This is a précis of Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (Oxford, 2022). Contemporary art can seem like a wilderness of unwieldy installations, decaying materials, immersive environments, and audience participation. It can be hard to know what to focus on and how to assess the value or meaning of what we encounter, since so many artworks use non-art materials and techniques and defy familiar conventions. In Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art, I argue that these developments, disparate as they may seem, can (...) be understood by shifting our focus to the rules that artists articulate in creating and deploying their works. Rules have become an artistic medium that artists customize to achieve specific artistic statements and aesthetic effects. Rules are partly, and sometimes wholly, constitutive of the very structure of the artwork; grasping the rules associated with a work is thus crucial to understanding its nature. Articulating these rules, which may be quite specific and fine-grained, is part of the act of artmaking, and the rules bear meaning just as essential physical objects do. (shrink)

In this article I reply to commentary on Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (Oxford, 2022) by Shelby Moser, Darren Hudson Hick, and Guy Rohrbaugh.

This essay explores the intersection of contingency and aesthetics in contemporary artistic practices, challenging the historical dichotomy between reason and fact, and between necessity and contingency. Through the lens of Italian feminist thought, particularly the work of Carla Lonzi, it examines how contingency can redefine aesthetic gestures and suggests the concept of “dynamic liminality” as the conceptual operator of such redefinition. The study identifies four main components of “dynamic liminality” – instability, repetition, impermanence, and unproductiveness – showing how contemporary artists (...) like Nao Bustamante, Marcel Broodthaers, Chiara Camoni, Lucia Cristiani, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Laura Grisi, and Beatrice Meoni embody these concepts. Their works demonstrate the critical and transformative potential of contingency, proposing an aesthetics that embraces transient, unstable, and unproductive elements as essential to artistic expression and cultural critique. (shrink)

This article explores the concept of “excessive contingency” through an analysis of the Situationist International’s practice of the dérive and Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of exposition. It argues that contingency, rooted in our fundamental being-with-others, exceeds traditional subject-object divisions. In line with Improvisation Studies scholars Dan DiPiero and Alessandro Bertinetto, Situationist dérive is examined as a “deliberate” engagement with urban contingency that subverts functionalist approaches to space. Nancy’s ontology of exposition further illuminates how contingency is integral to our relational existence. By (...) bringing these perspectives together, the article develops an expanded understanding of contingency as fundamentally tied to our exposition to and entanglement with the world. This “excessive contingency” moves beyond binary oppositions to reveal the inherently relational and open-ended nature of experience. The analysis offers new insights into urban practices, social relations, and the ontological significance of contingency, proposing a reimagining of our relationship to urban spaces, others, and the unfolding of contingent experience itself. (shrink)

This essay takes the concept of “digital ekphrasis” as an opportunity to look at contemporary multimodal AI – or more precisely text-to-image generators, understood as the latest phenomena in the media history of technical images. In my discussion, I raise the question of whether the digitally programmed image generation performed by programs like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney or DALL-E can be thought of as ekphrasis. Following recent discussions in the field of media theory, I thereby ask whether the criterion of operativity (...) is decisive for distinguishing text-to-image generation from ekphrasis in the classical sense. My discussion evolves in a revision of ekphrasis in the art historical sense, confronted with the structural processes of multimodal AI. However, the comparison of these two modes of ekphrasis reveals how impoverished the concepts of both image and language risk being in the context of text-to-image-modelling. This, in turn, does not mean that current AI imageries cannot be discussed regarding a (post-) digital aesthetics. Rather, as recent media artists working with multimodal AI show, text-to-image reformulates old questions about the relationship between art or aesthetics and (media) technology. (shrink)

This paper focuses on two aspects of Maximilian Beck’s philosophical reflection: his adherence to naive (phenomenological) realism and his claim to the autonomous existence of the affective qualities of the objectual world. Therefore, my contribution will be structured as follows: after a brief overview of Beck’s defence of naive realism (§2), I will attempt to show how, in his opinion, the affective qualities characterizing the world (i.e., the places and things we encounter) are in principle independent of the perceiver, possessing (...) an objectivity of their own. It is pertinent to mention here that Beck calls these affective qualities “objective moods” (objektive Stimmungen) (§3). After that, I will try to illustrate the “externalist” aspects of Beck’s theory of the apprehension of Stimmungen, highlighting its differences from the “projective empathy” theses that were circulating at the time, particularly in the version proposed by Theodor Lipps (§4). In the final section, I will present two arguments that Beck puts forward in support of his theory of the objectivity of the Stimmungen (§5). (shrink)

