Judith-Frederike Popp
Normative Claims – Aesthetic Practices, Ethical Striving and the Question of Evaluation
Aesthetic interactions with the world can be located in a status of in-between: between epistemic and teleological orientations or between being embedded in everyday life and being separated from it. The talk inquires into the implications of this status for normative questions. By conceptualizing aesthetic interactions in terms of agency, it becomes possible to relate them to human striving for being at home in the world and creating a meaningful life. This enables evaluating aesthetic practices in dense ethical terms like emancipation or progress. Due to their in-between status, however, these practices resist being reduced to linear steps towards ethical ends: They confront their agents with potentials and limits. Hence, the talk argues that aesthetic practices provide ethical impulses but not through harmonious fusions for example of aesthetic intensity and ethical self-transparency. Instead, they provide an opportunity of getting in touch with oneself without providing security that this will work out as intended. Aesthetic practices irritate teleological organization and thereby are able to confront their agents with frustration and disempowerment. This places them in a space of mentally and bodily experienced reality, where striving can be put into action but is also limited. Through this positioning, aesthetic practices can be evaluated in their potential to confront their agents with the contingency and limitations of their ethical orientations while at the same time opening up a broader experiential approach towards what the latter are. Finally, the talk argues for integrating this normative framework for aesthetic practices to do their situatedness justice.
Biography
Judith-Frederike Popp, PhD, is a Philosopher and currently FWF Senior Post-Doc at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, leading the research project “Mediated Autonomy. Ideal and Reality of Aesthetic Practice”. She is working on her second monograph with the preliminary title “Crafted Relations. Production aesthetics of being a subject”. Most recent book publication: “Adorno und die Medien. Kritik, Relevanz, Ästhetik” (with L. Voropai), Berlin: Kadmos 2023.
Daniel Vella
Ludic Subjectivity and the Question of Character
Drawing on equally on theories of character (Frow 2014; Garber 2020), phenomenological accounts of play (Fink 2015[1970]) and the aesthetics of digital games (Kania 2017; Nguyen 2021), this presentation shall argue for an understanding of digital games as being existential-aesthetic: in other words, they both invite us to situate ourselves within, and enact, a ludic subjectivity as our being-in-the-game, and, at the same time, mediate this ludic subjectivity as an aesthetic figure. This figure, I shall argue, can be understood in the way it is shaped by - but also, potentially, puts into question - established cultural notions of character.
Biography
Dr. Daniel Vella is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Digital Games (University of Malta). He is the co-author (with Prof. Stefano Gualeni) of Virtual Existentialism (Palgrave Pivot, 2020) and has published a number of papers and book chapters on subjectivity, aesthetics and space and place in games. He is also a narrative designer for board games with Mighty Boards, and his writing credits include Posthuman Saga (2019) and Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan (forthcoming, 2023).
Jussi Saarinen
Transforming Oneself Through Painting
In this presentation, I suggest that artmaking can have a profound effect on the artist’s overall sense of being. To support this view, I provide a case study of psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s (1957) intensive experimentation with painting. Milner, more acutely perhaps than any other psychoanalytic writer, reflected on the ways in which artmaking relates to overall creative living. To expound further on her project and its existential implications, I make use of philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe’s (2008; 2015) theory of so-called existential feelings. Put broadly, existential feelings constitute a changeable background sense of what is real and possible, and as such structure how we belong to and relate to the world as a whole. Within this conceptual framework, I argue that Milner’s creative progression can be understood both as temporary shifts in existential feeling and as the gradual consolidation of a more permanent existential orientation. Overall, my aim is to show that painting, and especially a long-term commitment to painting, can significantly reconfigure how one finds oneself in the world.
Biography
Dr. Jussi A. Saarinen is a senior researcher in philosophy at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Ģֱ. His interests range from contemporary philosophy of mind to painting and artistic creativity. He has discussed the latter topics in journals including British Journal of Aesthetics, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Journal of Aesthetic Education, and in a monograph titled Affect in Artistic Creativity: Painting to Feel (Routledge, 2020).
Kaisa Mäki-Petäjä
Formation of Self and Finding Your Own Artistic Style
Searching “finding your own style art” produces 1 770 000 000 (1.77 billion) results on Google. It is a question no artist, professional or amateur, can escape. Even if one is not that concerned about their own style, the question is something one is destined to run into during their journey. It is something most artists seem to ponder, even fret. Do I have a personal, recognisable style? Am I style-wise original enough to stand out? Is my art authentic, i.e. do I have a style that sets my art apart from other artworks, and that feels like me? The fear of copying a style, of resembling some other artist seems to ail many, especially those in the early stages of their artist’s journey.
Artistic style has much to so with artistic expression as a skill to express or depict something in the way one wants, but I propose that style is much more a question of self-exploration, and in this presentation I seek to problematise the urge to find one’s own style. Recognising the fundamental role of style in art theory, practice, and history, I will view finding one’s style as a serious quest that is deeply rooted in questions of self: self-realisation, self-knowledge and self-acknowledgement, self-acceptance, and self-affirmation and self-actualisation – in other words, as a way of answering to the question who and how I am.
