Pauline von Bonsdorff
Biography
Project PI Pauline von Bonsdorff is Professor of Art Education at the Ģֱ since 2002. Her research interests include art as self- and world-formation; the role of aesthetics in childhood (aesthetic agency, embodiment, imagination, intersubjectivity); and most recently the practice approach to arts and aesthetic life. She has also published extensively on environmental and urban aesthetics. Her scholarly output includes 9 books (as author or editor) and around 90 articles.
Yuriko Saito
The aesthetics of ‘doing’ house chores
‘Doing’ house chores appears to be a quintessential example of something which lacks aesthetic credentials. First, house chores are performed for practical purposes and their tedious routine makes them a drudgery without any sense of excitement, accomplishment, or fulfillment. Second, a first-person account of doing things does not fit the modern Western model of aesthetics, because there is no object which invites a spectator to make a judgment regarding its aesthetic or artistic value.
However, doing house chores can provide a surprisingly rich reservoir for what may be considered aesthetic practices. They engage the whole person in relation to others and the world, offer opportunities for devising creative and imaginative solutions, and connect them to a community of those who perform similar tasks, whether actual, historical, or imaginative, thereby providing the possibility of intersubjectivity, although it is neither a means to nor results from any judgment-making.
We should be careful not to romanticize house chores, because they are so often performed by the marginalized population. However, engaging in them as an aesthetic practice enriches the quality of life and encourages reflections on one’s place in the world.
Biography
Yuriko Saito, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the Rhode Island School of Design, USA, and Editor of Contemporary Aesthetics, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal. Her research areas are everyday aesthetics, Japanese aesthetics, and environmental aesthetics. She has lectured widely on these subjects, both within the United States and globally, and her writings have been published as book chapters, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries. Her Everyday Aesthetics (2008) and Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making (2017) were published by Oxford University Press. The latter was awarded the 2018 Outstanding Monograph Prize by the American Society for Aesthetics. Her Aesthetics of Care: Practice in Everyday Life is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.
Raymond Lucas
Perspectives on dwelling: A work-in-progress report
This paper will present the work being conducted with participants in the Perspectives on Dwelling series of workshops at Université Libre de Bruxelles in April & May 2022. We’ll exploit the serendipity of our simultaneous investigations into the nature of drawing and the knowledges it produces.
The title is a play on Tim Ingold’s concept of the dwelling perspective from The Perception of the Environment (2000) and also brings ideas from my longstanding collaborations with Ingold and other members of the wider Knowing from the Inside group. Drawing is a form of perception and understanding. The interpretation of the environment and description of our world through lines is an important practice to architecture, however those lines are inscribed. By drawing, we are able to see more deeply, able to understand more thoroughly, interpret meanings and explore possibilities. This paper will explore a variety of inscriptive practices and show how these have been applied to the spaces of everyday life, where we live and dwell.
Our workshop runs from 27th April to 25th May and includes sessions on Copying as Understanding; Taking a Walk for a Line; Rendering Visible; Describing the Ordinary; and Collaborative Drawings. We owe it to ourselves to restore drawing to its place in the academy as a worthwhile activity, one capable of incredible nuance and which communicates with an engaging directness, bringing the viewer into the observations of the scribe.
Biography
Ray Lucas has a PhD in Social Anthropology proposing A Theory of Notation as a Thinking Tool and an MPhil with the thesis Filmic Architecture. He is Reader in Architecture at Manchester School of Architecture (MSA), and has held a range of positions at the Manchester Metropolitan University and University of Manchester including a three year term as head of department between 2015 and 2018. Lucas is currently the Head of Humanities, working across the BA and Masters programmes of one of the largest architecture schools in the UK and setting the agenda for our programme of architectural history, theory and pioneering delivery of architectural social sciences. At MSA, Lucas has delivered a range of units including Thinking Through Drawing, Anthropology of Home, Inscribing the City, and Filmic Architecture.
Lucas is Author of Research Methods for Architecture (Laurence King, 2016); Drawing Parallels: Knowledge Production in Axonometric, Isometric, and Oblique Drawings (Routledge, 2019); and Anthropology for Architects: Social Relations and the Built Environment (Bloomsbury, 2020). These works establish a continuing research interest in anthropological aspects of architecture. Lucas is also co-editor of the volume Architecture, Festivals and the City (Routledge, 2018).
His current project is a new monograph on the architecture of Japanese festivals for Bloomsbury.
Kaisa Mäki-Petäjä
Drawing and being-in-the-world
The purpose of my presentation is to firstly provide a concise description of the principal constituents of the backdrop of my research. Secondly I will introduce in more detail how drawing as an aesthetic practice affects how we experience our lifeworld and how it can be a particular way of being-in-the-world. I will end with the introduction of my core research problem of who drawing facilitates a deeper, more meaningful experience of being-in-the-world.
