Panel: “The Aesthetics of Disruptive Business”

@ “Aesthetics Re-loaded“, International conference
December 11-13, 2012, Aarhus University, Denmark

The aim of the conference is to advance and exchange basic research on aesthetics within the field of new technology. The conference explores the concept of aesthetics by investigating the challenges new computational technologies pose for current aesthetic theory. Confirmed keynote speakers include Bernard Stiegler, Olga Goriunova, and Mark B.N. Hansen.

Scholars of aesthetic theory seldom engage the specific potential for aesthetic experience offered by digital computer technology, despite its omnipresence. By the same token, IT researchers often interpret “aesthetics” as merely a question of how the user interface manifests itself – in other words, as a question of an encounter or interaction of a “user” with an interface without any more detailed evaluation of the aesthetic qualities of that meeting or interaction. The conference attempts to bring a deeper, theoretically grounded consideration of the aesthetic dimension to bear on the digital phenomena and technologies that surround us today.

As part of the conference programme, I am moderating a panel entitled: “The Aesthetics of Disruptive Business”

Participants: Christian Ulrik Andersen/Geoff Cox/Søren Pold, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Stevphen Shukaitis, Marina Vishmidt.

With a backdrop of the crisis of financial capitalism, austerity cuts in the cultural sphere, the panel will focus on aesthetic strategies in relation to a broken economy. In a perverse way, we ask whether this presents new opportunities for cultural producers to achieve more autonomy over their production process and ask what alternative business models emerge? We are concerned broadly with business as (artistic) material for reinvention, and the challenge for critical aesthetics in terms of key business paradigms like innovation and regeneration.

• Tatiana Bazzichelli (Transmediale / Leuphana University of Lüneburg), moderator
• Christian Ulrik Andersen/Søren Pold/Geoff Cox (Aarhus University), “Disruptive Innovation in Digital Art/Activism and Business”
• Stevphen Shukaitis (University of Essex / Autonomedia), “All Your Aesthetic Management Is Belong to Us: Mimetic Self-Organization in the Circuits of Immaterial Production”
• Marina Vishmidt (Queen Mary, University of London), “Mimesis of the Hardened and Alienated: Money, Value and Activism in Recent Art and Around It”

More info about the Panel: here
More info about the Conference: here
Conference Programme: here