This article is divided into two parts. The first part demonstrates the importance of contingency in art. There is a strong link between contingency and creativity, and it is possible to say that in art this contingency-dependent creativity makes art more “real”. In this first part the “creative contingency” or art model will also transferred to the idea of the “art of life” as a mixture of ethics and aesthetics. The second part analyzes the capacity of algorithms to produce aesthetic (...) expressions by following necessary rules and by excluding contingency. Is this cognitive model compatible with artistic creativity? (shrink)

The essay aims to examine the concept of translation in Nietzsche’s thinking. Starting from the Gay Science, the article questions the continuity/discontinuity between the argument on translation developed in §83 and the topic of the origin of poetry and of its rhythm dealt with in §84. The paper focuses then on a passage from the introduction to the second edition of Daybreak, which thinks of language on the basis of the rhythm of reading. Through the analysis of paragraph 28 of (...) Beyond Good and Evil, the first part of the paper thinks the practice of translating as a poetics of translation. By reversing the theses apparently upheld in §83 of the Gai savoir, i.e. the translation as violence and domestication, the second part of the paper aims to suggest the way the constellation of translation opens to Nietzsche the room for a radical critique of philosophical language and of German culture. (shrink)

Although incidents of online sexual assault are becoming increasingly common, the concept of virtual rape still needs critical examination. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I first argue that virtual rape should not be seen as a metaphorical term, let alone an oxymoron. Focusing on the embodied conditions that define presence in immersive environments, I then draw a phenomenologically inspired distinction between physical and bodily to challenge the idea that virtual rape is nothing more than psychological violence. Lastly, I introduce the notion (...) of somatechnical body to clarify the specific nature of virtual rape. (shrink)

The notion of contingency seems to apply only improperly to storytelling. From Aristotle to Peter Brooks, the efficacy of a plot is in fact measured by its ability to bind the initial and final situation through a series of events connected according to the principle of causality. Within the plot, each element does not have value in itself, but for the link it has with the preceding and subsequent elements; what at first seemed sensational and fortuitous at a retrospective glance (...) is thus functional to the whole and is cloaked in the veil of necessity. In this contribution, we will see in Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the polyphonic novel a way of making contingency coexist with the narrative arrangement of events. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to outline some traits of Iannis Xenakis’ aesthetics, with reference to his conception of chance, which stands in contrast to both determinism in serial music and the theorists of alea. His elaboration of a stochastic music is here understood not as a mere evolution of compositional techniques, but as evidence of a philosophical necessity, considering chance an ontological problem and resulting in a rejection of the hyper-specialization of the different branches of knowledge. Through a (...) look at his theoretical works, some of his references to pre-Socratic philosophy, but also to Plato and to Husserl’s phenomenology are discussed, and a possible interpretation of his non-positivistic cosmo-ontology through the idea of Wittgenstein’s isomorphism is suggested. (shrink)

If artistic improvisation gives a predominant place to contingency, this contingency cannot be absolute, on pain of depriving improvisation of any technique. This article, by taking the case of dance improvisation, will explore the complex relationships between contingency and necessity, by analyzing how a relative contingency can arise from the external necessity of a given framework of action, and how an inner necessity can result from a contingency understood as a creative condition relative to the Kairos of a situation in (...) the making. These two connections will ultimately be linked to two different approaches to the concept of emergence. (shrink)

How does contingency “appear” and how can it be “used” in the creation of artworks? What are the aesthetic and art historical implications of elaborating the possibilities of randomness in art? In this article I investigate these questions with the help of a series of artworks. Therefore, I am not pursuing a mere theoretical survey, i.e. scrutinising just the ideas (both the older conceptualisation and more recent theories) concerning the concept of contingency. Instead of such an ideahistorical approach, here I (...) am more interested in observing the question from the point of view of the actual practice and practitioners, hence what we can learn from the inspection of the works of art themselves. For this, first I examine some exciting aspects and questions around art, aesthetics and contingency, with the help of a piece by Alma Heikkilä. After that I provide an overview of some of the most exciting examples of the manifestation and “use” of randomness in art, ranging from the Renaissance to the 21st century. This will then help us, towards the end of the paper, to identify some curious patterns in the development of the occurrence of contingency and of the artistic “handling” of chance in art practices as well as to understand better the creative significance and aesthetic consequences of elaborating randomness. (shrink)

