Maja Bak Herrie: With, Across, Among, Between: Thinking Aesthetically about Aesthetics
 

In his 1994 book Atlas, Michel Serres aptly asks, “has not philosophy restricted itself to exploring – inadequately – the ‘on’ with respect to transcendence, the ‘under’, with respect to substance and the subject and the ‘in’ with respect to the immanence of the world and the self?” Has not philosophy fixated too much on static or fixative prepositions, you could ask? And does this approach not leave room for what could be termed a topological expansion: a call for the ‘with’ of communication, the ‘across’ of translation, the ‘among’ and ‘between’ of interferences? Although it is often seen as a subfield of precisely philosophy, the discipline of aesthetics offers something else. It engages with a kind of experience that does not result in rationally controllable knowledge but concerns a sensitivity to the individual appearance of things: a ‘sensuous knowledge’ (cognitio sensitiva), in Baumgarten’s terminology, or simply a way of knowing otherwise. Including works by artists such as Marina Gadonneix, Stéphanie Solinas, Harun Farocki, and Elisa Giardina Papa, I will take my point of view in precisely this possibility of another way of knowing, discussing the status of present-day aesthetics and its methods. A key argument will be that we should, indeed, think more aesthetically about aesthetic analysis.

Bio:
Maja Bak Herrie is Postdoc at the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. Currently, she is concluding her research project, Perceiving a Pre-Filtered World: Anticipated Perception in a Data-Driven Culture, supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Soon she will embark on a new venture alongside Lotte Philipsen and Lea Laura Nørregaard Michelsen titled New Visions: Image Cultures in the Era of AI, funded by Aarhus University Research Foundation. Her diverse publications span across aesthetics, media theory, and the philosophy of science, exploring themes such as computational technologies of vision, scientific imaging, photography, mediality, and artistic research. Additionally, she serves as the editor, together with Tobias Dias, of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics.

• Æstetisk Seminar program F2024
• Æstetisk Seminar plakat F2024

Æstetisk Seminar F2024 er tilrettelagt af Morten Kyndrup og Thomas Rosendal, Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.