In the last few years holography has celebrated some important anniversaries: in 2010 the 50th anniversary of the light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation (LASER) invention; in 2011 the 40th anniversary of the Nobel Prize awarded to the Hungarian scientist Dennis Gabor for inventing holography and in 2012 the 50th anniversary of the first holograms. Holography can create an accurate visual simulation, with total parallax: a replica of the real object made of light, which has the (...) real object’s visual properties but is immaterial, intangible. The holographic images are volumetric and exist in a real and measurable space, and are not based on the Renaissance perspective, which can represent the three-dimensional physical space in a bi-dimensional one. In the near future, holography-based techniques will open up new possibilities in the visualization domain, allowing new visual worlds. In the meantime, holography can be a useful technical and theoretical tool for reflecting on how our everyday mediascape works. The media can produce, reproduce and transmit bi-dimensional images on flat supports. The media system has a high degree of coherence and the images share similar morphostructural rules, and thus can be transferred from one medium to another without any fundamental information loss: bi-dimensionality and image-support coincidently appear to be the basis of this high level of translatability. Conversely, holograms cannot be displayed through the usual media without losing their peculiarity: they require new displays, new visual media and new genres of communication, even if they hybridize with the existing media. Holography stands apart from the media realm, which in part explains the difficulties of this technique in emerging and integrating into the mediascape. Holography suggests a new visual universe within a culture where visual simulation is the most effective communication system, and it lets us reflect on the need for a more comprehensive definition of ‘image’. It is easy to imagine that future images will also be holographic and that we will communicate more and more through them, in a delicate balance between presence and absence, immediacy and remoteness, materiality and immateriality, matter and energy. Holography can work as a model in science, for example in the study of brain activity in the Holonomic Brain Theory, originated by Austrian psychologist Karl Pribram and initially developed in collaboration with physicist David Bohm to explain human cognition. Holography can also be a model in physics, for example in the idea of the physicist David Bohm of an ‘implicate order’ in the universe, where global structure can be found in each small part – the universe would be a gigantic and wonderfully detailed hologram. More recently, theoretical results on black holes suggest that the idea of a holographic universe is a viable hypothesis. And in the field of quantum gravity and string theories the ‘holographic principle’ suggests that the entire universe can be considered as a two-dimensional information structure, and that the three-dimensional world we observe is but a description at a macroscopic scale and at low energies. (shrink)

We propose an analogy between optical holography and neural behavior as a hypothesis about the physical mechanisms of neural reuse. Specifically, parameters in optical holography (frequency, amplitude, and phase of the reference beam) may provide useful analogues for understanding the role of different parameters in determining the behavior of neurons (e.g., frequency, amplitude, and phase of spiking behavior).

Holography is a fruitful concept in modern physics. However, there is no generally accepted definition of the term, and its significance, especially as a guiding principle in quantum gravity, is rather uncertain. The present paper critically evaluates variants of the holographic principle from two perspectives: their relevance in contemporary approaches to quantum gravity and in closely related areas; their historical forerunners in the early twentieth century and the role played by past and present concepts of holography in attempts (...) to unify physics. By combining these two perspectives a certain depth of focus is gained which allows us to draw some tentative conclusions about what might be reasonable aspirations and prospects for holography in quantum gravity. By the same token, we will have a brief and critical look at wider philosophical interpretations of the term. (shrink)

In the fall of 1957 the University of California Press expanded Arnheim’s 1933 book _Film_ by four essays and brought that landmark work back into print as _Film as Art._ Now nearly fifty years after that re-edition, the book continues to occupy an important place in the literature of film. Arnheim’s method, provocative in this age of technological wizardry, was to focus on the way art in film was derived from that medium’s early limitations: no sound, no color, no three-dimensional (...) depth. (shrink)

Law as Art presents a radical new legal theory, the Law as Art Hypothesis, which conceives law, not as a system of rules, but as a distinctive kind of art work. Law is differentiated as art by the Law as Compound Artistic Type Hypothesis, which uses the heuristic metaphor of the Operatic Music Drama, the most elementally complex compound art form, to develop an idea of legal art as a distinctive empowered text, supported by the arts of drama, painting, sculpture, (...) dress-design, architecture, rhetoric and communication to form an elementally developed yet integrated unitary art work. Part I develops a new realist epistemology to support a contemporary action-type ontology of art, differentiated as art by virtue of its artistic value. Part II opens with a critical review of the arts in legal theory, before detailing the Law as Art and Law as Compound Artistic Type Hypothesis and locating them within contemporary scholarship. Legal philosophical implications are considered and there is an acronym key and glossary, bibliography and index. (shrink)