Bioart emerges as a response to worrying changes in living forms produced by genetic engineering. Indeed, bioartists focus their attention on artistic exploration of biotechnologies and related ethical issues. Their main goal was to inform the public about dangerous genetic engineering techniques, like cloning, inter- and intraspecies experiments, reproductive technologies, genotype and phenotype reprogramming, hybridization techniques, and many others. The paradox lies in the fact that bioartists, in collaboration with scientists, use the same abovementioned techniques and create in laboratory unique (...) living beings with original aesthetic aspects. The use of living organisms for creative or recreational purposes inevitably causes serious cultural and bioethical debates. In this context emerges the concept of contingency linked with living forms, biotech art, and aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially in its current incarnation of Machine Learning (ML), is an endeavor that is characterized by contingencies of two kinds. Intrinsic contingencies stem from the use of specific computational techniques that seem to decrease the control that human users exert on this technology. Relational contingencies emerge from the interaction of AI with other disciplines and contexts. I conduct an analysis of these contingencies on the backdrop of the visual arts with the aim to shed light on the (...) complex relations between technology and creativity. (shrink)

Contingency has an essential importance in the world, and its investigation can be really useful for the better understanding of many aspects of art and aesthetics too. Aesthetic contingency is quite paradoxical: artistic activity seems to contain both design, necessity, rules, pre-planned aspects and at the same time contingent elements, chance, accidents and unforeseen results. While creation always contained some degree of chance, the aesthetic potential of contingency started to become an important topic, and one to be explicitly investigated in (...) the twentieth century. This introduction surveys some of the positions in the theoretical discussions about contingency with its relationship with aesthetics. (shrink)

The article aims to define the role assumed by Paul Cézanne’s pictorial landscape within aesthetic reflections on landscape. Starting with the testimonies of Emile Bernard, Joachim Gasquet and Maurice Denis, the aim is to identify those concepts and components that aesthetically constitute and characterise the landscape of Mont Sainte-Victoire. In this sense we wish to proceed with an investigation aimed at the aesthetic-perceptual reading provided by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, focusing on the parameters of vision, colour and depth, and then turn our (...) attention to the motif analysed by Henri Maldiney, through the concepts of form and rhythm. (shrink)

The essay aims to demonstrate that participatory ecological art focused on plant-ing, sowing, and cultivation serves as a means to promote a culture of environ-mental care. After exploring several artistic projects involving community engage-ment in landscape stewardship, the essay focuses on the debate concerning ges-ture and behavioral patterns. Finally, by examining artist Egle Oddo’s Performative Habitats project, it seeks to understand how art can influence the formation of new habits through both increased environmental awareness and repeated action, employing key theoretical (...) frameworks of Everyday Aesthetics. (shrink)

Published in 1977, The tuning of the world by Raymond Murray Schafer, inaugu-rated the soundscape studies, that have shaped much further research, interweav-ing different disciplinary fields, and are based around the concept of sound as a meta-category that both encompasses and transcends music. These studies invite us to reflect on the relationship between human beings and sound environment, on the responsibility of each individual in sharing the soundscape as a common and collective heritage and, more generally, on the ability to (...) exercise hearing as a medium of understanding of the world. (shrink)

This essay sets out to investigate the Shelleys’ perception of Italy and the Italians, oscillating between heartfelt enthusiasm and disillusionment. As will be shown, P.B. Shelley adopted a more critical stance towards the population, while he unre-servedly appreciated both the natural landscape and the relics of a glorious past. Conversely, Mary Shelley was more sympathetic and convincingly embraced the Italian cause. The intertwined concepts of Italophilia and Italophobia will also be explored.

The article aims to explore some of the more strictly aesthetic-philosophical as-pects of Stanislaw Lem's famous novel Solaris. Beginning with a historical recon-struction of the use of the concepts of fantasy and imagination in Western culture, and exploring the relationship between these two terms and the idea of matter with which they are intertwined, the article offers an interpretation of the novel in which the relationship between matter and imagination plays a crucial role for the characters themselves.

