"What Are Artworks and How Do We Experience Them"

Winter Symposium at the Center for Semiotics, Aarhus University
January 26th – 28th, 2012

Call for papers

The Center for Semiotics, Aarhus University announces its annual Winter
Symposium, this year on the properties of aesthetic objects and the mechanisms
involved in their cognition.
The purpose of this conference is to investigate the multifarious aspects of
the relation between an artwork (visual, literary, or musical) and its objective
properties, the meaningful experience of it, and the cognitive skills and acts
involved in the latter.

From an ontological point of view, artworks differ from plain everyday objects
in different respects. From this perspective, follows a number of questions:
What properties do artworks possess that plain objects don’t? If artworks depict
or represent something, then what exactly is depiction or representation?
If artworks are intentional objects par excellence, how is this intentionality
encoded in them, and how can it be retrieved, if it is to be retrieved
in the first
place? If artworks are valuable in a sense that plain objects are not,
what do we
mean by value?

On the other hand, the experience or cognition of artworks and aesthetic objects
in general is obviously of another type than experience of plain objects. This
lead to another list of research questions, which rather aim at characterizing
the subjective correlate of aesthetic experience: If we attend to aesthetic
objects differently than to plain everyday objects, what, then, characterizes
this intentional attitude or mindset? If there is a difference between the
phenomenology of seeing three apples, a photo of three apples or a painting
of three apples, what, then, characterizes the phenomenology of aesthetic
experience? If artworks affect us perceptually, by virtue of their qualitative
(visual, textual or acoustic) layout, what are the phenomenal or qualitative
properties, which are particularly significant for us? If artworks affect us by
virtue of given properties of our visuo-cognitive system what are, then, the
relevant properties exploited to that effect? If there is a specific
phenomenology
of aesthetic experience, does it follow that there is a general brain state or a
neural dynamics that correspond to that phenomenology?

The aim of this conference is to explore the complementarity of these domains of
investigation and how they may mutually enlighten each other. We have invited
eminent philosophers, psychologists, art historians, neuroscientists; including
scholars specialized in the crossovers between the above domains. Our hope is
thus, first, that the conference will be the scene for state of the
art discussions
within each of these fields: the ontology of art and the psychology of
art, broadly
taken. And, next – that these insights will help us better understand
the logic and

nature of meaning-making in the aesthetic domain.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Anjan Chatterjee (University of Pennsylvania)
Peter Dixon/Marisa Bortolussi (University of Alberta)
John M. Kennedy (University of Toronto Scarborough)
Jerrold Levinson (University of Maryland)
Paul J. Locher (Montclair State University)
Dominc Lopes (University of British Columbia)
Raymond A. Mar (York University)
Jeff Mitscherling (University of Guelph)
Jean Petitot (CREA, Ecole Polytechnique)
Barry Smith (State University of New York at Buffalo)
Kendall Walton (University of Michigan)
Peer Bundgaard (Aarhus University)
Frederik Stjernfelt (Aarhus University)

Format:
The conference welcomes a limited number of submitted papers (20 minutes
and 10 minutes for discussion).

Submission of abstracts:
Abstracts should not exceed 200 words: the bibliography is excluded from this
count, but should be kept essential. Please, clearly indicate a title,
a thesis, and
the line of the argumentation.

Abstracts should be submitted electronically to [log in to unmask]
Please include the following information in the main body of you
e-mail: author’s
name, affiliation, e-mail address for correspondence, title of talk,
3-5 keywords.

Submission deadline: December 9th 2011

For further info, see www.hum.au.dk/semiotics/

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Riccardo Fusaroli, post.doctoral fellow
http://www.google.com/profiles/fusaroli
Center for Semiotics - Institute of Aesthetics and Communication
Interacting Minds - Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience
University of Aarhus