_The Collision of Science with the Question of Be-ing in Heidegger’s Thinking_ Science does not lead to the full, final, truly in-depth exploration of beings; it leaves unresolved (unclarified) the understanding of being; it does not think through the question of being, of the “to be”, of the “is”; it does not think being as such; it adopts a metaphysical idea of being as being of beings (as one, the highest of beings). As this study shows, being is not (...) within the range of merely scientific investigation. Many philosophical questions (e. g., the foundation of the sciences; the understanding of the ontological difference) go beyond and transcend the reach of scientific inquiry. The collision of science with the question of being, with the question of the “to be”, comes from science attempting to move beyond its intrinsic limitations and boundary. According to Heidegger’s be-ing-historical thinking, scientific inquiry cannot resolve the question of the “to be” and that of the truth of the “to be”; it cannot eliminate (suppress) these distinctly philosophical concerns. Science cannot become a substitute for philosophy. As this study indicates, the understanding of the danger of the “collision” identified contributes to its prevention and to a creative interaction between science and philosophy. (shrink)

Algebraic equations in the tradition of Descartes and Frans Van Schooten accompany Christiaan Huygens’s early work on collision, which later would be reorganized and presented as De motu corporum ex percussione. Huygens produced the equations at the same time as his announcement of his rejection of Descartes’s rules of collision. Never intended for publication, the equations appear to have been used as preliminary scaffolding on which to build his critiques of Descartes’s physics. Additionally, Huygens used algebraic equations of (...) this form to accurately predict the speeds of bodies after collision in experiments carried out at the Royal Society. Despite their deceptive simplicity, Huygens’s algebraic equations pose significant conceptual problems both mathematically and for their physical interpretation especially for negative speeds; they may very well have been the source of a new principle, the conservation of quantity of motion with direction. (shrink)

This Collision examines photographs of Santiago Sierra’s “Line” installations, discovering in these works a unique formulation of the tension between the social and formal aspects of contemporary art. Developing the philosophical implications of this formulation, this essay connects divergent trajectories embodied by the work (i.e. trajectories initiated by the material elements of the works, the body and the line) to divergent trajectories in contemporary aesthetic theory (i.e. the trajectory that emphasises the socio-political possibilities of artistic representation versus the trajectory (...) that emphasises a distinction between the formal aspects of art and the political effects of art). Developing the socio-political approach, I draw on recent work by Claire Bishop who, emphasizing the distinction between consensus and antagonism, argues that Sierra’s work enacts a democratic politics more rigorous than that of “relational art.” Developing a specifically aesthetic understanding of Sierra’s installations, I understand the works in relation to the constructivist interrogation of the nature of the line. Drawing in part on the philosophies of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, I suggest that, whereas a social aesthetic tends to limit art to a didactic function, a geometric aesthetic enables a more rigorously materialist experience of the work without reducing the potential political force of the work. (shrink)

Collision-free autonomous path planning under a dynamic and uncertainty vineyard environment is the most important issue which needs to be resolved firstly in the process of improving robotic harvesting manipulator intelligence. We present and apply energy optimal and artificial potential field to develop a path planning method for six degree of freedom serial harvesting robot under dynamic uncertain environment. Firstly, the kinematical model of Six-DOF serial manipulator was constructed by using the Denavit-Hartenberg method. The model of obstacles was defined (...) by axis-aligned bounding box, and then the configuration space of harvesting robot was described by combining the obstacles and arm space of robot. Secondly, the harvesting sequence in path planning was computed by energy optimal method, and the anticollision path points were automatically generated based on the artificial potential field and sampling searching method. Finally, to verify and test the proposed path planning algorithm, a virtual test system based on virtual reality was developed. After obtaining the space coordinates of grape picking point and anticollision bounding volume, the path points were drew out by the proposed method. 10 times picking tests for grape anticollision path planning were implemented on the developed simulation system, and the success rate was up to 90%. The results showed that the proposed path planning method can be used to the harvesting robot. (shrink)

This Collision explores the relationship between Object-Oriented Ontology theory, the “aesthetic experience” of a contemporary artwork (Iris Haussler’s He dreamed overtime from 2012) and the creeping hand of fiction. OOO is a useful theory to apply to contemporary art, as it charts a philosophical return to all things as objects, rather than their relations or networks. It is also timely for understanding the changing nature of multi-media art, wherein experience, interactivity, spectatorial agency and contingent narratives are key.

