From: Gary Hall [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 09 June 2014 11:23
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: The Aesthetics of the Humanities: Towards a Poetic Knowledge Production
The Aesthetics of the Humanities: Towards a Poetic Knowledge Production
Wednesday June 11th - Coventry University (ETG34) - 2:30-6:00pm
Erin Manning (Concordia University)
Søren Pold (Aarhus University)
Johanna Drucker (UCLA)
Silvio Lorusso (IUAV University of Venice)
The event is free but registration is recommended to ensure a place
http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/wiki/
Schedule
14:30 Registration
14:50 Introduction (Janneke Adema - Coventry University)
15:00 Erin Manning (Concordia University) - via Skype
Against Method
This paper will explore how a radically empirical approach opens up the relationship between making and thinking.
15:20 Søren Pold (Aarhus University)
Ink After Print. Literary Interface Criticism
Currently literary media are changing again with the read-write
controlled consumption interfaces of e-books, smart phones, tablets and
web 2.0 reading-writing platforms. In this short talk, I aim to sketch
out how we can apply an interface criticism to these changes in order to
find out how the contemporary literary and cultural interfaces are
structured and how they can be explored critically and reflexively in
art practice.
15:40 Discussion
16:15 Tea break
16:45 Johanna Drucker (UCLA) - via Skype
Diagrammatic Form and Performative Materiality
Theories of materiality include attention to the literal, forensic,
formal, and distributed-to which categories the "performative" adds
another dimension, one that is premised on the instantiated and situated
experience of an aesthetic work rather assuming its existence as a
self-evident, autonomous object defined by inherent properties. The idea
of performativity is also crucial to diagrams-drawings that work, that
are generative in their activity because of structural features that
spatialize semantic relations and make spatial relations semantic.
Because diagrams are exemplary-even paradigmatic-they offer a way to
reconceptualize approaches to design and reading/viewing aesthetic
artifacts across a broad range of artistic works and practices. This
paper proposes that the "diagrammatic" and "performative" concepts offer
a way to think aesthetic practice from a theoretical perspective that
draws on non-representational and new materialist perspectives that
embody crucial principles of humanistic epistemology relevant to the
creation of knowledge in the digital environment. Examples from the
history of information visualization, poetics, book arts, and digital
arts will be used to illustrate these principles.
17:05 Silvio Lorusso (IUAV University of Venice)
The Post-Digital Publishing Archive: An Inventory of Speculative Strategies
Recently launched, the Post-Digital Publishing Archive (P-DPA) is an
online platform to systematically collect, organise and keep trace of
art and design experiences at the intersection of publishing and digital
technology. Filling a gap in the discussion, which is generally led by
the narrative of innovation, P-DPA focuses on projects that investigate
the social, cultural and economic dynamics of publishing through a DIY
approach, custom tools and counterintuitive employment of popular
platforms. Like every archive, P-DPA embodies a specific attitude that
is mainly expressed by the criteria employed to select the works and by
the multiple relations among them. How can the materiality of such works
be properly defined through a categorisation system? What technological,
processual and signifying aspects need to be taken into account? By
acting as an inventory of speculative strategies, P-DPA aims to become a
reference point for designers and artists interested in publishing and
indirectly extend its very notion.
17:25 Discussion
18:00 End
The Centre for Disruptive Media presents
Disrupting the Humanities
A series of 3 half-day seminars looking at research and scholarship in a
'posthumanities' context, organised by the Centre for Disruptive
Media<http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/> at Coventry University.
Disrupting the Humanities will both critically engage with the humanist
legacy of the humanities, and creatively explore alternative and
affirmative possible futures for the humanities.
http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/wiki/
The Aesthetics of the Humanities: Towards a Poetic Knowledge Production
The increasing use of digital tools and interfaces to represent
scholarly materials has once again drawn our attention to both the
importance of aesthetics in the (digital) humanities and to questions of
form, design and poetics in relationship to our systems and practices of
knowledge production. In this respect, imagining how creativity,
reasoning, interpretation, and aesthetics are intrinsically entangled,
would be the start of a critique of what can still be seen as one of the
major oppositions structuring humanities scholarship: an opposition
between on the one hand more rationalistic, conceptual and objectifying
tendencies in knowledge production and representation and on the other
hand, the role played by subjectivity, artfulness, feeling, experience
and sensory aspects in research practices as well as in their media of
dissemination and communication.
This critique has been triggered by, among other things, new data
visualisation tools and methods. These tools and methods offer
alternative ways of representing information and of thinking about
information aesthetics or 'infosthetics'. But what does this mean for
our conventional ways of reading, understanding and analysing data and
information? What is the role of design and aesthetics in knowledge
formation? And what is gained or lost at the hands of these new ways of
extracting and representing data? These are just some of the questions
that will be addressed by our international cast of speakers.
In the process, this seminar will examine how such developments relate
to the humanities in particular, as a field with a history of resistance
to more visual forms of knowledge representation and production? This
conservatism on the part of the humanities is intrinsically bound-up
with its textual condition - what Jessica Pressman has called its
'aesthetics of bookishness'. At the same time the multimodality of the
digital medium has fuelled the idea that scholarly content is separate
from its material instantiation or presentation. There is a felt need to
again emphasise how a media's materiality or specific format influences
its meaning and use. From this point of view, if we pay more attention
to the performative aspects of materiality, of media, and of design, we
might be more receptive to seeing the ideology that is inherent in our
representations and the politics that is instantiated in our continued
practical iterations of these representations. Interfaces are not merely
representing our information and data, they are creating and
interpreting it too. Yet how is this interpretation being represented
and performed?
One response would be to extend our visual epistemologies by stimulating
humanist training in visual representation, interface critique, and
design tools and methodologies. But, as scholars, do we not also need to
become more involved in the actual design, visualisation, and
performance of our materials, so as to generate new relationships
between data and interpretation, and explore what can be thought of as a
new poetics of scholarship?
Wednesday June 11th
Coventry University
Jordan Well
Ellen Terry Building, Room 34 (ETG34)
CV1 5RW Coventry
United Kingdom
http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/
--
Gary Hall
Research Professor of Media and Performing Arts
School of Art and Design, Coventry University
Director of the Centre for Disruptive Media
http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/
Co-founder of the Open Humanities Press
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org
Visiting Professor, Hybrid Publishing Lab, Leuphana University
http://www.leuphana.de/zentren/cdc/forschung-projekte/alle/hybrid-publishing-lab.html
Website http://www.garyhall.info
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*************************************************************************************
************************************************************************************
Distributed through Cyber-Society-Live [CSL]: CSL is a moderated discussion
list made up of people who are interested in the interdisciplinary academic
study of Cyber Society in all its manifestations.To join the list please visit:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html
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