The symposium focuses on the question of how the age-old notion of beauty can regain an importance appropriate to the 21st century. Our need for beauty has not diminished, as hard as modernism tried to erase it from art and life and supplant it with the sublime. It was a sublime that increasingly associated itself with negation and deconstruction. In contrast, vital beauty, as defined by John Ruskin more than 150 years ago, is a beauty of sympathies and affinities with life forms. Yet vital beauty must be reinvented, since life forms today can be technological as well as natural. The concept of vital beauty raises the question of how we should design our environments, our objects and our lives, and of how we might one day invent a politics of beauty.
"Beauty is a wider, and more fundamental, notion than Truth"
Alfred N. Whitehead
Program:
09:45–10:30 Lars Spuybroek: Introduction and moderation
10:30–11:30 Thierry Bardini: Hints of a Junk Aesthetic
11:30–12:30 Wendy Steiner: Beauty as Interaction
13:30–14:30 Arjen Mulder: The Beauty of Agency Art
14:30–15:30 Tim Ingold: Lines and the Weather
15:30–16:30 Philip Beesley: Protocell Field
Tickets available at http://www.deaf.nl/program/modules/symposium-vital-beauty
The publication Vital Beauty: Reclaiming Aesthetics in the Tangle of Technology and Nature will be released during the symposium. With essays and interviews by Thierry Bardini, Caroline van Eck, Gustav Fechner, Mark Frost, George Gessert, Tim Ingold, Arjen Mulder, John Ruskin, Wendy Steiner and Daniel N. Stern.
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