Aesthetic Experience

This essay presents a multifold argument on Oakeshott's aesthetics. First, his famous essay "The Voice of Poetry" deals more explicitly and thoroughly with art than is often acknowledged. Second, aesthetic experience is a competitor to philosophic insight in so far as it discloses the coherence of a world of ideas through its uniting form and content; yet "art" remains a mode. Third, the essay points out that the absence of history from any major role in Oakeshott's most important treatment of (...) art is a puzzle worthy of consideration. It is argued that Oakeshott's exclusion of history is intimately related to his interest in art's non-temporality, specifically, the ability of art to create a fictive "world of the text" which includes representations of human action in time which are set apart from both history and practical human conduct. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl, Begründer der Phänomenologie als Wesensforschung, hielt in der Zeit von 1904 bis 1910 eine Reihe von Vorlesungen die sein Schüler Martin Heidegger 1928 unter dem Titel Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins veröffentlicht hat. Das zentrale Thema der Schriftensammlung war die Untersuchung zeitlicher Konstitution subjektiven Empfindungsmoments und diesem Moment zugrunde liegende Selbstkonstitution des Zeitbewusstseins.Selbstkonstitution des Zeitbewusstseins basiert vor allem auf Urimpression, Retention und Protention, und diese Prozesse bilden eine Mannigfaltigkeit möglichen Konfigurationen der phänomenologischen Zeit . Alle diese Termini (...) werde ich im Laufe der Arbeit detailliert aufgreifen und erklären. Durch die Rede über die phänomenologische Zeit ist es wichtig an eine Trennung zwischen objektiver Zeit und subjektiver Zeitempfindungzu denken - mit Zeiteinheiten wie Sekunden oder Minuten objektiv mess- und normierbare Zeit und das Bewusstsein darüber ist nicht das Objekt und Ziel phänomenologischer Untersuchung Phänomenologie will vielmehr die Subjektivität der Zeitempfindung begründen. So findet Husserl (auf Franz Brentano bezogen) das Zentrum des Zeitbewusstseins in der Phantasie.Damit bezweifelt Husserl nicht die Existenz einer objektiven Weltzeit, die reale Zeit - die Basis der Theorie ist vielmehr immanente Zeit des Bewusstseinverlaufes. Husserl bezweifelt auch nicht den Raum, der unzertrennlich mit der Zeit verbundenist. Transzendent ist für ihn nur unsere Vorstellung von Raum und Zeit, die erscheinende Raumgestalt, die erscheinende Zeitgestalt. Immanenz und Transzendenz sind bei Husserl zweideutig zu verstehen und eine detaillierte Erklärung Phänomenologie Husserls ist nicht das Thema dieser Arbeit. Ich werde vielmehr versuchen zu beantworten, ob es sein kann dass Zeitkünste unästhetisch werden können, weil sie Wahrnehmung (gr. aisthesis)als Jetztsetzung begreifen? Sind die (Ur)Impression, Protention und Retention, innerhalb der Doppelkontinuität von Ablaufsphänomenen, im Gegensatz zu der Aisthesis, für die Ästhetik der Zeitkünste nicht wichtiger? So werde ich im Schluss als Prüfstein der Problematik zwischen Zeitbewusstsein, Aisthesis und Ästhetik improvisierte Musik nehmen. (shrink)

Either beauty is the beholding of a fixed and final aesthetic essence discontinuous with the rest of nature, or it is an intuitive grasp and encompassing feel of a consummated movement of natural energies and elements through their inner relations into a single, qualitative unity, whose pervasive tonality is a situational emergent from the biologically active, temporally continuous, and reciprocally constituting-constituted transactional dialectic between a human creature and the world. If aesthetic-mystical experience is indeed something “eternalized” out of all connection (...) with ordinary experience and the flood of moving fact, then what is immediately entailed is a phenomenological profile conceived as .. (shrink)

The book concludes that it is a mistake to think of Art as something subjective, or as an arbitrary social representation, and of Technology as an instrumental ..

In Selbstgefühl, Manfred Frank provides a detailed study of the eighteenth century origins and contemporary philosophical implications of a unique kind of direct selfawareness. The growing significance of this phenomenon is closely related to three interconnected developments in modern philosophy, which I describe as the 'subjective turn', the 'aesthetic turn', and the 'historical turn'. While following Frank in emphasising key concepts in the first of these two turns, I add a stress on the historical turn in post-Kantian philosophical writing.

A brief overview of the current status of the scholarship on Heidegger and contemporary art and of the contributions included in the special issue.

