Keynote Speaker & Call for Papers

I am one of the Keynote Speakers at this conference on Aesthetics, in Oslo at the end of May. Click on the blue text link above to go to the conference web site.

Gesture: 2013 Annual Conference of the Nordic Society for Aesthetics

The Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Arts and Ideas welcome you to the 2013 Annual Conference of the Nordic Society for Aesthetics. The theme of the conference is “Gesture” and it will take place at the University of Oslo from May 30 – June 1, (Thursday noon through Saturday evening).
Tid og sted: 30. mai. 2013 – 1. jun. 2013, Georg Morgenstiernes hus
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The use of gesticulation has always been a means by which human beings have expressed themselves. Being bodily rather than conceptual, its logos lie outside language. Within the fields of art and aesthetics, gesture implies an opening process as a distinctive way of cognition as well as an approach to the particular qualities of artworks.

While Jean-François Lyotard associates the artwork with the processuality of gesture, Roland Barthes thinks gesture in terms of the event, and its production of effects, thus seeing gesture at once as a part of the artwork and as transgressing the work “itself”.

For Theodor Adorno the gestural in music was a central topic and Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke of architecture as a gesture. Part of our aesthetic experience and of our “answer” to artworks is always gestural.

Keynote speakers:
Gottfried Boehm, Professor of Modern Art History at Basel University: “What reveals itself. On Gesture and Image”

Julian Johnson, professor, Department of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London: “The particularity of musical gesture”

Rainer Nägele, Alfred C & Martha F Mohr Professor of Germanic Languages & Literature, Professor of Classics & Comparative Literature, Yale University: “Caesura: The Transformation of Gesticulation into the language of Gesture (Brecht, Artaud and Benjamin)”

Lilian Munk Rösing, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Copenhagen University: “Gesture, Colour, and Affect”

John Paul Ricco, Associate professor, Comparative Literature & Visual Studies University of Toronto: “The Separated Gesture or, The Inoperative Praxis of the Already-Unmade”

The conference calls for papers on both contemporary and historical issues: suggested topics of interest would include questions related to aesthetic experience in general as well as visual art, architecture, music, and literature.

Abstract proposals of no more than 200 words should be sent before February 15 to Bente Larsen, bente.larsen@ifikk.uio.no

N.B. Participation without paper is welcome as well – however we kindly ask that you register your participation. PhD students are strongly encouraged to submit a proposal.