Vital Beauty
"Vital Beauty: Reclaiming Aesthetics in the Tangle of Technology and Nature" focuses on the question of how the age-old notion of beauty can have a meaning fit for the 21st century.
| Author: Various Issued: 2012 Type: Paperback, illustrated, full color Pages: 256 Language: English |
Dimensions: 23 x 16 cm ISBN: 978-90-5662-856-7 Price: € 10 Design: Joke Brouwer |
With: Thierry Bardini, Caroline van Eck, Gustav Fechner, Mark Frost, George Gessert, Tim Ingold, Arjen Mulder, John Ruskin, Lars Spuybroek, Wendy Steiner, Daniel N. Stern.
Edited by Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder and Lars Spuybroek.
How can the age-old notion of beauty regain an importance appropriate to the 21st century? Our need for beauty has not diminished, as hard as modernism tried to erase it from art and life and supplant it with the sublime. It was a sublime that increasingly associated itself with negation and deconstruction. In contrast, vital beauty, as defined by John Ruskin more than 150 years ago, is a beauty of sympathies and affinities with life forms. Yet vital beauty must be reinvented, since life forms today can be technological as well as natural. The concept of vital beauty raises the question of how we should design our environments, our objects and our lives, and of how we might one day invent a politics of beauty.
The publication was released during the Vital Beauty Symposium at May 16, 2012 in de Balie, Amsterdam.
Download the introduction of Vital Beauty (PDF).
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V2_ presents: "Vital Beauty," an international symposium and publication as part of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival 2012.
DEAF2012 Dutch Electronic Art Festival - The Power of Things!
Gustav Theodor Fechner (DE) (1801-1887) was an experimental psychologist and the founder of psychophysics.
Lars Spuybroek is Professor of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
Caroline van Eck (NL) researches the relations between classical rhetoric, religion and the visual arts and architecture.
Arjen Mulder (NL) is the author of a number of essay collections and works of art criticism.
Timothy Ingold (UK) is a social anthropologist, and Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.
Wendy Steiner (US) is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, cultural critic and founding director of the Penn Humanities Forum.
Short report in the form of a blogpost about the symposium Vital Beauty at DEAF2012, written by John de Weerd.
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