In this paper, I critically discuss Riggle’s definition of street art. I argue that his definition has important limitations, and is therefore unsuccessful. I show that his view obscures a defining feature of street art, that is, its subversive power. As a significant consequence of ignoring that essential aspect, Riggle is incapable of fully understanding how street art transforms public space by turning one corner of the city at the time into contested ground. I also suggest that, when appreciating street (...) art's subversiveness, its challenge against the Modern separation of art and life appears more radical than Riggle foresees. (shrink)

Digital media seem to be marked by process. The digital image itself is produced by software processes and the constant flux of code. Further this, interaction with digital systems involves a constant process by which a so-called 'user' comes into contact with various machinic occasions. It seems that in light of these processes it is impossible to maintain an aesthetic or media theory that pictures a self-contained and psychologised subject interacting with a static and inert object. How then can we (...) begin to think about digital aesthetics through a process philosophy rather than the traditional and reductive subject/object distinction found in so much aesthetic theory? This paper seeks to address this problem by enacting Alfred Whitehead's process philosophy, informed by Gilles Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers and Steve Shaviro and work it through several examples of recent manifestations of interactive media art, including work by Martin Wattenberg, Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. I work Whitehead's process philosophy through these artworks to illustrate the performative nature of software processes and the manner in which these processes affect the aesthetics of interaction. I also use these works to illustrate a concept of interaction that privileges process and events rather than a concept that focuses upon an individual human user. In this paper I propose to view the 'user' as a set of occasions – as a particular condition that is produced by various user-initiated actions – rather than an enduring subject that is able to distance herself from the object of aesthetic contemplation. By doing this I move toward a theory in which user-occasions, machine-occasions and their interpenetration actualise the aesthetics of media art. Whitehead allows me to think outside of the binary oppositions that divide the world into knower/known or subject/object relationships. Throughout the argument I unpack Whiteheadian concepts such as actual entities, the unison of immediate becoming and, in general, the primacy of the event, bringing these concepts to bear on individual case studies of interactive media art. Whitehead's general thesis is that materiality and permanence are created by a continual process. Viewing the digital encounter through this theoretical framework I position the aesthetic experience of interaction as that which emerges from the fluctuations of process. The event of interaction is a necessarily hybrid process in which human occasions become supplemented by technology and the aesthetic event becomes innately coupled to the processes of the machine. In this paper I am not interested in any notion of consciousness or a psychologised human 'user', rather I am interested in a particular condition that takes place as user-initiated processes work with machine-initiated processes. This is because, for Whitehead, process comes before consciousness; it is the process of actual entities that prompt the consciousness into being. In this paper I thus propose interaction with digital systems as the commingling of contemporary actual occasions, shifting emphasis from a conscious human user and instead focusing on the process of the encounter that precedes this conscious experience. (shrink)

The public release of datasets on the internet by government agencies, environmental scientists, political groups and many other organizations has fostered a social practice of data visualization. The audiences have expectations of production values commensurate with their daily experience of professional visual media. At the same time, access to this data has allowed visual designers and artists to apply their skills to what was previously a field dominated by scientists and engineers. The ‘aesthetic turn’ in data visualization has sparked debates (...) between the new wave and older more scientifically grounded schools of thought on the topic. Sonification is not as well known or commonly practiced as visualization. But sound is a naturally affective, aesthetic and cultural medium. The extension of the aesthetic turn to sonification could transform this field from a scientific curiosity and engineering instrument into a popular mass medium. This paper proposes that a design approach can facilitate an aesthetic turn in sonification that integrates aesthetics and functionality by dissolving divisions between scientific and artistic methods. The first section applies the design perspective to the definition of sonification by replacing the linguistic concept of representation with non-verbal concept of functionality. The next section describes applications of the TaDa design method that raised aesthetic issues particular to sonification practice. The final section proposes a pragmatic aesthetics that distinguishes sonification from the auditory sciences and sonic arts. A design perspective may lead to a future where the general public tunes into pop sonifications for listening enjoyment as well as useful information about the world. (shrink)

Ineffability—that which cannot be explained in words—lies at the heart of the Christian mystical tradition. It has also been part of every discussion of religious experience since the early twentieth century. Despite this centrality, ineffability is a concept that has largely been ignored by philosophers of religion. In this book, Bennett-Hunter builds on the recent work of David E. Cooper, who argues that the meaning of life can only be understood in terms of an ineffable source on which life depends, (...) and engages with the work of continental philosophers, such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Karl Jaspers. This is the first book to explore the concept of ineffability within contemporary philosophy of religion and provides a starting point for further scholarly debate. It will be of interest to scholars of philosophy of religion, theology, existentialism and phenomenology. -/- 'Bennett Hunter’s book is a timely contribution to the growing theological and philosophical literature on mystery and ineffability. Written in a lucid and elegant style, the book makes a convincing case for the ineffability of religious experience and explores its relationship to a sense that our lives are answerable to such experience.' — David E. Cooper. -/- 'Philosophers have long concentrated on linguistic forms in a way that has isolated language from the rest of life, and this isolation has increasingly obscured for them the vast range of things that cannot be spoken. Bennett-Hunter is not the first philosopher to try and map this distracted field, but he is remarkable in the width and sympathy of his approach to the highly various thinkers whom he invokes to illuminate it.' — Mary Midgley. (shrink)