This collision explores ecological aesthetics through two encounters with dead whales: one literary and one osseous . The literary animal is the taxidermied whale that drives the narrative of László Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance, and the osseous encounter involves a bench made of one jawbone and one rib from a baleen whale. Considered together, the immense totality of the taxidermied whale and the metonymic bones provide unsettling aesthetic insights into ecological matters of interconnectedness – of the (...) relationships between parts and wholes and amongst parts within a whole or wholes. Through analyses of the visual, literary, and haptic aspects of these encounters, this paper raises questions about what it means to perceive and think about ecology through aesthetic encounters with non-human animal bones and taxidermied bodies. (shrink)

This Collision uses an encounter with Cathy Choi’s B1206 , coupled with theories of aesthetic empathy, to articulate how hijacking as an aesthetic concept might work. The aesthetic faculty of empathy conceives of the aesthetic experience as “feeling into” a given work. This concept furnishes a useful framework for thinking about aesthetic hijacking, as “feeling into” something implies the displacement of the work or its viewer. Hijacking, then, could foreground that displacement by emphasizing spatial uncertainty. Furthermore, hijacking could be (...) an inversion of the process of “feeling into” a given work, indicating a process whereby the work forces its way into the viewer and the space s/he inhabits. (shrink)

The chapter offers an overview of the ethical debate on unavoidable collision scenarios. It explains why the problem arises and what strategies have been proposed to program the behaviour of CAVs according to given ethical theories. Moreover, it addresses empirical research that has been carried out in the field by critically weighing its merits and demerits. In light of this, the chapter discusses reasons for and against the focus on unavoidable collisions in the ethics of driving automation. Furthermore, it (...) considers the strengths and weaknesses of the debate with reference to the state of the art of the technology and the aims of engineering ethics. Finally, it focuses on the delegation of moral decision-making to CAVs as a crucial element to the interpretation of the concept of artificial moral agency. (shrink)

For this collision, the role of nonhuman animals as woodland theater and naturalizing agents is questioned. In remediated sites, animals are actors that legitimize everyday pollution, oppression and violence. How can the lived realities of nonhuman animals be embraced without naturalizing the discourse that externalizes those lives? As life and industrial-nature cohere, how might aesthetics engender agency in recovery?

We discuss the total collision singularities of the gravitational N-body problem on shape space. Shape space is the relational configuration space of the system obtained by quotienting ordinary configuration space with respect to the similarity group of total translations, rotations, and scalings. For the zero-energy gravitating N-body system, the dynamics on shape space can be constructed explicitly and the points of total collision, which are the points of central configuration and zero shape momenta, can be analyzed in detail. (...) It turns out that, even on shape space where scale is not part of the description, the equations of motion diverge at (and only at) the points of total collision. We construct and study the stratified total-collision manifold and show that, at the points of total collision on shape space, the singularity is essential. There is, thus, no way to evolve the solutions through these points. This mirrors closely the big bang singularity of general relativity, where the homogeneous-but-not-isotropic cosmological model of Bianchi IX shows an essential singularity at the big bang. A simple modification of the general-relativistic model (the addition of a stiff matter field) changes the system into one whose shape-dynamical description allows for a deterministic evolution through the singularity. We suspect that, similarly, some modification of the dynamics would be required in order to regularize the total collision singularity of the N-body model. (shrink)