Works of Alva Nöe, Brene Brown, and Tim Ingold, and the concepts of being-in-the-world, self and no-self (Evan Thompson et.al.), unfolding, and becoming form the philosophical framework for this undertaking.
Biography
Kaisa Mäki-Petäjä‘s research interests are being-in-the-world, encounters, and aesthetic experience. She combines phenomenological and aesthetic approaches with anthropology, cognitive science, and ecology. Mäki-Petäjä’s current research expands towards a new subject area, practices of drawing. In her previous research, she studied museum exhibitions as embodied encounters between the visitor and the worlds represented in the exhibitions.
Anu Besson
On Aesthetic Practices of Residing
In this presentation, I discuss some key findings of my ongoing case study exploring the sense of authenticity and rhythms embedded in aesthetic practices. My case study involves thematic interviews with Finnish people living abroad to discuss aesthetic practices relating to residing, or creating and managing a home and attaining homeliness. Particular activities covered by my study are interior decoration (including cleaning, tidying and decluttering), cooking and baking, and handicrafts relating to the home. Aligning with the theorising by Pauline von Bonsdorff (2022, 2023) and Yuriko Saito (2022), my findings indicate that everyday aesthetic practices of residing have deeper existential meaning to the enactors as a vehicle for self-expression, self-care and identity building; and such practices are temporally more ‘stretched’ than perhaps previously recognised. For example, planning and preparing for an activity as well as remembering and sharing it afterwards, appear to be key elements of the aesthetic arc of the experience, parallelling the importance of the activity itself. Furthermore, in the case of emigrants, this temporal stretching spans from the past generations to the future: traditional-cultural and personal aesthetic practices inform each other and gain value and weight through this interplay. Finally, my interviewees report that their self-image would change if they were unable to continue certain aesthetic practices; thus, aesthetic practices build and support self-identity and can be seen as irreducible.
Biography
Anu Besson is a post doc research fellow at Ģֱ. Currently she examines the experience of homeliness and aesthetic practices relating to the home. Her previous research covers environmental aesthetics of urban and natural environments. She is particularly interested in bridging philosophical viewpoints with empirical findings and sociological-ethnographic stance and has conducted surveys and interviews to gauge ‘laypeople’s’ experiences of their everyday environments.
Paul Moerman
Dancing with the Other
Dancing with the Other is a dance teaching and learning method introducing creative dance ‘from scratch’.
No steps are demonstrated. In improvisational exercises, the participants investigate whatever movement they have in themselves. Basic steps are inventoried, jump, gallop, turn, walk, steal, skip, etc. The material is expanded by exploring quality of movement through variation of the basic building blocks of dance: space, time, body and force. Compositional work is done in whole group, smaller groups, pairs and one by one.
The entire improvisational and choreographing work is purely movement based. The aim is to indulge in movement and kinesthetic awareness. In subsequent talks the participants are invited to share their experiences during the dance work and to discuss views on dance generally and dance education specifically, and possible aesthetic and ethical, relational and existential dimensions of dance and education.
Biography
Paul Moerman is a university lecturer and teacher educator, a dancer, actor and literature translator who received his training at Stockholm University of the Arts and Valand Academy at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. He is presently a PhD student of art education at the Ģֱ. He has designed teaching and learning programs in creative dance and integrated these in language, math and natural science teaching and learning.
His research interests and publication themes are dance in/as education, focusing on relational and existential aspects of dance and education, the entwinement of the ethical and the aesthetic, and dance and the arts as spaces of becoming.
ORCID iD: 0000-0001-6507-3399
Feng Zhu
What is the ‘aesthetic’ in ‘aesthetic self-transformation’?
Although the notion of self-transformation as an ‘aesthetic’ endeavour has been of central importance to many thinkers, they have also notably deployed quite different commitments as to what it is that renders such practices ‘aesthetic’. In this talk, I will consider Michel Foucault’s work on the ‘aesthetics of existence’ to ask: to what extent can self-transformative practices, which are a moral and ethical work, also be seen to have an ‘aesthetic’ dimension to them?
I will argue that Foucault was engaged in a ‘problematisation’ of the current usage of ‘aesthetic’. This is an exercise that sought to induce us to explore how to live differently by revealing the narrow confines of how aesthetics has been socially delimited. In doing so, he invoked both a Kantian conception of aesthetics as well as a Greek one (techne, poiesis, kalos), which has led to charges of inconsistency. I argue that this difficulty reveals an incomplete project that sought to thread a line between the autonomy and heteronomy of the aesthetic: it is a perspective that potentially includes all practices into the ‘aesthetic’ domain (living can itself be an art) and yet also requires the ongoing cultivation of a ‘sensibility’ involving particular care and attention. ‘Sensibility’ can be thought to be the character of sensuous experience, one which is culturally encoded and temperamentally delimited, but also mutable through practice. Following Schiller’s writing on aesthetic education, ethics necessarily involves such a sensibility. It is not a matter of the will but the cultivation of the inclination or the ‘character’ – a process involving more than simply effort and discipline. Reading Foucault in such terms, I will touch upon some parallels with the work of Shusterman, Baumgarten, and Dewey.