Chinese philosophy views experience as intrinsically aesthetic. This world view could be elucidated through a consideration of John Dewey's aesthetics and features of Chinese art. Dewey's philosophy of art starts with an understanding of experience as 'live processes' of living creatures interacting with their environment. Such processes are autopoietic in being self-sustaining, ever-changing, capable of increasing complexity, capable of generating novelty, direction and progress on its own. Its autopoietic character is a precondition of the aesthetic in the process of experience. (...) An aesthetic experience is rhythmic, focused, consummatory, and reaches beyond the transitory boundaries of concrete existence. The aesthetic is not confined to what is conventionally identified as art. Most important, the ethical-political, the natural and the cosmic all have an aesthetic aspect, as the paper attempts to show by examining classical Confucianism. (shrink)

I discuss the early history of holography and explore how perceptions, applications, and forecasts of the subject were shaped by prior experience. I focus on the work of Dennis Gabor (1900–1979) in England,Yury N. Denisyuk (1927-2005) in the Soviet Union, and Emmett N. Leith (1927–2005) and Juris Upatnieks (b. 1936) in the United States. I show that the evolution of holography was simultaneously promoted and constrained by its identification as an analog of photography, an association that influenced its (...) assessment by successive audiences of practitioners, entrepreneurs, and consumers. One consequence is that holography can be seen as an example of a modern technical subject that has been shaped by cultural influences more powerfully than generally appreciated. Conversely, the understanding of this new science and technology in terms of an older one helps to explain why the cultural effects of holography have been more muted than anticipated by forecasters between the 1960s and 1990s. (shrink)

The article investigates the hypothesis that preaching implies more than merely verbalising, proclaiming and rhetoric reasoning. Preaching is fundamentally the art of poetic seeing; an aesthetic event on an ontic and spiritual level; that is, it provides vocabulary and images in order to help people to discover meaning in life (preaching as the art of foolishness). In this regard, preaching should provide God-images that open up the dimension of aesthetics and provide vistas of the ‘unseen’. The iconic dimension of preaching (...) is about symbols and metaphors that help people to ‘see’ in everyday life (a poetic gaze) the presence of God in such a way that tragic events, the awareness of death and the anguish about the fear for loss and rejection become events for signifying life and for healing (the quest for wholeness). It is argued that practical theology should be about a liturgy of life. In this regard, the ‘ugliness of God’ becomes an aesthetic category in a Christian spiritual approach to iconography. In order to do this a critical approach to praxis thinking should probe into the realm of paradigms, especially paradigms that describe the ‘power of God’. Due to the assumption that the depiction of God’s power was predominantly influenced by the Serapis, Zeus and Roman cult (Emperor mystique), a paradigm shift from omni-categories (pantokrator) to bowel categories (passio Dei) in the homiletic depiction of God is proposed. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Performance as Art Performed Works and Work‐Performances Work‐Performances and Performance‐Works Performance‐Works and Improvisation.

Theater is an art or theater is not an independent art. Each of these antithetical propositions has its supporters. It is usually the supporters of the second who come up with anything resembling intelligible argumentation. The first is usually accepted as fact, sanctified by universal acknowledgement, without criticism, without much reflection—it is just accepted: theater unquestionably gives satisfaction. What kind? Aesthetic! And so, theater is an art!

According to my entire understanding here, art is itself an emanation of the absolute. The history of art will show us most revealingly its immediate connections to the conditions of the universe and thereby to that absolute identity in which art is preordained. Only in the history of art does the essential and inner unity of all works of art reveal itself, a unity showing that all poetry is of the same spirit, a spirit that even in the antitheses of (...) ancient and modern art is merely showing its two different faces. §14. The indifference of the ideal and the real as indifference manifests itself in the ideal world through art, for art is in itself neither mere activity nor mere knowledge, but is rather an activity completely permeated by knowledge, or in a reverse fashion knowledge that has completely become activity. That is, it is the indifference of both. (shrink)

The given work analyses several aspects of the concept te’cnh in Plato´s philosophy. At the same time, it deals with his attempt of finding a type of behaviour which counts on the same features as arts and science, in other words, a behaviour based on rational principles that will enable us to act accurately and according to our principles. He followed the path of Socrates in the process of the search for such behaviour. The sophists were proud of teaching a (...) certain political science that, to Plato, is an exclusive property of the philosopher who is acquainted with the intelligible forms and makes use of the right calculation and measure. According to him, these two would be the undeniable components of what we may define as the good and happy life of an individual.El presente estudio analiza algunos aspectos del concepto de te’cnh en la filosofía de Platón, así como el intento, siguiendo los pasos de su maestro, de encon- trar un tipo de conducta que posea las mismas características que las artes y ciencias, es decir, basado en principios racionales capaces de proporcionar fiabilidad y precisión a nuestras acciones. Los sofistas se preciaban de enseñar una ciencia política que, en opinión de Platón, es propiedad exclusiva del filósofo que conoce las Formas inteligibles y se sirve del cálculo y la medida, componentes indispensables de toda vida buena y feliz. (shrink)