The author of this paper discusses some major points vital for two classical Indian schools of philosophy: (1) a significant feature of linguistic analysis in the Yoga tradition; (2) the role of the religious practice (iśvara-pranidhana) in the search for true self-identity in Samkhya and Yoga darśanas with special reference to their gnoseological purposes; and (3) some possible readings of ‘ahamkara’ and ‘asmita’ displayed in the context of Samkhya-Yoga phenomenology and metaphysics. The collision of language and metaphysics refers to (...) the risk of paralogism caused by the common linguistic procedures making the subject define its identity within the semantic order (i.e. verbal conventions and grammatical rules) which does not reflect the actual metaphysical situation of the self, though it determines one’s self-understanding in the empirical sense. Whereas, Samkhya-Yoga aims at recognizing, reorganizing and, finally, going beyond these procedures regarded as the obstacles on the path towards self-knowledge and liberation form metaphysical ignorance. (shrink)

Using Bakhtin's notion of polyphony, this study explored the discussion of the end-of-life issues in the Course on Life and Death Education in one Chinese university. Ethnographic methods were adopted to investigate the collision between the classroom voices and the voices of the mainstream culture on end-of-life in the process of developing students' attitudes toward death. The findings revealed that “to understand death” involved challenging the voice of “strangeness and fear of death”; “honestly facing up to and accepting the (...) feelings of the fear, pain, and helplessness” was the response to “be brave”; and the goal “to die peacefully” resisted the notion of “extending life at any cost.” Through the collision between these voices, students developed their attitudes toward death in facing, understanding, accepting, and choosing how to die. The analysis further revealed that providing only one “answer” to death by the teacher is not sufficient or effective to foster students' attitudes toward death because the students are a diverse group holding different views on the end-of-life issues, which demonstrated the importance of creating dialogues in the life and death education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:129 Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race BY GENEVIEVE CARPIO Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019 REVIEWED BY JARED FRIESEN In Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race, Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies Genevieve Carpio systematically uncovers several of the insidious forms that power takes in order to construct racial inequality. Settlement, mobility, and immobility have served to draw distinctions (...) between Latino/a, Indigenous, Asian, African Americans and white populations in the inland Southern California region. Carpio produced abundant evidence to bolster these statements through interdisciplinary methodological practices, such as “reinterpreting and recovering history” through archival research, analysis of oral history projects, and the examination of both photographic records and the built environment (14). Collisions at the Crossroads begins with a recent example of how mobility and the social construction of place, or “place making” were used to exclude Latino/a residents from participating in the celebration of the Route 66 heritage of the area. In an effort to protect the authenticity of the event, organizers of the Rendezvous festival implemented a ban on lowriders, thus sanitizing the event of Mexican cruising culture that has been a part of the complex multiracial history of the region. This moment is only one of the latest in the history of inland Southern California reaching back to the arrival of white migrants in the form of the Riverside colony to a region composed of Indigenous and Mexican Book Reviews ENVIRONMENT, SPACE, PLACE / VOLUME 13 / ISSUE 2 / 2021 130 American communities. The book lays bare how “the concept of mobility particularly applies to the everyday channels of movement in a community, especially for Indigenous people and people of color” (3–­4). Mobility is conceptualized as physical movement, the shared meaning of the physical movement, and the policies that enable or constrict movement.Throughthisanalyticlens,Carpio tracesthe “Anglo Fantasy Past” to illuminate how white populations created history that places them at the center and either erases non-­white populations or reduces themtoperpetualoutsiders.Thishistoryincludeswhitesettlement,the rise of the citrus industry, and the role of religion. For example, Indigenous people were immobilized in off-­ reservation boarding schools for AmericanIndianchildren,andcapitalist-­orientedpolicieswereenacted such as the Geary Act (1892) in order to control the mobility of Chinese immigrants. The latter is an excellent example of how race continually shaped the experiences of nonwhite migrants. Mobility is encouraged when a source of low cost labor is needed, but then controlled or even criminalized in order to maintain a racialized hierarchy. Throughout the book, Carpio reinforces the precarious situation of mobilityforpeopleofcolor.“Workersweresupposedtomoveinparticu­ lar ways, at specific times, in and to predetermined spaces” (66). This was deftly accomplished in a way that expresses the subtle processes through which power is used, indeed in ways that appear normative and even natural. Without globalized labor migration, the rise of industries such as large-­ scale citrus agriculture would not have been possible. Alternatively, deterring regional labor migration and desegregated housing were critical to maintaining the white supremacist status quo. Collisions at the Crossroads connects readers to the current turmoil and fear around immigration and racism by looking back at the exploita­ tive incentivizing and coercion of Mexican migrant workers. Mexican immigrants are attracted to work in agricultural communities, then their mobility is pathologized to limit movement through public policy. Ultimately, Mexican immigrants are constructed as “birds of passage” who prefer not to be rooted to a place. Geographer Doreen Massey refers to these processes as “differentiated mobility”: “some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-­end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.”1 Book Reviews 131 This racialization of labor created a low-­ cost workforce that was immobilized by the threat of arrest but later seen as preferable to Puerto Rican or Filipino migrants who had rights to permanent settlement. The claim was that because Mexicans preferred to migrate to worksites, they should therefore return to Mexico in the ebbs of citrus production in the inland Southern California region. Mexican migrants were considered a natural option for filling the workforce needs of the local citrus industry while... (shrink)

