The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
of UC Berkeley's Center for New Media Presents:
Representing the Real: A Merleau-Pontean Account
of Art and Experience from the Renaissance to New Media
Sean Dorrance Kelly
Philosophy and Neuroscience, Princeton University
Mon, 20 Sept, 7:30-9pm: UC Berkeley, 160 Kroeber Hall
All ATC Lectures are free and open to the public.
The Paragone, or Comparison of the Arts, was one of the great debates of
the Renaissance. It pitted the sculptors against the painters in a
competition over which was the superior art. The leading question of the
Paragone was whether sculpture or painting was better at creating
realistic representations. But what exactly is a "realistic"
representation? Looking at art from the Renaissance to contemporary New
Media, Kelly will trace one thread in the evolution of the artistic
understanding of the representation of the real. This evolution, Kelly
argues, parallels the evolution of the philosophical understanding of the
nature of perception: it begins with the Empiricist account of perception
as the projection of an image and builds toward the Merleau-Pontean idea
of perception as embodied engagement with the world. The digital images
of New Media, which are often thought of as the paradigm of disembodied,
theoretical entities, are instead, Kelly argues, the culmination of this
evolution toward an embodied understanding of perception and the
representation of the real.
Sean Dorrance Kelly is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Neuroscience
and Jonathan Edwards Bicentennial Preceptor at Princeton University. His
work focuses on various aspects of the philosophical, phenomenological,
and cognitive neuroscientific nature of human experience. He has
published articles in numerous journals and anthologies and has received
fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the NSF and the James
S. McDonnell Foundation, among others. He is currently a Visiting
Professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where he is working on
a book that is tentatively entitled Wonder in the Face of the World:
Philosophy and the Nature of Experience.
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Note: The Center for New Media will sponsor 3 other lectures related to
Merleau-Ponty on campus 20-22 Sept. Please see http://cnm.berkeley.edu
under Events for details.
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The ATC is sponsored by UC Berkeley's: Center for New Media, Office of the
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, College of Engineering
Interdisciplinary Studies Program, Center for Information Technology in
the Interest of Society, Consortium for the Arts, BAM/PFA, Townsend Center
for the Humanities, and the Intel Corporation.
ATC Director: Ken Goldberg
ATC Associate Director: Greg Niemeyer
ATC Assistant: Therese Tierney
Curated with ATC Advisory Board
Full F04-S05 series schedule and video archive:
http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/lecs/
Contact: [email protected], or phone: (510) 643-9565
atc: sean kelly lecture, monday 7:30pm
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Type: discussion