This transdisciplinary symposium explores how ethics can figure eminently in the generation of art and images after modernism and postmodernism, starting from the premise that in the Anthropocene, the work cannot rest upon its separation from the world. The symposium asks what ethics are at play in the relations between the human artist, the art, and the human and non-human models or participants. Art theorists and practitioners as well as legal studies scholars will probe the role of art and moving images in the creation of ethical relations which have historically been considered as the preserve of law and juridical discourse, or moral philosophy. Through new materialist, eco-political and posthuman thought and practice, the symposium will bypass the division between the active practice of ethics and the contemplative theory of aesthetics that Hannah Arendt challenges in Kant’s philosophy, to further an ethics of immanence beyond the fault line between the ethics of the individual and impersonal singularities. Using Spinoza, Deleuze, Guattari, Levinas, Nietzsche, Agamben, Grosz, Massumi, Haraway, Blanchot, and Nancy, the different papers move from human to human/non-human relations in the course of the day to advance an ecological and posthuman ethics with respect to art.

The symposium is organized by Silke Panse (University for the Creative Arts) and Connal Parsley (Centre for Critical Thought at Kent Law School, University of Kent).

To register for this event, please click here or for more information, please see here.

University for the Creative Arts, Cragg Lecture Theatre, New Dover Road, Canterbury, Kent CT1 3AN, 3rd of June 2016, 9.30 – 19.30