This lecture starts from the common ground of Alfred North Whitehead’s text “Universities and their Function” from 1928, later extended and published in The Aims of Education (1929), and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition from 1979 (published in English in 1984): the proposal to use the imagination as a source of critical knowledge and creative insights. Whitehead’s

text was written in response to the first business school appearing on the academic scene. Lyotard responds to the arrival of institutes of technology. In today’s algorithmic condition (Colman et al. 2018), we are faced with a combination of both corporatization and computerization, intensified by the replacement of our good-old stand-alone desktop computers and statically wired networks by fully networked ICTs and dynamic machine learning. How to push Whitehead’s and Lyotard’s analyses and arguments to the here and now? Where do we see imaginative practices today and what do they teach us? One case study that will be discussed in the lecture is the “glossary boom” across the humanities, art, and culture (cf. Van der Tuin and Nocek 2019, Van der Tuin and Verhoeff 2022). Another example pertains to so-called posthuman knowledge production in our contemporary media-technological landscapes (cf. Thylstrup 2018). Other examples will be decided upon collectively and discussed interactively.

• See Aesthetic seminar Poster
• See Aesthetic seminar Programme

Aesthetic seminar is organized by Morten Kyndrup and Jacob Lund
on behalf of School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University

All are welcome