This paper attempts to explain the emergence of the logical empiricist philosophy of space and time as a collision of mathematical traditions. The historical development of the ``Riemannian'' and ``Helmholtzian'' traditions in 19th century mathematics is investigated. Whereas Helmholtz's insistence on rigid bodies in geometry was developed group theoretically by Lie and philosophically by Poincaré, Riemann's Habilitationsvotrag triggered Christoffel's and Lipschitz's work on quadratic differential forms, paving the way to Ricci's absolute differential calculus. The transition from special to general (...) relativity is briefly sketched as a process of escaping from the Helmholtzian tradition and entering the Riemannian one. Early logical empiricist conventionalism, it is argued, emerges as the failed attempt to interpret Einstein's reflections on rods and clocks in general relativity through the conceptual resources of the Helmholtzian tradition. Einstein's epistemology of geometry should, in spite of his rhetorical appeal to Helmholtz and Poincaré, be understood in the wake the Riemannian tradition and of its aftermath in the work of Levi-Civita, Weyl, Eddington, and others. (shrink)

This paper interrogates the profound tension between Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism and modern evolutionary-neurobiological frameworks of consciousness, ultimately indicting Kant's practical philosophy from the standpoint of an ontology of care. The analysis begins by bridging Kant's epistemology of ``representation" and ``mental content" with Antonio Damasio's somatic theories of consciousness. While modern neurobiology effectively maps Kant's phenomenal self - demonstrating that all mental content is inextricably anchored to the body's homeostatic survival - it simultaneously exposes the fatal fragility of Kant's reliance (...) on an inaccessible, purely rational ``noumenal" soul. The inquiry then pivots from epistemology to ethics, contrasting Kant's Categorical Imperative with a survival-oriented moral framework grounded in the historical continuum of the Big Bang, Life, and Human Being. We contrast Kant's demand for absolute logical consistency-which systematically exiles empathy, biological consequence, and relational vulnerability from the realm of moral worth-with an evolutionary mandate focused on the mitigation of suffering. By framing moral behavior through the pragmatic, contextual lens of ``microlect expressions" and Aristotelian phronesis (practical wisdom), this paper exposes the inherent danger of Kant's mathematical universalism. We argue that by substituting the messy, vital work of human compassion for a sterile geometry of duty, Kantian deontology does not elevate human dignity. Rather, to a biologically embedded agent whose survival depends entirely on interconnected care, Kant's moral machinery is revealed to be deeply inhuman and philosophically disgusting. (shrink)

Iranian national cinema is showing the scars of artistic persecution. The aesthetic landscape of this national cinema has become one of stark confines – both in its thematic allowances and its aesthetic possibilities. However, these confinements, both physical and technological, have not merely been passively affected by ideological constraints but have also been active in affecting ideological discourse, answering back as it does within imposed limitations. What we are seeing in contemporary Iranian cinema, I believe, is a complex movement of (...) aesthetic novelty, provoking some important questions regarding the relationship between politics and aesthetics. The relatively high-profile instance of which I am concerned here is Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film (2011): a work that denies its ontological category and, in turn, furthers its medial possibilities. Panahi’s confinement is an example of enforced asceticism: an asceticism of necessity, groundbreaking in its approach. So much potential arises from this “non-film” – too much to find any answers here. However, this Collision presents the perfect space for briefly outlining some of the questions emanating from a film that is “not a film”. I raise some striking similarities between what occurs with Panahi and the politico-aesthetic ideas of Jacques Rancière in order to contemplate Panahi’s use of asceticism to political effect. (shrink)

