The workshop is organized by Aloisia Moser in cooperation with the Faculty of Philosophy and Art History at the KU Linz and under the patronage of the German Society for Aesthetics and is primarily aimed at young female researchers.

Keynote speeches: Lidia Gasperoni, Sibylle Krämer, Alva Noe, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Monika Wagner

HOW DOES ANYTHING NEW EVEN COME INTO FORM?

In answering this question, art and science have often been assigned diametrically opposed positions: Scientific innovation was mostly viewed as the result of targeted, planned research, whereas artistic innovation was seen as the fruit of a genius’s inspiration. A look at scientific and artistic practices reveals how wrong both ideas are. Just as aesthetic form cannot arise from nothing, scientific facts cannot be achieved through deductive processes alone. Rather, an experimental field stretches between art and science, in which the aleatoric, serendipity, and even material factors play a far greater role than previously thought. This workshop explores the role of media triggers in the creation of scientific and aesthetic facts. Media triggers refer to both the ordering of the material that sometimes arises randomly in the search process, whose specific arrangements suggest new solutions to problems, but also the medial events between active and passive, which allow the searchers to come up with something that was previously unimaginable. 

The fact that experimentation with processes is so important in both art and science suggests that in both areas the desired result often only occurs indirectly and unintentionally. Successful works of art cannot be forced, just as insights cannot be forced: at best, the framework can be created to increase the probability of their occurrence. Every creative innovation presupposes the ability to see things in a new and different way than before, but that is easier said than done, since it is often precisely the active search that prevents ideas from becoming apparent. This workshop explores the relationship between searching and finding in creative processes, between linearity and disruption, purpose and lack of intention, but also the extent to which the (aesthetic and scientific) spirit is not already inherent in physical and material arrangements. To what extent are conceptual syntheses merely spelling out previous non-conceptual syntheses in the material? How many ideas are in fact subject to chance? What emerges from the synthesis of aleatorically generated elements? To what extent can we claim our ideas as our own, and to what extent are they merely something that happens to us or even comes upon us? Between active and passive, spirit and matter, explicit and implicit knowledge, the workshop aims to pay attention to those media triggers without which the radical changes in our artistic and scientific exploration of the world would not have occurred.