In contrast to a positivist conception that considers the objective elements of its topographical location to be absolutely prevalent for the identification of a real estate, the Roman legal sources present a more articulated picture, in which the voluntas, affectio and constitutio of the dominus play a fundamental role in the subjective distinction between locus and fundus. In any case, a merely patrimo-nial perspective appears extraneous to Roman jurist’s thinking. On the contrary, emerges the full awareness of a special juridical (...) relationship of man with the ter-ritory. (shrink)

In the contemporary media landscape determined by the pervasive and ubiquitous use of computational media, the figure of ekphrasis is experiencing a moment of renewed interest, which contributes to broadening its field of action traditionally limited to literature. Following this line of interpretation, this article aims to show how precisely the concept of ekphrasis, understood in its processual and performative dimension, can be fruitfully engaged in an analysis of the aesthetic and visual experience that characterises the daily use of our (...) digital devices. By examining Juran Landt's drawing "I just want fruits on a plate", this article explores the tension between text and image in digitally inspired aesthetics. It analyses the disorienting yet productive experiences induced by Landt's artwork, which are reminiscent of our daily encounters with digital media. Finally, this article proposes that the ekphrastic process may represent a moment of unexpected rupture in the otherwise smooth and hypnotic consumption of the digital media. (shrink)

This paper aims to reevaluate the use of the concept of representation as it is used to define the concept of ekphrasis, while taking into account recent developments of digital (visual) culture. It offers an account on the different ways representation can be understood as part of those definitions and how they prove successful – or fail to do so – in digital environments, mainly by resorting to the philosophical method of conceptual analysis.

Collecting is one of the most widespread cultural practices in the world; which, similar to art – already the subject of a long tradition of philosophical studies – has given rise to the most various creations over the centuries. This refers not only to the countless types of objects that have been the focus of collections but, above all, to the object that constitutes their most defining production: the collection itself, collectively understood as an unparalleled artifact. But from a metaphysical (...) point of view, what is a collection? Starting from the peculiar relationship between a collection and the objects that compose it, in this article we will investigate the essence that distinguishes a collection from any other type of set or gathering of objects. The answer to the question “what is a collection?” will thus culminate in the outline of a specific theory, the abstract artifactualism of collections. (shrink)

The essay aims to examine the concept of digital ekphrasis in virtual reality environments. The emergence of immersive narrative worlds, both in videogames and artistic expression, requires a reflection on the relationships between traditional narrative forms (literature and painting, as well as photography and cinema) and the possibilities that technological development brings to the evolution of artistic and expressive languages. Starting from the analysis of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s virtual reality installation "Carne y Arena", the essay questions the continuity/discontinuity relationship with (...) the semiotic and aesthetic universes conventionally summoned by ekphrasis. The transformation of the medium, which places the viewer immediately within the work, abolishes not only the distance between the involved expressive media, integrating them intermedially, but also the distance between work and spectator, according to a paradigm of aesthetic experience minority within aesthetics, attributable to a theoretical line that combines Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. The resonance between forms of expressiveness significantly radicalizes the scope of ekphrasis, as visual discourse is no longer transposed to a discursive level, as traditionally occurred, but into other forms of the visual and the sensible that continually set the semiosis of the work in motion. (shrink)

The paper relies on the idea that the context of the digital art world is the main place to observe the formation of a new ekphrasis and, at the same time, of new media. Hence it means digital ekphrasis as a productive tension, capable of generating communication through a medium-medium relationship.

The article explores the concept of ironic ekphrasis in the works of Carl Schmitt, a prominent jurist in the Third Reich and a significant figure in contemporary philosophy. The analysis focuses on Schattenrisse (1913), a collection of satirical portraits, and examines the relationship between politics and aesthetics, particularly the interplay of word and image in Schmitt's literary descriptions. The paper argues that Schmitt’s use of ekphrasis serves as a diagnostic tool, offering a satirical critique of his historical era. However, ekphrasis (...) can also involve a constructive effort: in the realm of “virtualization”, ekphrasis transforms into a creative process. This analysis highlights Schmitt’s ambiguous relationship with German Romanticism, suggesting that elements of ekphrasis and irony become integral to his aesthetic jurisprudence. The article concludes by considering the relevance and implications of Schmitt’s approach to ekphrasis in the contemporary context. (shrink)

In this article I will explore three contributions that Shusterman’s somaesthetics can make to meta-aesthetics: Shusterman’s interpretation of the analytic-continental aesthetic debate; the redefinition of the aesthetic through the notion of experience, resulting in the aesthetics of popular art and somaesthetics, and finally, the opening of aesthetics to extra-philosophical practices, such as body exercises and performances.

