Author Archives: polyhedra

About polyhedra

Polyhedra is a non-profit cultural association for cross-disciplinary research and activities in art and science fostering ‘face to face’ encounters between the arts, sciences and humanities.

Conference on Perception and the Arts [call for papers]

CFP: Conference on Perception and the Arts, Institute of Philosophy, London, September 16-17, 2015 (BSA Connections Conference)

Call for papers

The conceptual apparatus of philosophy of perception has been used in as diverse corners of aesthetics and philosophy of art as debates about depiction, aesthetic experiences, character engagement, our engagement with fictions, our engagement with narratives, aesthetic properties, metaphors, and so on. The aim of the conference is to provide a general framework for these ways in which philosophy of perception and aesthetics can be fruitfully combined, but, it is important to emphasize, a framework where not only aesthetics is enriched by philosophy of perception but philosophy of perception can also learn from aesthetics, making the interaction between the two sub-disciplines genuinely bidirectional. The conference is supported by a BSA Connections Conference Grant.

Confirmed speakers:

Ophelia Deroy (University of London)
Anya Farennikova (University of Bristol)
Heather Logue (University of Leeds)
Mohan Matthen (University of Toronto)
Matthew Nudds (University of Warwick)
Elisabeth Schellekens (University of Durham and University of Uppsala)
Barry Smith (University of London)
Lambert Wiesing (University of Halle)

find out more…

Images of Nature – Hamburg University

in the Department of Cultural History and Cultural Studies

„Naturbilder/Images of Nature“ examines the role of nature in art history and in the history of images, with a particular emphasis on Early Modern Europe. Central to this are the structural traits of the ‘natural’ and their imitation, emulation, and transformation into the arts, e.g. enlivenment, force, form, expression, or even quality.

http://www.fbkultur.uni-hamburg.de/en/naturbilder.html

Mestizajes – Encuentros 2014

http://www.mestizajes.es/Encuentros_2014/

mestizajes.es/Encuentros_2014

Mestizajes is an alternative meeting point for artists, scientists and humanists. A place for discussion. A place to think differently, to imagine. A place to search. A place where to collide and to disagree. A place for the generation and dissemination of new forms of knowledge. Mestizajes plans to open a path to move the boundary between art and science and create a fertile ground for the generation of new ideas. Through workshops, conferences, residencies and collaborations it aims to encourage active participation and critical view of reality from an innovative and cutting edge perspective. The founding idea is that Mestizajes has opened a crack in the wall that separates art and science. It is possible to move that boundary and penetrate in an emerging territory loaded with enormous human and intellectual potential.

Idea y Dirección General
Gustavo Ariel Schwartz

“Rethinking Foundations of Physics” [workshop] · 28 March -4 April 15 · Austria

Description:

Traditional conferences and subject-specific workshops offer little room for in-depth discussions about the foundations of physics in an open, creative, and speculative way. This workshop offers a platform for young scientists to engage in such discussions.

The major part of the workshop will consist of discussion sessions in small groups, aiming at new approaches and ways of thinking about specific topics in fundamental physics. The discussion sessions will be led by the talks of some of the participants (there will be not more than three talks per day). The topics of discussions will be selected based on the expertise and interests of all participants and, similarly to the topics of talks, will be centered around some of the following questions:

What are the mathematical, conceptual, and experimental paradigms underlying modern formulations of QM, GR, and QFT?
Can they be relaxed or changed? And how?
Which mathematics and principles could be relevant for new foundations?
Are there promising nonstandard experimental possibilities?

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“Pictures & Proofs” [call for papers] · Columbia, South Carolina · 19-21 March 2015

What are the roles of pictures and diagrams in mathematical proofs, in formal reasoning, and in epistemic justification more broadly?
Can pictures by themselves serve as rigorous argumentation insofar as they can be persuasive and even convey a sense of demonstrative certainty?

from Allan Marquand, “A Machine for Producing Syllogistic Variations” —In C. S. Peirce (ed.),Studies in Logic by Members of the John Hopkins University, 12–15. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1883.

For the most part, these questions have been discussed separately. We want to bring them together and take them in new directions. These are philosophical questions that are addressed by many different disciplines: STS, history of science, mathematics, engineering, media studies, and the visual arts. They draw attention to technologies of picturing, the contexts of practice in which proofs and procedures of formal reasoning are employed, and problems and methods of teaching and communication.

We invite submissions on any aspect of the relation between pictures and proofs, and especially in these three thematic areas:

The role of pictures in logical or mathematical reasoning: What is the role of diagrams as objects of reasoning or as parts of the language of reasoning?
Compelling imagery and the power of visual evidence: Do pictures afford evidence and certainty such that they can serve as proofs?
Handling proofs and putting them to work: How have mechanical models, graphic procedures, visual and haptic manipulation contributed to mathematical reasoning in a wide variety of disciplines and applications?

Find out more….

“Extinction Marathon: Visions of the Future” [event]· Serpentine Gallery London · 18 October 2014.

“Extinction Marathon: Visions of the Future”

On the weekend of 18 and 19 October – during the Frieze Art Fair – Serpentine Galleries presents the Extinction Marathon, the ninth in the Galleries’ yearly Marathon series. Artists, writers, scientists, film-makers, choreographers, theorists and musicians explore the complex and timely topic of extinction through talks, conversations, performances and screenings.

