Still Life?

New York City, March 30-31, 2012

The Masters program in Philosophy and the Arts at Stony Brook University in Manhattan focuses on intersections of art and philosophy. In an effort to encourage dialogue across disciplines, we offer this conference and concurrent month-long exhibition in Chelsea as an interdisciplinary event and welcome participants working in a variety of fields and media to respond to this year’s topic: Still Life?

Dr. David Wood, Keynote Speaker
Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University

Submissions are due by January 13, 2012 (instructions here)

The theme Still Life? might provoke an existential, ontological, and/or ethical questioning of life as we know it. Additional topics might include: questions about (universal) human rights; the distribution of protections and risks; personal freedom, agency, and choice; disability and dependency; aging, decay and entropy; becomings, stunted potential, stutters and stammers; material, cognitive, affective or spiritual motion/mobility; vitality, time and rhythm; practices of preservation, plasticization and documentation; distillation and/or dilution; memory, nostalgia and haunting; exchanges, transitions and continuities between life and death; conceptualizations of eternity; enduring, waiting and patience; the life of art objects; ephemera(l) tracings; questions of motion and stasis; the uncanny or animate-inanimate; the inorganic life of things; causa sui or nascent morphology; contemporary still life; the endurance of painting/the painted gesture; the ‘freezing’ of photography; the stillness or kinetic affect or quality of sculpture; performance and the moving image.