The Aesthetics of the Humanities: Towards a Poetic Knowledge Production

The Centre for Disruptive Media presents

Disrupting the Humanities
 
A series of 3 half-day seminars looking at research and scholarship in a 'posthumanities' context, organised by the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry University, and held over the course of spring and summer, 2014. Disrupting the Humanities will both critically engage with the humanist legacy of the humanities, and creatively explore alternative and affirmative possible futures for the humanities.

http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/wiki/

The second seminar will take place on Wednesday June 11th at Coventry University (ETG34) from 2:30-6:00pm

The Aesthetics of the Humanities: Towards a Poetic Knowledge Production

Speakers:

Erin Manning (Concordia University)
Søren Pold (Aarhus University)
Johanna Drucker (UCLA)
Silvio Lorusso (IUAV University of Venice)

The event is free but registration is recommended to ensure a place
http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/wiki/

 
The Aesthetics of the Humanities: Towards a Poetic Knowledge Production

The increasing use of digital tools and interfaces to represent scholarly materials has once again drawn our attention to both the importance of aesthetics in the (digital) humanities and to questions of form, design and poetics in relationship to our systems and practices of knowledge production. In this respect, imagining how creativity, reasoning, interpretation and aesthetics are intrinsically entangled, would be the start of a critique of what can still be seen as one of the major oppositions structuring humanities scholarship: an opposition between, on the one hand, more rationalistic, conceptual and objectifying tendencies in knowledge production and representation and, on the other, the role played by subjectivity, artfulness, feeling, experience and sensory aspects in research practices as well as in their media of dissemination and communication.

This critique has been triggered by, among other things, new data visualisation tools and methods. These tools and methods offer alternative ways of representing information and of thinking about information aesthetics or 'infosthetics'. But what does this mean for our conventional ways of reading, understanding and analysing data and information? What is the role of design and aesthetics in knowledge formation? And what is gained or lost at the hands of these new ways of extracting and representing data? These are just some of the questions that will be addressed by our international cast of speakers.

In the process, this seminar will examine how such developments relate to the humanities in particular, as a field with a history of resistance to more visual forms of knowledge representation and production? Such conservatism on the part of the humanities is intrinsically bound-up with its textual condition - what Jessica Pressman has called its 'aesthetics of bookishness'. At the same time the multimodality of the digital medium has fuelled the idea that scholarly content is separate from its material instantiation or presentation. There is a felt need to emphasise again how a media's materiality or specific format influences its meaning and use. From this point of view, if we pay more attention to the performative aspects of materiality, of media, and of design, then we might be more receptive to seeing the ideology that is inherent in our representations and the politics that is instantiated in our continued practical iterations of these representations. Interfaces are not merely representing our information and data, they are creating and interpreting it too. Yet how is this interpretation being represented and performed?

One response would be to extend our visual epistemologies by stimulating humanist training in visual representation, interface critique, and design tools and methodologies. But, as scholars, do we not also need to become more involved in the actual design, visualisation, and performance of our materials, so as to generate new relationships between data and interpretation, and explore what can be thought of as a new poetics of scholarship?

Wednesday June 11th
Coventry University
Jordan Well
Ellen Terry Building, Room 34 (ETG34)
CV1 5RW Coventry
United Kingdom

http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/