Situated Aesthetics

Riccardo Manzotti

Description

This book focuses on externalist approaches to art. It is the first fruit of a workshop held in Milan in September 2009, where leading scholars in the emerging field of psychology of art compared their different approaches using a neutral language and discussing freely their goals.The event threw up common grounds for future research activities. First, there is a considerable interest in using cognitive and neural inspired techniques to help art historians, museum curators, art archiving, art preservation. Secondly, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists are rather open to using art as a special way of accessing the structures of the mind. Third, there are artists who explicitly draw inspiration out of current research on various aspects of the mind. Fourth, during the workshop, a converging methodological paradigm emerged around which more specific efforts could be encouraged.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Psychology

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 29 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845403669
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
Situated Aesthetics
Art Beyond the Skin
Edited by Riccardo Manzotti



Copyright Page
This collection copyright © Riccardo Manzotti, 2011
Individual contributions © their authors, 2011
Cover illustration: La Scala Virtuale, © Federica Marangoni
Cover design: Concept Graphics, www.conceptstudio.co.uk
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic
PO Box 200, Exeter EX 5 5 YX, UK
Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic
Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA
Digital version converted and published in 2012 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com



Acknowledgments
I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the persons and organizations that made possible both this volume and the conference that inspired it. In particular, I express my gratitude to the European Science Foundation (ESF) whose support permitted the publication of this volume.
The publication of this volume is counterfactually related to the occurrence of a curious situation which merits, I think, a word or two. The original commitment of many of the participants revolved around the possibility of providing a more scientific approach to aesthetics. By and large, the general feeling was that time was ripe to corroborate established and respected aesthetic theories with state-of-the-art models of the mind. The natural candidate was offered by neuroaesthetics pioneered by Semir Zeki’s seminal and brilliant work. As a result neuroaesthetics prominently showed in the conference title. Nevertheless, during some of the most lively, intellectually rewarding, and interesting discussions, an alternative view gained momentum. Since a relevant number among the participants found such a view fascinating and promising, it was considered an opportunity to present this approach in a more systematic way. Of course, I am referring to externalism and its possible consequences for aesthetics. It must be stressed that it was neither possible nor desirable to put together several authors on a daring target like that and to expect them to share a very detailed picture of the forthcoming view. However, as it happens, in the end, the editor and the authors managed to get together by persuasion or charm to achieve a final work. I would like to remember that in science and in philosophy as well, there is what the Greek conductor and pianist Dimitri Mitropoulos used to call ‘the sportive element’ - namely a factor of curiosity, adventure, and experiment that makes a book worthy of being read, discussed, and perhaps agreed upon. It’s in this spirit of adventure that this book is now published.
As the editor I must thank all the contributors of the book who bravely agreed to participate in a rather perilous intellectual enterprise whose precise goals and ends are not easy to foresee at the present time.
From the Institute of Communication and Behavior at IULM University in Milan, I thank the chair Professor Paolo Moderato for his continuous support, advice and encouragement. Finally, and not least, I want to express my gratitude to Professor Giovanni Puglisi, dean of IULM University, for creating and maintaining an intellectually open and rewarding environment where new ideas can freely cross the traditional watertight boundaries of academic trenches.
Riccardo Manzotti
January 2011
Notes on the Authors
Liliana Albertazzi is associate professor at Trento University and member of CIMeC (Centre for Mind & Brain, Rovereto, Italy). Her most recent works concern the nature of the perceptual and pictorial spaces of vision, the perceptual base of linguistic universals, the cognitive structure of metaphorical thinking, colour perception and colour categorization, information in perception, and the origin of meaning from grouping and shape configuration. Recently she edited the volume Visual Thought: The Depictive Space of Perception (John Benjamins, Amsterdam) and Perception Beyond Inference: The Information Content of Perceptual Processes (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA).
[e-mail]
