War Seminar #3: War and Aesthetics
Ever since Homer opened the urtext of Western literature with the famous line “Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son, Achilles,” war has been closely entwined with aesthetics. Both before, during, and after armed conflict, art and aesthetics have been a driving force in producing and inducing responses to war, oftentimes calibrating the sensuous apparatuses of populations in ways that aided the war effort, while sometimes also offering a set of counter-narratives and affects. The close bond between war and aesthetics has become ever tighter during the 20th and 21st centuries. The conquering of the perceptual field, to quote Paul Virilio, by way of cinematographic and simulated images has become an integral part of home-front propaganda and of warfare itself. And as James Der Derian has noted, we find ourselves at a point in the history of war where the means of representing war have collapsed with the means of waging war. What is the status of aesthetics in these circumstances? How do classical and contemporary literary texts configure our understanding and sensuous perception of warfare? In which ways do algorithmic technologies, cloud computing, and virtual scenarios co-opt and reconfigure aesthetics, and how may artists and cultural analysts respond to this predicament?
To discuss these complex linkages between war and aesthetics, we have invited some some of today’s most influential thinkers for this third and final war seminar, viz. Eyal Weizman, Caren Kaplan, Arkadi Zaides, Phil Klay, Kate McLoughlin, Ryan Bishop, and Anthony Downey.
Programme
Central European time (CET+1)
23/9 |
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| 09:15-09:30 | Anders Engberg-Pedersen | Welcome and Introduction |
| 09:30-10:40 | Ryan Bishop (Southampton) | Eyes, Ears, Mouths: A Sensorial Military Triptych (with satellite, electronic music, vocoder and muzak) |
| 11:00-12:10 | Anthony Downey (Birmingham City) | The Future of Death. Algorithmic Anxieties and Programmable Destruction |
| 13:45-14:55 | Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths) | Cloud Studies |
| 15:15-16:30 | Arkadi Zaides | Documentary Choreography - Choreographic Investigations of Sites of Conflict |
24/9 |
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| 09:30-10:40 | Caren Kaplan (UC Davis) | The Fabric of War: Making Meaning in Modernity |
| 11-12:10 | Kate McLoughlin (Oxford) | Deep Time and Contemporary War Poetry |
| 13:45-15 | Phil Klay | War, Beauty, and the Trouble with Witness |
| 15:15-15:45 | Concluding Panel |
About
Ryan Bishop
Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Arts and Politics and Co-Director of the Archaeologies of Media and Technology Research Group within the Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton. Some of his most recent books include Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology and the Military-Industrial Avant-garde (co-authored with John Beck, 2020), Seeing Degree Zero: Barthes/Burgin and Political Aesthetics (co-edited with Sunil Manghani, 2019), Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics (co-edited with John Beck, 2016).
Anthony Downey
Anthony Downey is Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa at Birmingham City University, with a specific research focus on practice-based research, digital methodologies and knowledge production in visual cultures. His most recent publications include Don’t Shrink Me to the Size of a Bullet: The Works of Hiwa K (2017), Future Imperfect: Contemporary Art Practices and Cultural Institutions in the Middle East (2016), and Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East (2015).
Eyal Weizman
Eyal Weizman is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and founding director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2010 he founded the research agency Forensic Architecture and directs it ever since. His is the writer of several books including The Conflict Shoreline (2015), The Least of all Possible Evils (2011), Hollow Land (2007), and A Civilian Occupation (2003)
Arkadi Zaides
Arkadi Zaides is an independent choreographer. Born in 1979 in Belarus, he immigrated to Israel in 1990 and currently lives in France. His work examines the ways in which political and social contexts effect the physical body and constitute choreography. His latest work include Necropolis, a performance outlining an invisible city of the dead mapped from the graves of the migrants who could not reach their final destinations in Europe; Talos (2013-2018), a performance that examines the relation between movement, innovative, technologies, and the future of borders; and Archive (2013) for which he received the Emile Zola Prize for Performing Arts for demonstrating engagement in human rights issues.
Caren Kaplan
Caren Kaplan is Professor of American Studies and affiliated faculty in Cultural Studies and Science and Technology Studies at UC Davis. She is the author of numerous books, among them two digital multi-media scholarly works, Dead Reckoning and Precision Targets. Most recently she recently published the monograph Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (2017) as well as the edited volume Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (2017)
Phil Klay
Phil Klay a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the author of the short story collection Redeployment (2014) and the novel Missionaries (2020). Redeployment won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics' Circle John Leonard Prize for best debut work in any genre. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the Brookings Institution's Brookings Essay series. And his nonfiction work won the George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Journalism, Arts & Letters in the category of Cultural & Historical Criticism in 2018. He is on the Board of Arts in the Armed Forces, and he currently teaches fiction at Fairfield University.
Kate McLouglin
Kate McLoughlin is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in English at Harris Manchester College. Her latest monograph, Veteran Poetics: British Literature in the Age of Mass Warfare, 1790-2015 (2018), reads a single figure - the war veteran - in the literary-philosophical contexts of the age of modern, mass, industrialized warfare, illustrating how ex-combatants have been deployed by authors from William Wordsworth to J. K. Rowling. Her previous publications include Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (2011), The First World War: Literature, Culture, Modernity (2018), Writing War, Writing Lives (2017), and The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (2009).
Registration
For free in-person participation go to BILETTO to claim your free ticket.
For online participation: zoomlink forthcoming, no registration needed.
Price
Free of charge.
Organizers
The seminar is organized by the research group The Aesthetics of Late Modern War (Jens Bjering, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Solveig Gade, Christine Strandmose Toft) University of Southern Denmark and will take place at The Black Diamond at the Royal Danish Library. It will also be live-streamed via Facebook.