Felt across the humanities and the sciences alike, the spectre of extinction looms over the ways in which we understand our being in the world today. Environmental degradation, atomic weapons, threats communities and languages, global warming, economic collapses, natural catastrophes, life wiped out by genocide, disease and hunger – the constellation of topics around extinction is ever-expansive and as urgent now as ever before.

Both a reflexive overview and a call to action, the two-day event invites us to respond, together, to a changing world, addressing visions of the future in all their scientific, artistic and literary ramifications. The Extinction Marathon is programmed in collaboration with artist Gustav Metzger, whose work – including his Serpentine Gallery exhibition Decades 1959 – 2009 – addresses extinction and climate change.

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“DE-EXTINCTION”: a conversation with Stewart Brand & Richard Prum with Hans Ulrich Obrist & John Brockman

Does the prospect of “de-extinction” change how we think about extinction? Conservation science is shifting from being species-centric to function-centric, focussing on the overall health of ecosystems. Does the extinction of a species leave a “gap in nature” that can only be filled by returning the species to life and to the wild? Or will a functionally close relative serve? Is a de-extincted species really nothing more than a functionally close relative anyway? If it is too difficult and expensive to revive every extinct species, what are the criteria for deciding which ones to work on? Humans are the ones deciding. What ethics and aesthetics should guide those decisions?

STEWART BRAND is the Founder of the “The Whole Earth Catalog” and Co-founder of The Long Now Foundation and Revive and Restore; Author, Whole Earth Discipline.
Stewart Brand’s Edge Bio Page

RICHARD PRUM is an Evolutionary Ornithologist at Yale University, where he is the Curator of Ornithology and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. He is working on a book about duck sex, aesthetic evolution, and the origin of beauty.
Richard Prum’s Edge Bio Page

HANS ULRICH OBRIST is the Co-director of the Serpentine Gallery in London; Author, Ways of Curating.
Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Edge Bio Page

JOHN BROCKMAN is the Editor and Publisher of Edge.org; Chairman of Brockman, Inc.; Author, By the Late John Brockman, The Third Culture [photo credit: WOWE] John Brockman’s Edge Bio Page

find out more…

LIVE BROADCAST

The event is live-streamed at ( http://extinct.ly/ ). 3pm-5pm London; 4pm-6pm Europe; 10am-12pm East Coast; 7am-10am West Coast.

EDGE & SERPENTINE GALLERY

Previous Edge-Serpentine collaborations have included:

“Formulae for the 21st Century” (2007)
“The Table-Top Experiment Marathon” (2007)
“Maps For The 21st Century” (2010)
“Information Gardens” (2011)

Aesthetics & the Embodied Mind [call for papers] · 24 August 2015 · BBK London.

Pragmatist and embodied approaches to aesthetics consider aesthetics to be the study of everything that goes into the human capacity to make and experience the bodily pre-linguistic cognitive, emotional and sensory-perceptual conditions of meaning constitution having its origins in the organic activities of living creatures and in their organism-environment transactions.

The 2nd conference on “Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind” aims at highlighting the role of the interdependent relation between emotion and cognition in the bodily mediated pre-linguistic meaning constitution in aesthetic experience and perception. It aims at doing this from an anti-dualistic point of view.

The rejection of the mind-body dualism and of the representationalist approaches to human cognition has led to recast the theoretical tenets of the relation between cognition and emotion in the process of meaning generation. It has contributed to the development of a truly enactive approach to emotions. The enactive approach to emotions has emphasized that cognition and emotions are embodied and interdependent. Accordingly, bodily events are constitutive of appraisal, both structurally and phenomenologically. Arousal needs no appraisal to be interpreted by the subject, for cognitive and emotional processes are simultaneously constrained by the global form produced by their coupling in a process of circular causality. Therefore, the emotional interpretation of a lived situation is a global state of emotion-cognition coherence. It comprises an appraisal of a situation, an affective tone, and an action plan. Emotions such as fear, joy, happiness are bodily mediated cognitive-emotional evaluations of the bodily sense-making of an adaptation to environmental factors the organism interacts with in the environment and of their viability. They allow to subjectively feel the cognitive-emotional qualitative dimension of the degree of value of our interaction with different environmental factors through the aroused lived body.

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Conceptual and technical challenges of quantum gravity: Rome, 8-12 September 2014.

This conference will provide an opportunity for an encounter between different approaches and different perspectives on the quantum-gravity problem. Its main goal is to contribute to a higher level of shared knowledge among the quantum-gravity communities pursuing each specific research program.

We plan to have plenary talks on many different approaches, including in particular string theory, loop quantum gravity, spacetime noncommutativity, causal dynamical triangulations, asymptotic safety and causal sets. We shall also welcome contributions from the perspective of philosophy of science.

In addition we shall have several shorter talks organized in parallel sessions labelled not by specific approaches, but rather by “themes” that can cross the boundaries between different approaches, such as black-hole information, locality, dimensional reduction and phenomenology.

It is our intention to make this meeting particularly enjoyable for students and junior postdocs, since exposure to different perspectives is most significant at early stages of one’s path in quantum gravity.

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