The Speculative Turn in Film and Digital Art
PLEASE NOTE: This research seminar is principally tailored to PhD students and staff members. However, selected research master students in the Humanities may participate in the seminar and have it count towards ECTS credit in the form of a tutorial. Please make sure you are granted permission to follow this seminar as a tutorial by writing to the organizers ahead of time and agreeing on conditions and procedure; in due time, the organizers will need to sign off on your grade and ECTS credits. It’s entirely up to them whether to allow in research master students, how much, and under what conditions. In some cases, you may also need permission from your respective masters’ coordinator in order to participate.
Directed by: Patricia Pisters (p.pisters@uva.nl) and Josef Früchtl (j.fruchtl@uva.nl)
Dates: 4 Oct, 1 Nov, 6 Dec 2013, 7 Feb, 7 March, 4 April, 9 May, 6 June 2014
Time: 3-6 pm. Coordinator: Blandine Joret (b.joret@uva.nl)
In this year’s Film-Philosophy PhD seminar our aim is two-fold. On the one hand we want to disentangle the different currents and strands of a recent development in philosophy that is indicated as the ‘speculative turn’ (Bryant, Srnicek, Harman, 2011). The speculative turn comprises related but different strand such as ‘speculative materialism’, ‘object oriented ontology’ and ‘new materialism/neo-vitalism’. What all these currents share is a rejection of “correlationalism” between thinking and being, a certain notion of “presence” and intuition, and a rethinking of the relations between human and non-human, organic and inorganic, object and subject in a dynamic process that allows hundreds of variations, modulations and co-creation between different categories of agents. On the other hand, and in connection to our first aim, we want to see how this ‘turn’ is related to considering film as a ‘speculative object’ or media ecological materiality that needs new ways of conceptualisation. We will return to thinkers such as Bergson, James, Whitehead, Deleuze and, last but not least, Hume but also investigate the different key texts in the contemporary speculative turn, including those by Harman, Meillasoux, Land, Latour, Bennett and Barad. We will invite experts in the field and open the floor for work in progress by PhD students whose work is engaging with these fields of rethinking the material and immaterial in philosophy, media theory and cultural analysis.
Our first guest speaker will be Iris van der Tuin (University Utrecht), author (with Rick Dolphijn) of the book New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (Open Humanities Press, 2012) who will map the field for further explorations. Detailed information about each session, presentations, and the location will be announced later on. If you want to join the seminar as a new member, please send a message to the convenor and coordinator to be added to the mailing list and receive further information.