Philosophy Dialogues: Roy Ben-Shai & Gabriel Rockhill

835 North Kings Road,West Hollywood CA 90069

05 March, 2022

Description

The Philosophy Dialogues series is organized by Joseph Lemelin on the occasion of "Florian Hecker — Resynthesizers." Gabriel Rockhill – “The Power of Aesthetics: Four Tactics of Artistic Intervention”Exploring ways that artistic practices relate to the dominant cultural apparatus, Rockhill presents a taxonomy of four tactics of artistic intervention that exemplify the power of aesthetics: Trojan Horse art, counter-hegemonic aesthetics, “third” culture, and the socialist cultural apparatus. In each case, Rockhill shares and discusses examples in order to elucidate how these tactics seek to intervene, as well as the ways in which they can potentially relate to one another in an overall strategy for social and political transformation. &Roy Ben-Shai – “Where Are We When We Think?”Using examples from art history and critical theory, Roy Ben-Shai examines different potentials of critical thought and artistic practice for constructing alternative worlds of sense and sense-making. In particular, he presents three different orientations of thought: spectatorial, agential, and affective. Through articulations of these orientations, Ben-Shai illustrates how they utilize and modify experience and conceptions of space. Philosophy DialoguesPlease join us at the Schindler House for a series of lectures organized by Joseph Lemelin and featuring philosophers Roy Ben-Shai, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Amy Ireland, Robin Mackay, and Gabriel Rockhill. The series is presented by Equitable Vitrines on the occasion of "Florian Hecker — Resynthesizers." Addressing Hecker’s work directly and obliquely, speakers in this series reflect on themes that his work evokes at the meeting point of theory and artistic practice. As automation and data-fueled technologies reconfigure lived experience, what new forms of sensing emerge? What kinds of relationships between human and machine sense arise? What does it mean for artists and theorists to intervene within these aesthetic transformations? Philosophy Dialogues gathers five contemporary thinkers from different theoretical orientations to investigate the capacities of art and technology to shape alternative worlds of sense and sense-making. Lead funding has been generously provided by the Wilhelm Family Foundation and the Michael Asher Foundation, with additional support from the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the Kebok Foundation, the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, and the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs."Florian Hecker — Resynthesizers" is on display through March 13, 2022, at the Fitzpatrick-Leland House.www.equitablevitrines.com Roy Ben-ShaiRoy Ben-Shai teaches philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. His book, A Critique of Critique, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Intervening in the fraught landscape of contemporary critical theory, in which competing theoretical standpoints attempt to delegitimize each other, Roy’s work argues for the need to recognize fundamentally different orientations of critical thinking, which are incompatible and irreconcilable, yet equally valid and necessary. Gabriel RockhillGabriel Rockhill is a philosopher, cultural critic and activist. He is the Founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop / Atelier de Théorie Critique and Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. His recent books include Contre-histoire du temps present (2017; available in English as Counter-History of the Present), Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics (2016), Radical History & the Politics of Art (2014) and Logique de l’histoire: Pour une analytique des pratiques philosophiques (2010). In addition to his scholarly work, he is actively engaged in extra-academic activities in the art and activist worlds, and his writings have appeared in venues like The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Truthout, CounterPunch, Liberation School, Libération and Mediapart. Joseph LemelinJoseph Lemelin is a philosopher based in New York City. His work combines critical theory and the philosophy of mind to examine emerging technologies. He has taught in the Philosophy Department at The New School for Social Research and currently teaches philosophy of technology in the graduate program in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Founded in 2014, Equitable Vitrines is a Los Angeles 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that organizes exhibitions and educational programming. Its work is based upon the conviction that art’s value lies in its capacity to facilitate the emergence of new aesthetic and discursive forms, which are needed to enhance humanity’s self-understanding in an era of unprecedented change.