Practical Aesthetics: (Thinking in the World)

This collection brings together artists and theoreticians to provide the first anthology of a new field: Practical Aesthetics. A work of art already contains its own criticism, a knowledge of its own which need not be conceptual or propositional. Yet today, there are many approaches to different forms of art that work on the brink between science and art, ‘sensible cognition’ and proposition, aesthetic knowledge and rational knowledge, while thinking with art (or the artistic material) rather than about it. This volumes presents ways of thinking with different forms of art (film, sound, dance, literature, etc), as well as new forms of aesthetic research and presentation such as Media Philosophy, the audiovisual essay, fictocriticism, the audio paper, and Artistic Research. It reveals how writing about art can become ‘artistic’ or ‘poetic’ in its own right: not only writing about artistic effects, but producing them in the first place. This takes art not as an object of (external) analysis, but as a subject with a knowledge in its own right, creating a co-composing 'conceptual interference pattern' between theory and practice. A ‘practical aesthetics’ thus understood, can be described as thinking with art, in order to find new ways to create worlds and thus to make the world perceivable in different ways.

Table of Contents:
1. Towards a practical aesthetics: thinking with, Bernd Herzogenrath 2. The experiment: between art and life, Christoph Menke 3. On the practice of theory: The technological turn of media theory and aesthetic practice of media philosophy, Katerina Krtilova 4. Episode zero: How empirical science discounts aesthetic experience, and a practical way to bring it back, Tim Ingold 5. Practical aesthetics: the case of bioart, Jan Jagodzinski 6. Colors without bodies: Wes Anderson’s drab ethics, Eugenie Brinkema 7. In lag of knowledge: the video essay as parapraxis, Johannes Binotto 8. Thinking with images: a word & photo essay, Bill Morrison 9. Lapses, affects, supplement: Hiro Murai’s audiovisual anachronism, Tomáš Jirsa 10. Some notes on sound thinking, Bernd Herzogenrath 11. Thinking with sound: preliminary thoughts, François Bonnet 12. In search of sacred space, John Luther Adams 13. Feeling in the bones, Craig Shepard 14. Music as sonic praxis: On the work of Catherine Christer Hennix, Marcus Boon 15. The audio paper as affective attunements: Thinking, producing and listening, Sanne Krogh Groth & Kristine Samson 16. Genealogies of immersive media and virtual reality (vr) as practical aesthetic machines, Michael N. Goddard 17. As duo: thinking with dance, Elizabeth Waterhouse 18. The heart and other organs of darkness in the year 2019, Allen C. Shelton 19. Essayistic imagination: Max Bense’s theory of essayistic writing as practical aesthetics, Christoph Ernst 20. Radioactivity and the typewriter’s breath: Practical aesthetics in Pound and Olson, Julius Greve 21. Can practical aesthetics change lives? Jill Bennett 22. Contaminations: towards an empathic museology, Mieke Bal 23. Transforming the temporality of trauma into the temporality of memory: The practical aesthetics of Marjan Teeuwen’s destroyed houses, Ernst Van Alphen

About the Author :
Bernd Herzogenrath is Professor of American Studies at the University of Frankfurt, Germany.

Review :
Tracing the matter of artworks and technical artifacts from within its own inherent qualities, Practical Aestheticsproposes an operational approach to its objects of research. These paradigmatic case studies re-interpret the aesthetics of multi-media artworks and artifacts as an encounter between human cognition and the physically real.With its focus on moving images, sound art, and other artistic and media-cultural practice, Practical Aesthetics is the academic companion to practice-based artistic research. Bringing together some of the most interesting voices at the intersections of theories and practices of media and culture, Practical Aesthetics raises important questions and ventures fascinating answers concerning the shifting terrain between art and technology—thus opening the path towards a rigorously philosophical way of thinking with and through material objects and practices. Herzogenrath’s Practical Aesthetics offers a timely approach to thinking about aesthetics, not merely as a philosophical exercise, but as a fulcrum for commencing new modes of living in complex times.