FEATURED IN EVENTAL AESTHETICS RETROSPECTIVE 1. LOOKING BACK AT 10 ISSUES OF EVENTAL AESTHETICS. This Collision examines photographs of Santiago Sierra’s “Line” installations, discovering in these works a unique formulation of the tension between the social and formal aspects of contemporary art. Developing the philosophical implications of this formulation, this essay connects divergent trajectories embodied by the work (i.e. trajectories initiated by the material elements of the works, the body and the line) to divergent trajectories in contemporary aesthetic theory (...) (i.e. the trajectory that emphasises the socio-political possibilities of artistic representation versus the trajectory that emphasises a distinction between the formal aspects of art and the political effects of art). Developing the socio-political approach, I draw on recent work by Claire Bishop who, emphasizing the distinction between consensus and antagonism, argues that Sierra’s work enacts a democratic politics more rigorous than that of “relational art.” Developing a specifically aesthetic understanding of Sierra’s installations, I understand the works in relation to the constructivist interrogation of the nature of the line. Drawing in part on the philosophies of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, I suggest that, whereas a social aesthetic tends to limit art to a didactic function, a geometric aesthetic enables a more rigorously materialist experience of the work without reducing the potential political force of the work. (shrink)

Adopting a functional–cognitive perspective of Halliday's transitivity model, this article examines the processes of ideological constructions within The New York Times and China Daily in their reports of an air collision between the USA and China in April 2001. The analysis shows that discourses surrounding the collision circulating in the two newspapers construct different understandings of the event which are shaped by the specific political position, interests, and priorities of each government regarding the collision. Through analyzing specific (...) choices of process types and participant roles made by each newspaper and the cognitive effects that these choices have on the reader, this article argues that transitivity analysis shares similar goals and assumptions with cognitively oriented views of language. It thus not only offers insights into referential aspects of meaning, but also has the capacity to account for the cognitive processes and effects invoked in the reader's mind. (shrink)

What is unpresentable in art? This paper considers VALIE EXPORT’s feminist exhibitionism in her 1968 performance artwork Genital Panic, which took place in a Munich cinema. EXPORT’s transgressive display of her genitals, which finds art-historical precedents in medieval sheela na gigs and Courbet’s Origin of the World, established a paradigm for a kind of feminist art collision that continues today, – for instance in Deborah de Robertis’ 2014 unauthorized performance at the Musée d’Orsay. EXPORT’s staged presentation and representation of (...) blatant power and sexuality contradicts the lack postulated in Freud’s castration complex. At the same time, it raises the question of the unpresentable, a notion taken up by Jean-François Lyotard’s The Inhuman, which explores concepts of representation and the unpresentable. The latter he defines as an expression of an “Idea of reason,”, an absolute. I reflect on how this concept applies to EXPORT’s marker for the use of the body in feminist art. (shrink)

We analyze the points of total collision of the Newtonian gravitational system on shape space (the relational configuration space of the system). While the Newtonian equations of motion, formulated with respect to absolute space and time, are singular at the point of total collision due to the singularity of the Newton potential at that point, this need not be the case on shape space where absolute scale doesn’t exist. We investigate whether, adopting a relational description of the system, (...) the shape degrees of freedom, which are merely angles and their conjugate momenta, can be evolved through the points of total collision. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Even without scale, the equations of motion are singular at the points of total collision (and only there). This follows from the special behavior of the shape momenta. While this behavior induces the singularity, it at the same time provides a purely shape-dynamical description of total collisions. By help of this, we are able to discern total-collision solutions from non-collision solutions on shape space, that is, without reference to (external) scale. We can further use the shape-dynamical description to show that total-collision solutions form a set of measure zero among all solutions. (shrink)

