This transdisciplinary symposium explores how ethics can figure eminently in the generation of art and images after modernism and postmodernism, starting from the premise that in the Anthropocene, the work cannot rest upon its separation from the world. The symposium asks what ethics are at play in the relations between the human artist, the art, and the human and non-human models or participants. Art theorists and practitioners as well as legal studies scholars will probe the role of art and moving images in the creation of ethical relations which have historically been considered as the preserve of law and juridical discourse, or moral philosophy. Through new materialist, eco-political and posthuman thought and practice, the symposium will bypass the division between the active practice of ethics and the contemplative theory of aesthetics that Hannah Arendt challenges in Kant’s philosophy, to further an ethics of immanence beyond the fault line between the ethics of the individual and impersonal singularities. Using Spinoza, Deleuze, Guattari, Levinas, Nietzsche, Agamben, Grosz, Massumi, Haraway, Blanchot, and Nancy, the different papers move from human to human/non-human relations in the course of the day to advance an ecological and posthuman ethics with respect to art.
The symposium is organized by Silke Panse [2] (University for the Creative Arts) and Connal Parsley [3] (Centre for Critical Thought at Kent Law School, University of Kent).
To register for this event, please click here [4] or for more information, please see here [5].
University for the Creative Arts, Cragg Lecture Theatre, New Dover Road, Canterbury, Kent CT1 3AN, 3rd of June 2016, 9.30 – 19.30
9.00 – 9.30 Registration + Tea & Coffee
9.30 Introduction Silke Panse and Connal Parsley
9.40 – 10.10 Jon Kear (Independent Scholar, I)
A Game that Must be Lost: Intersubjectivity, Otherness and Ethics in Cezanne’s Cardplayers
10.10 – 10.30 Connal Parsley (Lecturer, Centre for Critical Thought, Kent Law School, University of Kent, UK)
For a New Ethics of Spectatorship: The Artist Films of Renzo Martens
10.45 Tea & Coffee
11.00 – 11.20 Mike Marshall (Artist and Senior Lecturer, University for the Creative Arts, UK)
The Perils of Aesthetic Freedom / Being Bad Can Feel so Good
11.20 – 11.40 Silke Panse (Reader in Film, Art and Philosophy, University for the Creative Arts, UK)
For Innocence, Against Purity
11.40 – 12.00 Mikhail Lylov (Artist, Berlin, D)
Passive Strategy: Two Moments of a Fold
12.30 – 13.30 Lunch
13.30 – 14.10 Nicolas Bourriaud (Art Writer and Curator, F)
14.10 – 14.30 Oren Ben-Dor (Professor of Law and Philosophy, University of Southampton, UK)
Origin, Place, Light: On the Limit of Practical Wisdom
15.00 Tea & Coffee
15.20 – 15.45 Elke Marhöfer (Artist, Berlin, D)
Zones of IndiscernibilityÂ
15.45 – 16.00 Fiona MacDonald (Artist, UK)
Ant-ic Actions – An Experiential Exploration of the Ethics of Co-production
16.00 – 16.20 Phillip Warnell (Filmmaker and Associate Professor, Kingston University, UK)
Being Held to Account: Writing in the Place of the Animal
16.20 – 16.40 Anat Pick (Senior Lecturer, Film Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, UK) [via Skype]
Electricity and the Spectacle of Animality
17.00 All Speakers Round Table
Chair: Dominic Rahtz (Reader in History and Theory of Contemporary Art, University for the Creative Arts)
17.30 – 19.30 Reception