Anthropological Reflections on the Art of the Possible

«In 1956, the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys started working on a visionary architectural proposal for a future society; he didn’t stop for almost twenty years. Having been a cofounder of the Cobra group of artists in the late forties, he abandoned painting in 1953 to concentrate on the question of ‘construction’. He became a founding member of the Situationist International in 1957 and played a central role in their experiments until his resignation in 1960. New Babylon, as his project would eventually be called, is a situationist city intended as a polemical provocation.Peer Reviewe

The Living Sign. Reading Noble from a Biosemiotic Perspective

The author argues that the reductionist illusions of the Modern Synthesis, which Noble criticizes in his target article, are to a large extent resulting from a mere syntactical notion of biological information, neglecting the pragmatic and semantic dimension of information. Although the syntactical notion, introduced by Shannon, has been applied with much success in information theory and computer technologies, it is too narrow to understand biological reality. Biosemiotics can help to clarify the problems identified by Noble, and offers a more adequate biological information concept, which not only may help to overcome these problems in the life sciences, but may also serve to integrate natural-scientific and humanities approaches to life

Virtual Reality. The Interplay Between Technology, Ontology and Art

Virtual reality reunites art and technology which, since Greek culture, have gone their separate ways. In our attempt to elucidate the implications of the existence of virtual reality we have to try to avoid both its uncritical embracing and pessimistic rejection. Virtual reality is neither a holy grail nor “an assault on reality” (M. Slouka). It is not a neutral technology and like all technologies, virtual reality discloses the world in its own way and as such it offers us a whole range of new possibilities. We might expect that some of the greatest art in the next century will be based on the technology of virtual reality, and that at the same time this technology will be used for the most stultifying kitsch.Virtual reality reunites art and technology which, since Greek culture, have gone their separate ways. In our attempt to elucidate the implications of the existence of virtual reality we have to try to avoid both its uncritical embracing and pessimistic rejection. Virtual reality is neither a holy grail nor “an assault on reality” (M. Slouka). It is not a neutral technology and like all technologies, virtual reality discloses the world in its own way and as such it offers us a whole range of new possibilities. We might expect that some of the greatest art in the next century will be based on the technology of virtual reality, and that at the same time this technology will be used for the most stultifying kitsch

From Mobile Ontologies to Mobile Aesthetics

We are living in a globalizing world, characterized by constant and rapid innovation. As we are inclined to go with this flow and its accompanying discourse of mobility, there is a danger that we overlook the persistence of cultural traditions. However, this paper argues that important differences exist between pre-modern, modern and post-modern traditions with regard to the form mobility takes. After a short discussion of the role information and communication technologies play in post-modern traditions, it is argued that these technologies transform our world, and not only our electronic files, into a global database and, as a consequence, generate a mobile stream of post-historic phenomena. In the conclusion some implications of the presented database ontology for the arts and aesthetic theory are discussed

Horizons of hermeneutics: Intercultural hermeneutics in a globalizing world

Starting from the often-used metaphor of the "horizon of experience" this article discusses three different types of intercultural hermeneutics, which respectively conceive hermeneutic interpretation as a widening of horizons, a fusion of horizons, and a dissemination of horizons. It is argued that these subsequent stages in the history of hermeneutics have their origin in-but are not fully restricted to-respectively premodern, modern and postmodern stages of globalization. Taking some striking moments of the encounter between Western and Chinese language and philosophy as example, the particular merits and flaws of these three types of hermeneutics are being discussed. The claim defended is that although these different types of hermeneutics are mutually exclusive from a theoretical point of view, as interpreting beings in the current era we depend on each of these distinct hermeneutic practices and cannot avoid living them simultaneously