Conference: "Liquid Intelligence and the Aesthetics of Fluidity"
Confirmed Speakers: Caroline Arscott (Courtauld Institute of Art) 鈥� Fabio Barry (University of St. Andrews) 鈥� Matthew C. Hunter (不良研究所) 鈥� Yukio Lippit (Harvard University) 鈥� Jeffrey Moser (不良研究所) 鈥� Alexander Nemerov (Stanford University) 鈥� Jennifer L. Roberts (Harvard University) 鈥� Itay Sapir (UQAM)
In an influential essay, contemporary artist Jeff Wall has sketched a suggestive genealogy linking chemical photography to a range of fluid processes and their modes of 鈥渓iquid intelligence.鈥� By Wall鈥檚 telling, wet procedures done in the dark historically connect photography to a vast, subterranean network of primordial acts of chemical transformation like dyeing and bleaching. But, the pull of liquids on art and aesthetic imagination runs deeper still. From the unctuous stains of Titian鈥檚 macchie to Ed Ruscha鈥檚 鈥渓iquid word鈥� paintings鈥攆rom Kenneth Anger鈥檚 filmic imagination of the Renaissance garden鈥檚 ritualized, watery flows to the 鈥渂oggy, soggy, squitchy鈥� picture that flummoxes Ishmael at Melville鈥檚 Spouter-Inn鈥攖he urge to sound the fluid image abides. Where Walter Pater would explain Leonardo鈥檚 strange imaginings as like sight 鈥渋n some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through deep water,鈥� no less central a theorist of pictorial ontology than Leon Battista Alberti appealed to the myth of Narcissus. 鈥淲hat is painting,鈥� Alberti asks, 鈥渂ut the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool?鈥�
Hosted through the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at 不良研究所 and Media@不良研究所, this conference aims to thematize liquid intelligence and the broader aesthetics of fluidity in which it moves. Drawing together leading, international scholars, the conference seeks to open conversations around conceptions of photography, painting, and other fluid strategies made perceptible by pushing upon liquid intelligence. Can an ingenuity of liquid realization be constructively compared, we might ask, to the raw, 鈥渇luid鈥� smarts that psychologists oppose to formal, 鈥渃rystallized鈥� intelligence? Might the theoretical heuristic of liquid thinking devised for a recent, proximate past help flush out the modalities of more distant minds responsible for, say, the oozing, oil-spotted glazes of medieval tenmoku tea wares or the inky insubstantiality of Zen patriarch portraits? If we, like the intergalactic researchers in Andrei Tarkovsky鈥檚 Solaris, are influenced by the hegemonic, fluid images we study, how might those subtle currents work to dissolve the dry media genealogies and hoary theoretical constructs that continue inform much thinking on relations between photography, painting and other arts past and present?
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