Secured to a table in my living room is an antique apple peeler—a cast iron 19th century mechanical contrivance that I gave my wife for her birthday some years ago. This thing is not art. At the very least, I do not believe it is art. Yet my wife and I do not use it as an apple peeler; we use it as art. Indeed, my living room is filled with things that we are using as art—some artifacts, some natural (...) objects—but my living room is not filled with art. This is not, I think, all that unusual a phenomenon. Indeed, I believe this is a widespread phenomenon occurring at the blurry line between art and non-art, especially in the home. However, exactly what it means to use a thing as art without thus believing it is art, and without it being art, is not a straightforward matter, especially given the many functions of art today, and their functional overlap with non-art. In this essay, I investigate the notion of using a thing—specifically a non-art thing, whether an artifact or otherwise—as art, and the importance of this notion both inside and outside of philosophy.. (shrink)

Works of culinary expertise are not typically regarded as works of "fine" art, in the way that, say, paintings, etchings, symphonies and sculptures are. I argue, however, that any form of creativity embodied in a perceptible work reflecting it is a subject about which we might exercise "aesthetic judgments" that do not differ fundamentally from the sorts typical with regard to the usual "fine" arts. To reserve a special notion for marking off the latter simply disguises the fact that it (...) is properly a value judgment that one is making. Otherwise it might seem a simple matter of fact that certain works are not works of fine art. I deal with this issue in Chapters Three and Four, in connection with traditional attempts to distinguish art from mere "craft" and more recent efforts to account for a certain "openness" in the concept of art. In Chapter One I consider the work of art as an "aesthetic object" combining sensory qualities into a complex whole, and specific objections against the possibility of composing or constructing, according to artistic principles, complexes of tastes . In Chapter Two the notion of "function" is introduced, since it might be thought that food is too obviously functional, in the face of the apparent irrelevance of functional considerations in artistic appraisal. ;Throughout, the emphasis is on food as specifically edible. In Chapter Two I argue, however, that other aspects of food besides its taste and smell might also be considered as part of that specific emphasis. Even to consider the visual qualities of a dish, for example, does not necessarily reduce it to a case of sculpture or visual design. Rather, I argue, cooking is an art which, in some of its forms, simply happens also to be an art of sculpting or visual design. I make a related point in Chapter Five about works in which food is at most one ingredient, e.g., performances, services or ceremonies. In cases where the whole work actually utilizes potentialities of food in an essential way, I argue that it is at least not clear why we should not regard the work as one of the culinary art that also happens to take the form, say, of dramatic or pictorial art. ;The first two chapters primarily aim to remove objections to regarding food works as art. This of course does not show that any particular food creation ever does in fact reach the level demanded for proper inclusion as "art." However, my more general discussion in Chapters Three and Four are aimed at generating some sympathy for an approach that would simply undercut the feeling that there is any such "level" to be reached in the first place. At best we are dealing with degrees of artistic value. Why not simply grant, then, that creatively produced taste complexes are works of art, and reserve whatever valuations we might come to make for the judgements we make concerning how good any particular work of food art is? In Chapter Five I emphasize the extent to which food works may in fact embody artistic dimensions, specifically with respect to the creative combination of expressive and symbolic elements. This allows for a kind of "composition" involving those elements, over and above the potentialities inherent in taste and smell as such. As for whether such compositions then ever reach a level of excellence sufficiently high for genuine "art"--I try to argue that this is a question that we simply should not ask. (shrink)

Games occupy a unique and valuable place in our lives. Game designers do not simply create worlds; they design temporary selves. Game designers set what our motivations are in the game and what our abilities will be. Thus: games are the art form of agency. By working in the artistic medium of agency, games can offer a distinctive aesthetic value. They support aesthetic experiences of deciding and doing. -/- And the fact that we play games shows something remarkable about us. (...) Our agency is more fluid than we might have thought. In playing a game, we take on temporary ends; we submerge ourselves temporarily in an alternate agency. Games turn out to be a vessel for communicating different modes of agency, for writing them down and storing them. Games create an archive of agencies. And playing games is how we familiarize ourselves with different modes of agency, which helps us develop our capacity to fluidly change our own style of agency. (shrink)

Explores various aspects of Plato’s cosmological writings.