Biography
Kaisa Mäki-Petäjä‘s research interests are being-in-the-world, encounters, and aesthetic experience. In her PhD thesis (JYU 2014) she studied museum exhibitions as embodied encounters between the visitor and the worlds represented in the exhibitions. In her research, she combines phenomenological and aesthetic approaches with anthropology, cognitive science, and ecology.
Sanna Peden
Straight lines and footnotes: On the educational spirit of aesthetic practices
Aesthetic practices play an important role in building both personal and collective identities. Outward-facing aesthetic practice often is, by virtue of anticipating an audience and taking up public space, an educational act. For example, teasing apart received truths or reifying existing traditions require the intended audience to either already be aware of those truths and traditions, or to become so in engaging with the practice itself.
In this presentation I reflect on the intersections of my research, teaching and creative life over two decades as a Finnish researcher and writer in Australia, with a particular focus on the inherent role education plays in aesthetic practice in a migrant context.
Biography
Sanna Peden is a poet, writer and lapsed academic based on Wadjuk Noongar land in Western Australia. She has built a long career in higher education in Australia, first by completing a PhD on the nexus between national identity and authorship in the works of the Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki; and more recently teaching research, writing and presentation skills at the University of Western Australia. Sanna’s creative practice draws on her research and teaching experience, and engages in particular with ideas of nostalgia, reflection and belonging
Anu Besson
Aesthetic practices, agency and authenticity
How do Finnish emigrants use or develop aesthetic practices within the home (such as interior decoration, gardening, cooking and seasonal decorations) as part of their life-, world-, and identity-building in a new country and culture? Not everyone wishes to maintain stereotypical or defined Finnishness, but often, traces of the home culture will linger, at times actively cultivated. However, it is also possible to choose to ‘create oneself anew’ as part of relocation – in that case, what kinds of new aesthetic practices or expansions people adopt or develop?
Mirjana Lozanovska describes aesthetic anxiety as a phenomenon where, in the eyes of mainstream society, migrant architecture is perceived as out of place, inappropriate or threatening. Maram Shaweesh and Kelly Greenop expand the concept to situations where migrants themselves feel unwelcome; having to fit into the mainstream dwelling aesthetics. But, is it possible to experience aesthetic anxiety within one’s own culture and if yes, what might that look like? Settling into a new country can ‘release’ a person from cultural practices they do not find personally meaningful, and migration can act as a catalyst for the emigrant to discover or develop one’s perceived true identity, including new aesthetic practices.
Biography
Anu Besson is a researcher of everyday and environmental aesthetics and likes to examine hidden, underlying connections. Besson’s (2020) focused on gaps in current environmental preference studies, embodied in the narrow definition of restorative environments as visually pleasant or relaxing. According to Besson, restorativeness should rather be understood as something holistically unifying.
Johan Kalmanlehto
Gaming as an aesthetic practice
In this talk I will introduce my research in this project, which focuses on the practice of playing games. I will first elaborate how gameplay is an aesthetic practice through the practical aesthetics and temporal nature of gameplay. Drawing from process aesthetics, I elaborate how the aesthetics of gameplay is built around practical tasks. The emphasis on temporality stems from the momentary nature of gameplay aesthetics, but also from the repetitive nature of gameplay mechanics and how playing is a part of everyday routines and the player’s life. I will then introduce the theoretical background to my conception of self-formation, which comes from my previous research on philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. A central concept in my theoretical viewpoint to gameplay and the self is rhythm, which is a relevant, although not thoroughly researched concept also in game studies.
Biography
Johan Kalmanlehto focuses in his research to the connections between the self, community and aesthetics. In his dissertation he investigated the formation of the self by combining readings of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s texts on mimesis, representation, and the subject with game studies. He is interested especially in the tacit, habitual and rhythmic aspects of gameplay and the relation between technology and human existence.
C. Thi Nguyen
Process arts
The theory and culture of the arts has largely focused on the arts of objects, and neglected the arts of action – the “process arts”. In the process arts, artists create artifacts to engender activity in their audience, for the sake of the audience’s aesthetic appreciation of their own activity. This includes appreciating their own deliberations, choices, reactions, and movements. The process arts include games, urban planning, improvised social dance, cooking, and social food rituals. In the traditional object arts, the central aesthetic properties occur in the artistic artifact itself. It is the painting that is beautiful; the novel that is dramatic. In the process arts, the aesthetic properties occur in the activity of the appreciator. It is the game player’s own decisions that are elegant, the rock climber’s own movement that is graceful, and the tango dancers’ rapport that is beautiful. I discuss some examples of process arts: including community-centered art practices like cosplay, food rituals, and rituals of inebriation.
Biography
C. Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The University of Utah. He used to be a food writer. He writes about trust, art, games, and communities. He is interested in the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value.