Hume's regularity theory of causation was partly motivated by a criticism of Descartes' causal account of collisions. According to Descartes, bodies are things with extension, and since having extension does not entail any ability to cause changes of motion in other bodies, such changes must be explained by attributing a ‘causal power’ to bodies, logically independent of their extension. Hume's point is that we can't observe any such causal power and we should not use ideas about such unobserved qualities of (...) bodies. Given his form of empiricism, the regularity theory is the only choice; causation is no more than constant correlation. However, there is a third option beside attributing a metaphysical ‘causal power’ and mere regularity; if we follow Newton and say that bodies are characterised and individuated by their mass, not their extension, we can give another analysis of causal interaction between bodies. It is by having mass a body can cause changes in the motion of other bodies. Thus, using classical mechanics we can give an alternative to Hume's regularity theory of causation in which the necessary connection between cause and effect is understood as a conceptual connection between certain descriptions of cause and effect. It does not satisfy Hume's strictures on concept formation, but no additional metaphysics is necessary. In a sense it is an intermediate position between Humean regularity and an account in terms of metaphysical necessity. (shrink)

In 1997, the United States incarcerated over 1.7 million persons in local jails and in state and federal prisons. These inmates are disproportionately poor and persons of color. Many lack adequate access to health care before incarceration and present to correctional services with major unaddressed medical problems.Convictions for drug possession and use have increased the number of injection drug users with HIV and AIDS in prisons. Determinate sentencing and “three strikes and you’re out” laws have increased the number of inmates (...) who are aging and dying during their sentences. Their feelings reflect those of Larry Rideau, sentenced to life without parole and founder of The Angolite—an award-winning prison newspaper at Louisiana's Angola Prison—“The dream of getting out, you equate with heaven. Dying in prison you equate with hell.”. (shrink)

© 2016, CERN for the benefit of the.The luminosity determination for the ATLAS detector at the LHC during pp collisions at s= 8 TeV in 2012 is presented. The evaluation of the luminosity scale is performed using several luminometers, and comparisons between these luminosity detectors are made to assess the accuracy, consistency and long-term stability of the results. A luminosity uncertainty of δL/ L= ± 1.9 % is obtained for the 22.7fb-1 of pp collision data delivered to ATLAS at (...) s= 8 TeV in 2012. (shrink)

Focusing specifically on Hegels analysis of Dutch genre painting in the Lectures on Aesthetics, Jason Miller argues that Hegel regards modern art not as a failure to convey the deepest interests of a culture or society, but as a welcome liberation of art in which it comes to reflect the diversity and complexity of human experience.

The use of energy supplies for economic activities is a major global concern due to its environmental impact. Mitigating this problem involves the adoption of clean energies, so it is not trivial to assess those that can fit into this category, particularly the part corresponding to electrical energy. While the consumption of the latter is often perceived as more environmentally friendly than other sources, its production process raises significant questions, hence the core motivation to evaluate the behavior of the main (...) inputs for electrical energy production over 50 years and its correlation with the world Gross Domestic Product (GDP), confirming a prominent dependence on fossil fuels, a situation that seems to differ from the expectations set forth through the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Conference of the Parties. On the other hand, even though the production of electrical energy is consistent with the behavior of the world GDP, it shows heterogeneous annual percentage changes. (shrink)

This essay collides with the aesthetic of wilderness cultivated by the North American retail chain Bass Pro Shops. Through elaborate displays and décor that render each store part rustic lodge, aquarium, amusement park, natural history museum, and hunting simulator, the stores represent the natural world and its inhabitants as abundant resources for human consumption. The stores’ aesthetic is primarily wrought through the arrangement of taxidermied animals. These animals include both traditional wildlife mounts posed in lifelike attitudes as well as animatronic (...) taxidermy that becomes “alive” in response to players’ achievements in a shooting range game. By exploring the stores’ traditional and animatronic taxidermy as well as its conflation of animal and machine, this essay explores the conception of environmental conservation and animal ontology upheld by Bass Pro Shops. (shrink)

Philosophy for International Lawyers: A review of Samantha Besson and John Tasioulas, The Philosophy of International Law by Patrick Capps.

