in space. An artistic production in the form of sketches,
objects and installations runs parallel to theoretical work in the form
of workshops and platforms.
http://www.t-c-pollmann.de/
www.stopcounting.de
Maria Reicher
Aesthetic feelings and the process of artistic production
In my contribution, I would like to discuss three distinct, though
interrelated, questions: 1. What is beauty in the first place? Is it a
property in the objects or something that exists exclusively “in the
eye of the beholder”? 2. Is it possible to create beauty? If yes, what
kind of activity is this? 3. What is the relation between beauty on the
one hand and sensation and feeling on the other?
It shall be pointed out that it is indeed possible to conceive of
beauty as a property in the objects, although as a particular kind of
property, namely as a relational and dispositional property which is
dependent on other properties. Beauty is created by the creators of
beautiful things and complexes of thought, in particular by artists.
This process of creation (which will be considered in some detail) is
(just as the process of reception) closely related to sensations and
feelings, but not in the way that the work of art is simply a means to
transmit the private sensations and feelings of the artists to the
recipients.
Ignacio Vallines
As the liver secrets bile
In times of astonishing
scientific and technological achievements it becomes most evident how
extraordinary human brains are. Despite the immense effort done in the
last decades we are still far from understanding how such complex
structure manages to orchestrate all aspects of our lives. However,
recently developed research techniques provide us for the first time
with a window to the functioning brain while performing a variety of
complex cognitive tasks. The fruits of behaviourism and cognitive
research can now be matched to neural firing and brain activity
patterns, allowing for the study of the mind at its biological source.
A vast amount of information is continuously
delivered by our senses to our central nervous system; the brain
interprets the environment not only based on this sensory information,
but also integrating stored knowledge and previous experience to
actually construct a world of our own. At the same time, this
subjective interpretation of the physical world is driven by a set of
evolutionary-shaped universal principles that are common to individuals
from a determined socio-ethical context. Most artistic forms exploit
this process to the maximum by providing us with a wealth of sensory
information that emotionally appeals to our own memories and
experiences to assemble an aesthetic percept that goes beyond the
physical sensory stimulation. The brain is the organ of the mind, our
personal interpreter of the world and the biological substrate of
emotions and feelings. In this talk, I will introduce some basic
concepts from cognitive neuroscience and will try to instigate
discussion by presenting some demonstrations on how low level
perceptive integration can also influence higher psychological
processes.
Gerhard E.
Winkler
Chaotische Attraktoren als Beziehungsmodelle.
Zu den Grundlagen meiner interaktiven Oper "Heptameron"
(1998-2002)
Ausgehend von einer Szene seiner interaktiven Oper "Heptameron"
erläutert der Komponist, wie in seinen Arbeiten interaktive
Netzwerke auf verschiedenen Ebenen, vom abstrakten mathematischen
Modell, über Partitursynthese, bis hin zu Ausdrucksgesten und
direkten interaktiven Steuerungen, - der MusikerInnen untereinander wie
in der Kommunikation mit live-elektronischen Interfaces (Sensoren,
etc.) -, den "Körper" des Werkes ausformen. Dieses Zusammenspiel
der Ebenen wird vom Komponisten als "Realtime-Score" definiert.
Wesentlich ist dabei das Konzept des Situativen, das Schaffen von
Situationen, die durch die Art der Interaktionen charakterisiert sind:
nicht das Fixieren eines endgültigen Werkzustandes ist das Ziel,
sondern das Ermöglichen der Realisierung immer wieder neuer
Versionen. Im Falle von "Heptameron" betrifft dies sowohl die
Gesamtform der Aufführung, als auch die inneren Abläufe der
einzelnen "Szenen", die teilweise in mehreren Versionen während
einer Aufführung zu erleben sind und zum Vergleich einladen.
Die Hoffnung ist dabei, dass durch das Schaffen der
Situations-Charaktere auch eine Art strukturelle Emotionalität
entsteht, der Umriss einer relational definierten
Gefühlsästhetik.
Flavia Zucco
The dualistic opposition between the natural and the artificial has
been with us since antiquity. In recent times definitions of the
boundary have become more complex and less definable.
Current scientific research opens up unexpected horizons at the levels
of observation as well as at the level of sensory and symbolic
perception of the world. We are able to observe the extremes of scale.
Time and space have been regauged, making us experience unusual
dimensions. The individual experience augmented through the development
of machines transposes the other, the collective, into an artificial
elsewhere. The biological body with its prostheses (bio- and non)
makes us imaginary subjects of immortality, cloning, auto-nomy and
individual unsolvability in a history made of past, present and future.
Under the conditions of postmodernity, the future becomes immediately
past, and this causes disorientation, anxiety and discomfort.
Time is the present, the instant. This immanence causes the dismantling
and the implosion of the subject her- or himself. Progress becomes
demystified, seperated from its definative meaning and becomes
happening (Vattimo). Traditions don´t speak to us anymore: only
science mantains roots in the real, however, this is
difficult to grasp because of the extreme specialization and the
continuous acceleration in of the production of knowledge.
This situation opens up the problem of humanity fearing what she
herself has created, the obscure fear of a technique revolting
against, or subordinating the human. The problem is not whether or not
to accept the cyborg, but if whether the cyborg can be asserted as a
self determining subject i.e. is compatible with the rights and duties
of a democratic society.
Moreover, one has to accept the confrontation between ethics and
technique, because, when the first is activated , the second has
already passed beyond the limit of interrogation. Gehlen states that
the humanity who sought to be freed by technique is today imprisoned by
it and morality is reduced to the desperate role of having to
constantly hinder the efficacious, the realizable, the
functional. According to this author, the loneliness that the
individual must deal with, projects his/her attention towards the
„periferic territories of existence“ where perhaps, the image is going
to be a better communication tool than the word, by then already
inadequate.