Open to the Institute
This panel discussion brings together four speakers from the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, music and art to discuss some of the mechanisms by which possible worlds could be imagined, constructed and instantiated.
Given the highly coercive and heavily surveilled dynamics of the present moment, the question of construction, what we construct and its orientation to our future is ever present, and perhaps ever more urgent.
The question of constructing possible worlds is a challenge to the arts, centrally because art has often been understood as something outside of the norm; naturally resistant to functionality; a domain of the senses that apparently resists instrumentalization. We will explore amongst other things, how art’s sensory and non-linguistic facility plays a part in constructing a future, asking if this complexity provides the dynamics by which to re-engineer a more robust integration of the speculative and the analytic.
BIOS
Amanda Beech is an artist and writer. Her work proposes a new realist politics of the artwork and its possibilities in the context of contingency and neo-rationalist conceptions of power. Her recent work has included the comic strip Realism and its Discontents, for Art Margins, 2017, the video installation Covenant Transport Move or Die, exhibited at the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, 2016-17, and her paintings, Cause and Effect for Lasalle Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore, 2017. Her recent essays include ‘How Art Ought to Think” in Art and Reason, 2018, and ‘Cold World and Neo-Con Noir’, in Cold War Cold World, Urbanomic, 2016.
Anna Longo has a Ph.D. in aesthetics from Université Paris 1, where she has been teaching and researching. She is currently working on Deleuze's mathematical differential ontogenesis and Fichte's aesthetics, and is currently editing two books:
Retour de l'objet,
retour de l'ontologie? (2019),
Le paradoxe de la finitude (2019). She has also edited the volumes:
La genèse du transcendantal (2017),
Breaking the Spell: Speculative realism under discussion (2015),
Time without Becoming (2014), and
Il Divenire della Conoscenza (2013).
Daniel Sacilotto is a philosopher and an instructor in the CULB Comparative Literature program. His research focuses on the reconciliation of rationalism with materialism, and the pursuit of a revisionary naturalism through the work of Wilfrid Sellars, Alain Badiou, Lorenz Puntel, Jay Rosenberg, and Ray Brassier. He is currently preparing a monograph in which he develops a functionalist theory of cognition and realist theory of knowledge, chiefly inspired by the works of Wilfrid Sellars. His essays include:
Puncturing the Circle of Correlation (2017);
A Thought Disincarnate: What Does it Mean to Think?
(2018); Realism and Representation: On the Ontological Turn (2012).
Inigo Wilkins took his masters in Sonic Culture at the University of East London, and completed his doctorate in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths in 2016. The title of his thesis was ‘Irreversible Noise', which is the basis for a forthcoming publication by
Urbanomic. He is co-director of the online arts journal and research platform
Glass Bead (http://glass-bead.org/).