You meet someone new; you like them; you send them to your Facebook page. But how accurate is this representation of you? We all want to look our best, which is why we are drawn to the ability to fudge things a bit online. How does this projection of who we are distort us into who we want to be? Facebook allows us to hide our flaws that are all too visible in real life. We can embellish or correct what (...) we said earlier, edit out what we don’t like about ourselves, and only show photos where our chin is down and the lighting is blown out just enough to hide the bump on our nose. Our prospective employers can even turn to Facebook to assess our desirability. So might the constructed aesthetic of Facebook affect our approach to ethics – to interacting with other people? Does the way we design ourselves on Facebook directly impact the other people in our lives? Is each of us really just a rough draft that needs immediate editing? What about Facebook makes it possible to achieve genuine beauty? (shrink)

In his neglected treatise on education, the great eighteenth-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, mentions that Benjamin Franklin “wondered why everyone didn’t learn to swim, since swimming is so pleasant and so useful.” Franklin..

Johan Grimonprez’s dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y has been critically surveyed for its use of mass media: this film, a masterful feat of editing, appropriates found footage from television newscasts to examine the history of hijacking. My reading of this piece further analyzes Grimonprez’s use of appropriation, locating the image of the chimera featured in the film as a symbol of the method of montage that dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y uses, and of the links that this work makes between violence, homelessness and art making. The (...) chimera stands for the artwork itself, for the latter’s rapid sequence of disparate images functions as a grafted body. As a figment of the imagination, the chimera also stands for the constructed nature of the news event, which the film assays. Furthermore, the eloquence of the chimera’s image bespeaks the body that has lost its home. In this film, hijackings are related to homelessness; Grimonprez implies that wellsprings of violence arise from radical histories of displacement. By way of the chimera, he also suggests that art can impact society only by hijacking the images of mass culture, thus relating art making to violence. (shrink)

This article addresses the aesthetic status of gargoyles in medieval Gothic architecture. Irreducible to the grotesque yet manifestly discrepant with the core of cathedral and monastic buildings, the gargoyle serves as an entry point for an exploration of the stylistic relations comprising the Gothic and reflecting the cultural duality of the ecclesiastic sites of its historical emergence. The relation between gargoyles and the bulk of Gothic structures and ornamentation is discussed in terms of an “aesthetics of contrast.”.

Joanna Demers argues that Houellebecqs apocalypse can be understood as a system analogous to Hegels, and interrogates the ethics of such a system.

This paper addresses problems in the interpretation of Chardin’s still life paintings, which are disconcerting because they are so out of step with those of his contemporaries. It is suggested that, with the application of Kantian aesthetics, Chardin can be best understood as representing things in themselves as well as the limits of language and understanding.

This essay examines the scratch as it relates to garbage, scores, and the event. Garbage is that which is cast aside as social systems form themselves, and, as such, is always destined to return. Scores are both methodological maps and experimental artistic methods. And the event, in this context, is the opening that enables both the determination of form and the emergence of the unexpected.

This essay sketches the musical art of Frances Pelton-Jones, an American harpsichordist active at the beginning of the twentieth century. Almost entirely unknown today, she was widely acclaimed in her day for performing elaborate costume recitals dressed as Marie Antoinette. More than just a recitalist in costume, Pelton-Jones staged elaborate tableaux vivants with environmental decor to elicit fantasies of the past. Bridging the worlds of fashion, environmental design, and music, her performances offer a compelling case study to investigate the aesthetic (...) applications of Jane Bennett’s ecological theory of assemblages. Exploring how different human and nonhuman actants collaborated in Pelton-Jones’ art to evoke whole historical atmospheres for her audiences, I elaborate Bennett’s argument about the synthetic potential of combining certain materials to conjure an affect, highlighting how the delicacy of the assemblage as a whole often is contingent upon the frailty of the individual materials involved. Ultimately, Bennett’s theory affirms the aesthetic sensibilities of Pelton-Jones whose musical productions delighted audiences by harnessing the synthetic potential of well-coordinated vital materials. (shrink)