ABSTRACT This article gives a poetic argument that bodily practices such as those of the devoted runner can revitalize experience through regular encounters with the ineffable. It also argues that language—particularly the language of philosophy—tends to strip experience of its ineffable qualities, reducing lived experience to what can be expressed. Nonverbal and bodily practices can point toward a richer sense of experience, thereby offering a critical view of ways in which an overly linguistic form of contemporary life diminishes experience by (...) ignoring the ineffable. A few critical concepts in the work of a set of antiphilosophers are explored as entry points into a more robust philosophical discourse that does less violence to the ineffable qualities of experience. (shrink)

During the last thirty years or so, there has been a veritable renaissance of the classical ethical idea of the ‘art of living’. Far from being restricted to philosophical discourse, it has also successfully entered the arena of popular culture. This renaissance is closely linked to the late work of Foucault, in which he attempts to restore this classical idea, which he thinks is lacking in modern Western societies. The author aims to assess the Foucaultdian idea of the art of (...) living, and argues that Foucault greatly transformed the Graeco-Roman idea by radicalizing the dimension of artistic activity. In the second part of the paper the author asks whether this radicalized idea can live up to Foucault’s own emancipatory expectations. Lastly, the author argues that the radicalization of the aesthetic dimension has a contradictory effect. (shrink)

In this essay I propose to facilitate a dialogue between the thoughts of conceptual artist and philosopher, Daya Krishna, and the work of literary artist, Vikas Swarup. The central concept that will be “interrogated” in this dialogue is that of knowledge. I will apply my understanding of Daya Krishna’s conceptualization of the knowledge enterprise on to Vikas Swarup’s attitude toward knowledge as embodied in his 2005 novel, Q & A. This exercise serves to create a context in which conceptions of (...) knowledge from diverse fields (hardcore philosophy and popular culture) can be in dialogue with one another, and thereby enhance meaning. Daya Krishna observes that the loss of certainty and proof in our postmodern age erodes the concept of knowledge. He alternately suggests new indicators with which to define knowledge, indicators which factor in chance and probability, and take into account inherent moral qualities of knowledge. I argue that this alternative model of knowledge finds an expression in Swarup’s novel. (shrink)

Joseph Kupfer removes aesthetics from the exclusive province of museums, concert halls, and the periphery of human interests to reveal the impact of aesthetic experience on daily living.

Paul Thom argues that opera is a set of practices framed by the concepts of work, interpretation, performance, and art. His argument is that operatic works have the potential to be art, but so do operatic productions, independently of their value as interpretations of the works they stage.

Western art gardens have enjoyed a chequered relationship with philosophical aesthetics. At different times, they have been both lauded and rejected as exemplars of art, and, for most of the last 150 or so years, they have been largely ignored. However, during the last 25 years, there has been a welcome resurgence of philosophical interest in such gardens. This study situates the work stemming from this revival of interest in its historical context and assesses its adequacy in accounting for gardens (...) in accordance with a range of pan-art criteria. The study argues that contemporary philosophical accounts of gardens are inadequate in some important ways, particularly with respect to gardens’ temporality, ontology, and arthood, and the ways in which gardens are experienced. In response to the arguments of Amie Thomasson, Dominic McIver Lopes, and some other contemporary philosophers, which advocate philosophical accounts of individual arts rather than pan-art accounts, the study develops a partial, new account of gardens that aims to remedy the perceived inadequacies in existing accounts. The new account claims that gardens are singular, not multiple, artworks and that they have an identity not unlike that possessed by humans and other animals; that, metaphorically speaking, our garden experiences may be helpfully illuminated by the application of theories developed in the context of contemporary, improvisatory dance; and that the “ordinariness” of many of gardens materials may be better understood in terms of Arthur Danto’s claim that esse est interpretari, that is, that meaning and value derive from the interpretative process. The new account also proposes personhood as a potentially useful heuristic for understanding how gardens are experienced and understood. The concept of “garden,” and the related constitutive garden aspects, features, and issues are established at the opening of the study with reference to an actual garden. Thereafter, the sources on which the study draws, and which it critiques, are all archival. They include recent philosophical monographs by Mara Miller (The Garden as Art), Stephanie Ross (What Gardens Mean), and David Cooper (A Philosophy of Gardens), and a range of historical and other contemporary monographs and papers written by philosophers, garden historians, and landscape architects and theorists. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Are Videogames Art? A Cluster Theory of Art The Art in Videogames New Art from Old Bottles.

Life as Art synthesizes a number of aesthetic theories in philosophy after 1850 and shows the ways in which they contribute to a unified field of analysis and potential implementation. The book is framed both as a secondary text, analyzing 19th and 20th Century aesthetics, and a primary argument for the viability of life as art as a unified philosophical position.

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, Volume 44, Issue 1, Page 143-160, December 2019.