November 22, 2017
Orpheus Institute, Concert Hall
dialogue
artistic research, material/ism
abstract
This dialogue addresses the fundamental question of how to relate speculative thought and research activities on the arts with the concrete materiality of daily artistic practices and outcomes (artefacts). To make art involves being-in-the-world and, critically, the use of tools, materials, instruments, and supports. It is from and with all these things that new affects, new sensations, new modes of communication can be invented or extracted, contributing to a continued expansion of art practices and idioms. Artistic research (a new type of “nomadic science”) has been providing diverse practices and perspectives with strong geographical and disciplinary differences, but they all remain bound by a common reference to the grounding “materiality” of their specific activity. The materials used, produced, and discussed in artistic research are fluid entities, akin to metal alloys, less defined than stratified objects, and more affective than concepts. On the other hand, recent philosophical discourses increasingly refer to process-oriented, relational ontologies that crucially move beyond subject-centred philosophies, and beyond object- analytical decodings. Bringing together artist researchers and philosophers, this dialogue aims at mapping some new materialist perspectives for artistic research.
Paulo de Assis, chair
about the author(s)
Paulo de Assis
Paulo de Assis is Fellow Researcher at the Oprpheus Institute, Ghent and general chair of the DARE conferences. He is an artist-researcher with transdisciplinary interests on Philosophy, French Post-Structuralism, and Epistemology.
He studied Piano with Vitaly Margulis and Alexis Weissenberg (a.o.) and Musicology with Jürg Stenzl and André Richard (a.o.), receiving a PhD and a post-doctoral appointment on the works of Luigi Nono. Commissioned by the Foundation Giorgio Cini (Venice, 2003), he completed Camillo Togni’s Piano concerto—a piece that remained unfinished at the composer’s death.
Between 2009 and 2012 he was Senior Researcher at the Centre for the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (CESEM) at the University Nova Lisbon and Research Fellow at the Orpheus Research Centre in Music [ORCiM].
For the period 2013-2018 he was granted a European Research Council Starting Grant for the project “Experimentation versus Interpretation: exploring new paths in music performance in the twenty-first century,” hosted at the Orpheus Institute, in Ghent (Belgium). He has authored two books (on the music of Luigi Nono and Camillo Togni) and edited four others (on music notation and on contemporary composers).
info & contact
affiliation
Orpheus Institute, Ghent, BE
paulo.deassis [AT] orpheusinstituut.be
web
Barbara Bolt
Barbara Bolt is a practising artist and art theorist at the VCA University of Melbourne. She has written two monographs, Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image (2004) and Heidegger Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts (2011), and co-edited four books, Material Inventions: Applying Creative Arts Research (2014), Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” through the Arts (2013), Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (2007), and Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (2007). Her publications build a strong dialogue between practice and theory. She is a board member of Studio Research and Studies in Material Thinking and Society of Artistic Research (2011–13) and is MC Observer to COST Action, New Materialisms Network.
info & contact
affiliation
University of Melbourne, AU
bbolt [AT] unimelb.edu.au
web
Jean-Marc Chouvel
While he was learning composition with the most important musicians of the twentieth century, Jean-Marc Chouvel developed a theoretical approach that led him to reconsider the main notions of music writing. Taking up the contribution of phenomenology and cognitive sciences, his work on temporal forms has been published in two books: Esquisses pour une pensée musicale and Analyse musicale, sémiologie et cognition des formes temporelles. He also proposed a complete theory of the harmonic phenomena, which allowed him to explore the broad universe of micro-intervals, among other things. Since his studies in Spain with Francisco Guerrero, he has written more than thirty pieces for instruments and electroacoustics. He participated in founding the instrumental ensemble l’Instant donné as well as the reviews Filigrane and Musimediane.
List of publications: iremus.cnrs.fr
info & contact
affiliation
Institut de recherche en Musicologie, Paris University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, FR
jeanmarc.chouvel [AT] free.fr
web
Simon O’Sullivan
Simon O’Sullivan is a theorist and artist working at the intersection of contemporary art practice, performance, and continental philosophy. He has published two monographs with Palgrave Macmillan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (2005) and On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation (2012), and is the editor, with Stephen Zepke, of both Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (Continuum, 2008) and Deleuze and Contemporary Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). His collaborative art practice—with David Burrows and others—comes under the name Plastique Fantastique, a “performance fiction” that involves an investigation into aesthetics, subjectivity, the sacred, popular culture and politics produced through, performance, film and sound work, comics, text, installations and assemblages. Plastique Fantastique have performed and exhibited widely in the UK and abroad and are represented by IMT Gallery in London. O’Sullivan is currently working on a collaborative volume of writings, with Burrows, on Mythopoesis–MythScience–Mythotechnesis: Fictioning and the Posthuman in Contemporary Art.
info & contact
affiliation
Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
s.o’sullivan [AT] gold.ac.uk
web
Sjoerd van Tuinen
Sjoerd van Tuinen is currently visiting research fellow at Princeton University and teaches philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is editor of numerous books, including Deleuze and The Fold: A Critical Reader (2010), De nieuwe Franse filosofie (2011), Speculative Art Histories (2017), Art History after Deleuze and Guattari (2017), and The Polemics of Ressentiment (forthcoming 2018), and has authored Sloterdijk: Binnenstebuiten denken (2004). At his home university he also coordinates the Centre for Art and Philosophy (CAP) and is a cofounder of the Erasmus Institute for Public Knowledge (EIPK), where he is responsible for a project on European politics of debt and austerity.
info & contact
affiliation
Erasmus University Rotterdam, NL
vantuinen [AT] fwb.eur.nl
Kamini Vellodi
Kamini Vellodi is an academic with a background crossing philosophy, art history, fine art, and visual culture, and a practising artist working mainly in painting. She is Lecturer in Contemporary Art Practice and Theory at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, and Honorary Lecturer at Exeter University. She completed her PhD in philosophy under the supervision of Peter Osborne and Eric Alliez. Her research focuses on the critical implications of Deleuze’s philosophy for art history, with a focus on early modern visual arts, and her work has appeared in publications including Art History, Parrhesia, Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte, and Deleuze Studies. She is completing a monograph on Tintoretto and Deleuze’s philosophy of constructivism titled Tintoretto’s Difference: Deleuze’s Concept of the Diagram and the Problem of Art History (Bloomsbury Academic).
info & contact
affiliation
Edinburgh University, UK
k.vellodi [AT] ed.ac.uk