Enacting Ecological Aesthetics

By: Conversation Series
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  • Summary

  • Social and ecological transformation requires design and architecture fields to develop new, more expansive ways of thinking and acting that better engage questions of ecology. What forms of thinking and acting can work through the particular complexities of environmental crises in the contexts of design and architecture, bridging between rich ecological ideas and the practical challenges of concrete situations? This project examines how the work of anthropologist and cybernetician Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) might contribute an alternative frame of action to navigate this challenge. The project brings together scholars who are currently working with different aspects of Bateson’s work in architecture and design in Germany and the United Kingdom, affording a significantly broader engagement with this question. As early as the 1960s, Bateson argued that the environmental crisis resulted from a broader crisis of ideas and the forms of organisation that resulted from this, criticising piecemeal approaches to environmental action that address only those ‘problems’ that are identifiable and solvable. Bateson pointed to various aesthetic practices that support fuller ecosystemic engagements and speculated on how to develop a ‘systemic philosophy’ to guide human relationships with the environment. This research is supported by the DFG (German Research Foundation) grant number 508363000 and the AHRC (United Kingdom).
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Episodes
  • Double Bind, Decoloniality, the Question of Aesthetics

    Double Bind, Decoloniality, the Question of Aesthetics
    Mar 25 2024
    In this session we will reflect on intersections and interstices between Bateson`s ecology of the mind and decoloniality with a special focus on the echoing yet different concepts of the double bind and differential or border consciousness. These issues are directly linked to the onto-epistemic processes of sensing-knowing-making and therefore to decolonizing aesthetics through aesthesis, crucial for reimagining design of/by the South. In the second part (Q&A session) we also look forward to expanding the discussion on the relationship between questions of aesthetics and decoloniality in relation to design/ architecture/artistic research and methods. As such we warmly welcome researchers, graduate students, and others who may have specific questions regarding their research/practices to join us.
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    1 hr and 50 mins
  • Mind, Ecology, Enaction: Encounters between Gregory Bateson and Francisco Varela

    Mind, Ecology, Enaction: Encounters between Gregory Bateson and Francisco Varela
    Feb 28 2024
    In this conversation, we explore the relationships between Gregory Bateson and Francisco Varela's work, particularly the ways in which their work contributed to expanding our understanding of the 'mind' in the context of living. Starting from their time at Lindisfarne Association in the 1970s, a context that had multiple relationships to their intellectual projects, we will explore how they reformulated concepts such as wholes, boundaries, and recursion in their respective critiques of mainstream Western science/epistemology. The discussion would end with a focus on action. How does their expansion of the notions of 'cognition', 'mind', and consciousness' enable us to think about (design) action within the context of the present ecological crises? All interested are welcome. Evan Thompson is a writer and professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He works on the nature of the mind, the self, and human experience. His work combines cognitive science, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Asian philosophical traditions. He is the author of Why I Am Not a Buddhist (Yale University Press, 2020); Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2015); Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2007); and Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception (Routledge Press, 1995). He is the co-author, with Francisco J. Varela and Eleanor Rosch, of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991, revised edition 2016). Evan is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Bruce Clarke is the Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science Emeritus at Texas Tech University and the 2019 Baruch S. Blumberg/NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. He explores critical ecologies of narrative and systems theory in relation to posthumanism and Gaia theory. Together with Henry Sussman he is the editor of the book series Meaning Systems at Fordham University Press. With David McConville and Dawn Danby he curates the website Gaian Systems: Planetary Cognition Lab. This event is a collaboration between the Enacting Ecological Aesthetics( EEA) project and the Speaker Series of the American Society of Cybernetics(ASC).
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    1 hr and 35 mins
  • Gregory Bateson, Long Sixties, Ecological Consciousness

    Gregory Bateson, Long Sixties, Ecological Consciousness
    Feb 8 2024
    1 hr and 25 mins

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