In the final part of my talk, I will consider the implications of the above for thinking about computer gameplay as a lifelong practice in which players develop a certain sensibility through gameplay dispositions and habits. It is a sensibility that is arguably defined by a computational systematization of gameplay processes via discrete means such as numbers, models, procedures, and formalizations of relations between such things. Drawing on case studies from Magic: the Gathering limited draft, I ask whether playing to increase one’s wins is at odds with the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility.
Biography
Dr Feng Zhu is Lecturer in Games and Virtual Environments in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. He is interested in computer gameplay as a site from which to explore the intersection of power, subjectivity, and play. His research focuses on computer games and how we habituate ourselves through gameplay. In particular, it concerns forms of gameplay as longitudinal self-fashioning that may inculcate ambivalent forms of reflexivity and attention, some of which may be read in terms of an aesthetics of existence.
Johan Kalmanlehto
Self-fashioning Through Playstyle
In this presentation I investigate the relevance of style to subjectivity by focusing on the style of gameplay. I argue that while a player’s actions are heavily dictated by the game artefact, there is always room for variation for the player’s actions in terms of habit, manners, and more generally the way of enacting agency. I discuss playstyle in terms of game mechanics, as the player’s way of accomplishing the practical task presented by the game. Style can be regarded both as deliberate fashioning of the self and inconspicuously adopted manners. Both are meaningful to self-formation, but unconscious imprints can be more powerful than deliberate manners, as they are often repeated without noticing. In gameplay, players can seek a playstyle that fits their sense of self but styles can also be imitated from other players. Practices of playing can become communal practices, especially when gameplay is shared with others.
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.
Jochen Schuff
Again: Practice, Repetition, Seriality
Freud’s vivid description of the »Fort/Da«-game highlights the compulsive aspect of repetition, but just as much its aesthetic pleasures. At least at a certain age, children typically rejoice in repeating their favorite game over and over again, and we keep a rest of this joy of repetition throughout adult life. It may be one of the reasons for the connection between aesthetic experience and playing, frequently drawn since Kant and Schiller, that repetition plays several roles in the context of aesthetic engagement. For instance, practicing an aesthetic technique (e. g., learning to play an instrument) involves repeating the same skills and actions until they are habituated. An aesthetic experience (with what we call nature or in artistic contexts) is often something we actively seek to return to. We like to listen to our favorite songs repeatedly (on repeat, sometimes). We like revisit our favorite painting in a gallery, etc. And there is a particular aesthetic interest in the phenomenon of seriality – opera cycles, cinematic universes, the Mont St Victoire in different variations. In my paper, I will sketch some examples of aesthetic repetition, appropriation, and seriality to illuminate their role with regards to self-knowledge. I do not intend to delve all too deep into psychoanalytic theory, but at least as far as to recognize the values (and risks) of repetitive structures in the formation of the self – as well as in aesthetic practices of re-forming and trans-forming it.
Biography
Jochen Schuff is a postdoc in philosopher Alva Noë’s Berlin based research group »Reorganizing Ourselves« and in the Graduate Research School »Normativity, Critique, Change« at Freie Universität Berlin. Trained in philosophy, his current research interests are contemporary art and art criticism as well as the context of identity, autobiography, and theory. Among his publications are a book-length-study on Wittgenstein’s and Cavell’s philosophies of art as well as various essays and chapters on topics mainly in aesthetics. For further information see .
Pauline von Bonsdorff
Play and Practice
According to seminal texts in aesthetics by Immanuel Kant and Friedrich von Schiller, the free play of the mental faculties (Kant) or the “play-drive” (Schiller) is central for issues such as balancing mental life, realizing freedom, becoming aware of values, and helping to fulfill our personal potential. However, in these authors, play goes on in the mind of an individual. What if we think about play more concretely, as actions in the world, with objects or other people? In such cases, e.g., in children’s play or in playing games, playing is a chosen pastime and a practice, understood as a type of action. Not surprisingly, children’s play and playing games can be characterized as typical aesthetic practices, with room for expressive variation and novel contributions, and based on personal commitment. In my talk, I formulate some suggestions about the relationship between play as the novel, improvisational or dialogic aspect of aesthetic practice on the one hand and its habitual, repeated, experienced aspect on the other. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s insights about the temporally layered structure of experience and Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge, I suggest that the reciprocal relationship between improvisation or novelty (play) and experience (practice) in aesthetic practice is multilayered and needs to be understood broadly. Second, aesthetic practices, comprising the “practice of play”, support our freedom by on the one hand giving room for novelty, surprise, and unsuspected choices and on the other hand demonstrating the role of personal commitment in realizing them.
Biography
Pauline von Bonsdorff is Professor of Art Education at the Ģֱ since 2002 and Adjunct Professor of Aesthetics (title of Docent) at the University of Helsinki since 1999. 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, e.g., her PhD thesis The Human Habitat. Aesthetic and Axiological Perspectives (University of Helsinki, 1998). Her scholarly output includes 9 books (as author or editor) and around 90 articles.