‘Communication’ is the basic concept of an aesthetic media theory and, under the title ‘communication aesthetics’, is particularly suitable for defining a capacity of that phenomenon that also describes a holistic experience of so-called digitality in a new way. In the passage through this concept of communication, ‘communication aesthetics’ is therefore also the basic term for studies of digital media cultures and is used here as an example to determine the relevant phenomena of mediality, materiality and the contemporary technological body (...) practices associated with them. ‘Aesthetics of communication’ is then also the title word for the sought-after answer to the question of whether the speech of transfer between different arts as ekphrastic representation acquires a significance of its own that cannot be decomposed by unconditionally necessary and, as a rule, even more important reflection on its effects. The essay examines how both sides of the term – the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘communicative’ – can be discussed in order to reflect on their connection, especially against the background of the implications of the digital per se. In the first part, the contrasts that determine this conceptual construction are analyzed using an example of media culture in order to read them as the basic definitions of a dialectical concept of the ‘communicative-aesthetic’. Against this background, the second part of the essay deals with the related ‘communication-aesthetic’ practices that could be used as the ingredients and objects of a genuine interdisciplinary media theory. (shrink)

The sympathetic and negative emotions triggered in and by aesthetic experiences are among the enduring explanatory needs of reception aesthetics. Kant may have found a plausible formula for the intellectual pleasure of artworks in the free play of the powers of imagination. But it might be too intellectualistic to explain the aesthetic experience of music or immersive films. In English-language aesthetics, it has been discussed for decades as the paradox of fiction, why we are scared, for instance, in horror movies (...) at all, even though we know that there is no real danger. The lecture seeks answers to these questions in the intentionality of the mind and the imagination. (shrink)

After briefly discussing ekphrasis’s historical significance and function in the arts and its continued relevance as an effective artistic practice, this essay explores the concept of digital ekphrasis in the age of artificial intelligence and digital image generation. The discussion focuses on popular AI models readily available online, such as Midjourney, Dall-e, Stable Diffusion, and Firefly. By examining prominent examples of AI art or so-called popular “prompt art” – including Refik Anadol’s award-winning and mesmerizing AI project “Unsupervised” (MoMA, New York, (...) 2023) and the viral Midjourney prompt “The Pope wearing a Balencia-ga puffer jacket” (Spring 2023) – the author questions whether we can also speak of a computational ekphrasis in the age of artificial intelligence and AI models as our new co-creative collaborators. Therefore, the essay considers a praxeology of digital ekphrasis, exploring how efficient text instructions for AI models are now used to create compelling images in a new digital aesthetic that affects their global audience. (shrink)

In this work I try to show that there is a common thread between ekphrasis and prompt engineering, in spite of the temporal distance of almost thirty centuries between their respective earliest known instances, and despite the blatant disparity in technological tools supporting them. An investigation of the characteristics of such thread can shed light on a number of aspects of our experience of textual and visual works, including the role of our imagination, that of our emotions, and what happens (...) when human agency within these imaginative and emotive processes is substituted by the artificial agency of an AI system. (shrink)

Nietzsche announces his intentions to publish a “physiology of aesthetics”, namely a naturalistic explanation for how aesthetic judgements are grounded in the physiology of both the one experiencing the work, and the creator of it. But as well as the physiological reduction of aesthetic judgements, Nietzsche in many places across his oeuvre frames the apparatus of physiology, especially the prescriptive dimension of self-cultivation, in terms amenable to being treated as ‘aesthetic’. The first section will mount a (re-) defense of the (...) use of aestheticized language for discussing Nietzschean self-cultivation. The second section demonstrates an aesthetic evaluation of capacities that make possible the acquisition and removal of instinctual components, ultimately arguing for Nietzsche’s qualified indeterminism regarding the capacity for self-cultivation. The third section will assess the pres- ence of another aesthetic measure, this time in terms of envisaging one’s psycho-physiology by reference to an external spectacle. The final section discusses metaethical questions stemming from Nietzsche’s prescriptive language regarding the aestheticization of our physiology. (shrink)