Aesthetics & Critique VI : Realism in Perspective / Réalisme en perspective / Perspektiven des Realismus (Fribourg, 26-27.05.2023)

Back to Reality! Whether in art or philosophy, recent years have witnessed an outright run on the real, under banners such as speculative realism, neo-materialism, documentality, eco-realism, speculative poetics, or object-oriented aesthetics. Only progressively it starts to become clear that what these approaches respectively mean by realism differs sharply. The workshop shall confront various epistemic and artistic strategies seeking to grasp the ever-evading nature of reality, and work towards understanding the reasons behind this renewed desire for touching the “thing itself”. If the only claim these different realisms seem to agree upon is the need to decentre the human perspective, could it be that perspectivalness itself provides a key to a novel understanding of reality?

Organized as part of the workshop series Aesthetics & Critique (https://projects.unifr.ch/aesthetics-critique/) with the participation of the SNSF-funded research project Real Abstractions (https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/207845).

Conference Programme

FRIDAY 26 MAY

13:45–17:00 
Panel I – Perspectivisme: Philosophie, anthropologie, littérature, cinéma

Camille Chamois (Bruxelles)
Apprendre à voir : perspectivismes et apprentissage perceptif
Chair: Emmanuel Alloa

Camille de Toledo (Berlin)
Ce que je nomme habitats narratifs et ses conséquences sur la perspective…
Chair: Sophie Jaussi

Emmanuel Grimaud (Paris)
La perspective de l’insensible. Comment (nous) rêvent les IA.
Chair: Alessandro De Cesaris

17:30–19:30
Location: CinEmotion Rex, Fribourg
Projection
De Humani Corporis Fabrica
115‘. USA, 2022.
Dir: Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel (Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab)

19:30–20:15
Table Ronde/Q&A
Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel
avec/mit/with Fred Truniger & Emmanuel Alloa

SATURDAY 27 MAY

10:00–13:15 
Panel II – Art’s Realism

Ursula Biemann (Zurich)
Forest Thinking
Chair: Julia Gelshorn

Susan Schuppli (London)
Sensing Ice
Chair: Wolfgang Brückle

Sebastian Egenhofer (Wien)
Entropy and Infrastructure in Contemporary Art
Chair: Tobias Ertl

13:30 End

Participation is free, Registration (by e-mail to alessandro.decesaris@unifr.ch or tobias.ertl@unifr.ch) is appreciated.