Paola Carbone is Associate Professor of English Literature at IULM University, Milan. Her fields of research include: narrative theory; contemporary British culture and novel; the relationship between literature and new communication technologies. She has published several works on postmodern literature and digital art. In 2008 she published a groundbreaking analysis of Laurence Sterne’s work. Since 2000 she has coordinated the Tristram Shandy Web Project ( http://www.tristramshandyweb.it/ ). Her present research focuses on narration and the emergence of mental images.
[e-mail]
Stéphane Dumas is an art theoretician and a visual artist. As a theoretician, he has written papers about the problem of embodiment in art, the status of image as a ‘creative skin’, and the aesthetics of liminality. A book entitled Creative Skins is in preparation. As an artist, he works on the fragmented human figure and the skin. His work has been shown in numerous places, and is included in museum collections. He teaches at ESAA Duperré, Paris, and is part of a research laboratory in aesthetics at Sorbonne University.
[e-mail]
Giuliano Galletta ( www.giulianogalletta.it ) is an Italian artist, writer and journalist. He was born in Sanremo in 1955 and currently lives in Genoa where he is a staff writer at the Italian newspaper ‘Il Secolo XIX’. He has presented his work in several galleries and art museums both in Italy and abroad. Among his most recent exhibitions are ‘The Chaos Museum’, at the Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art in Genoa. He is the author of many books on the human condition. The most recent is The World is Not a Peach (Socialmente, 2010).
[e-mail]
Joel Krueger is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen. His current research focuses on the embodied and enactive roots of social cognition and music perception. He has published articles on various issues in phenomenology and philosophy of mind, Asian and comparative philosophy, pragmatism, and philosophy of music.
[e-mail]
Sylvain Le Groux is a researcher at the laboratory for Synthetic, Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is also an active musician and interaction designer. He builds and evaluates synthetic interactive systems to address questions at the intersection of perception, cognition, emotion, therapy, and performance.
[e-mail] http://www.dtic.upf.edu/~slegroux
Lambros Malafouris , PhD (Cambridge), is a Fellow in Creativity at Keble College, University of Oxford, and a former Balzan Research Fellow in Cognitive Archaeology at the McDonald Institute, University of Cambridge. His research interests lie broadly in the archaeology of mind and the philosophy of material culture. His recent publications include The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind (with Colin Renfrew), Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach (with Carl Knappett) and The Sapient Mind: Archaeology Meets Neuroscience (with Colin Renfrew and Chris Frith).
[e-mail]
Riccardo Manzotti is currently Professor of Psychology at IULM University in Milan. His main interests are the nature of consciousness and the design and implementation of models of conscious agents. He is a lecturer in Psychology of Art, and Neuroscience of Perception. He has a degree in Philosophy and another in Electronic Engineering. He has a PhD in Robotics focusing on Artificial Intelligence and models of Artificial Consciousness and Goal-Driven Artificial Agents.
He has published several papers on consciousness, externalism, and ontological issues as to the nature of phenomenal experience in a physical world. He edited a book on the topic of artificial consciousness and, more recently, a volume on externalism and aesthetics.
[e-mail]
Sabine Marienberg studied Romance Studies and Philosophy in Munich, Perugia and Berlin and holds a PhD in Philosophy and Humanities from the Freie Universität Berlin. She is currently a lecturer in Philosophy at the Humboldt Universität Berlin and member of the interdisciplinary research group Funktionen des Bewusstseins at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Her research interests lie in the areas of Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophical Anthropology and Aesthetics.
[e-mail]
Erik Myin teaches and conducts research at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Antwerp, where he is director of the Centre for Philosophical Psychology. His area of interest is the philosophy of cognitive science, often with a focus on perception. He has published on issues ranging from spectrum inversion to sensory substitution, sometimes in collaboration with working scientists, in places like Synthese, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Cognitive Science or The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. With Dan Hutto, he is currently working on a book manuscript titled Radicalizing Enactivism (under contract with MIT Press).
[e-mail]
Robert Pepperell is an artist and writer. Trained at the Slade School of Art, UCL, London, he worked as a multimedia and installation artist through the 1990s with exhibitions at The Barbican, the ICA, the Millennium Dome, Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, Ars Electronica, and others. He has written several books, inclu