Reflections On Jianrong Liao’S Recent Book, Arnold Berleant’S Environmental Aesthetics And Everyday Aesthetics,
2025
Guangdong University of Education
Reflections On Jianrong Liao’S Recent Book, Arnold Berleant’S Environmental Aesthetics And Everyday Aesthetics, Nie Chunhua
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
No abstract provided.
On Conversation, Its Modes, Pleasures, And Perils,
2025
University of Missouri-St. Louis
On Conversation, Its Modes, Pleasures, And Perils, Stephanie Ross
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
My goal is to explore the pleasures and perils of conversation. After acknowledging some insights from speech act theory and pragmatics, I turn to Paul Grice’s account of conversation as cooperative. I offer some proposals about what makes conversants well-suited and their exchanges pleasant and successful, examine conversational style, contrast in-person with online communication, and close by examining some practices that can undermine conversational exchange. I suggest that imbalances of power and the phenomenon of being talked at are especially destructive.
Time And Atmosphere,
2025
University of Vienna
Time And Atmosphere, Mǎdǎlina Diaconu
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Phenomenological investigation into atmospheres as spatial feelings has paid little attention thus far to their multifaceted temporality. Ambiances are not only situated but situational; they have an intermittent existence and modify time perception. Certain moods need time to evolve, and prolonged exposure to them may change their character. The passing of time itself generates atmospheres—ages are stereotypically associated with dominant moods, and seasonal rhythms influence well-being. Moreover, ambiances shape epochs and are socially contagious. While the idea that generations can be assigned a prevailing mood is not new, the terms Zeitgeist and Zeitzeichen have been framed by an idealist philosophy …
Restorationland: The Lost And Found Objects Of Atlanta's Doll's Head Trail,
2025
Kennesaw State University
Restorationland: The Lost And Found Objects Of Atlanta's Doll's Head Trail, Thomas Fish
Faculty Articles
The Doll’s Head Trail is a grassroots, low-art installation nestled within a Southeast Atlanta wildlife preserve. Constructed by volunteers and visitors from decades of environmental debris, the trail converts waste into folk art-inspired “junk” displays. The creative upcycling ranges from a miniscule shrine to “Toxic Masculinity” to a stark shoe pile commemorating child gun violence. This article details how queer theory’s “temporal turn” provides insights into material performance as collaborative regeneration. The curious vignettes playfully invert hierarchies, revealing the merits of small-time memorialization. Through these defiantly unofficial grassroot performances, the Doll’s Head Trail both remembers and restores community ruins, demonstrating …
Poetic Lines And Social Thought,
2025
University of Essex
Poetic Lines And Social Thought, Adam Neikirk
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This article draws connections between formal poetry and the capacity to imagine not just the actual world, but any possible world as essentially peopled and peopled with others: both human and nonhuman intelligences. Beginning with an anecdote from the fringes of science, the author goes on to identify the presence of social thought in Romantic literary worlds, citing canonical poems that rely on the recursion of metrical lines such as “Mont Blanc” (Percy Bysshe Shelley) and “Kubla Khan” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge). A theory of poetic lines is then proffered in which poetic invention is related strongly to the idea of …
Context And Form In Garden Classification,
2025
University of North Florida
Context And Form In Garden Classification, David Fenner
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Correctly classifying a garden is important because it allows us to appreciate a garden for what it is, create maintenance agendas for gardens, compare gardens to others in appropriate ways, and meaningfully evaluate gardens. We may correctly classify a garden by first deciding on an appropriate taxonomic approach and, second, by fitting gardens into their appropriate taxa. The first is achieved through justifying the organizing schema by ensuring that it significantly meets the goals mentioned above, results in meaningful and satisfying garden appreciation, and is comprehensive in scope—the creation of this taxonomic approach necessarily includes reference to a garden’s context. …
Book Review On The Worlds Of Classical Chinese Aesthetics (By Paul R. Goldin),
2025
San Jose State University
Book Review On The Worlds Of Classical Chinese Aesthetics (By Paul R. Goldin), Lin Wang
Comparative Philosophy
No abstract provided.
A Dualistic Interpretation Of Mathematical Creation Through Art And Argumentation,
2025
National Technical University of Athens, Greece
A Dualistic Interpretation Of Mathematical Creation Through Art And Argumentation, Sofia Almpani, Petros Stefaneas, Mihir Chakraborty
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
Creativity, informal reasoning and dynamic exchange of ideas form the pulsating heart of mathematical creation. In this approach, the concept of a mathematical object surpasses conventional boundaries of formal presentation, as they also encompass the intention to prove, significant creative stages within the proving, and the overall experience of prover's journey, which may involve arguments, debates, discovery insights, aesthetic visualizations, and narrative elements. In this paper we present two conceptual frameworks, namely Argumentation-based Proof-Events Calculus (APEC) and Mathematical RUPAs, in order to provide distinct yet interconnected perspectives on informal thinking, knowledge creation, and proving in mathematics. Following the two perspectives, …
Melodramatic Joy In Ibrahim Nasrallah’S Trilogy Of The Bells,
2025
University of Southern California
Melodramatic Joy In Ibrahim Nasrallah’S Trilogy Of The Bells, Adam V. Spanos
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This essay argues that absurdist humor, so often theorized as a challenge to metaphysical and identitarian claims, in fact supports such claims within the context of anticolonial nationalist melodrama. In his Trilogy of the Bells [2019], Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nasrallah uses the conventions of melodrama to make an epistemological claim specific to Palestinian experience. Confronting a regime that has been largely successful in determining the internationally accepted common sense about the conflict, Nasrallah aims to present the external world with a narrative of Palestinian history, experience, and aspirations. The Manichean distinctions, spectacular displays of pathos, and manifestations of suppressed secrets …
Introduction,
2025
University of Bologna
Introduction, Gioia Laura Iannilli, Ossi Naukkarinen, Enrico Glerean
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
No abstract provided.
Preserving Meaning In An Age Of Algorithms And Ai,
2025
University of Colorado Denver
Preserving Meaning In An Age Of Algorithms And Ai, David L. Hildebrand
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
New technologies not only surveil and collect data about us, they also change and alter the way we make or preserve meaning, including aesthetic meaning. Accordingly, the ways we consider, research, and educate aesthetics will have to adapt, at least insofar as it keeps a new range of technological dimensions in mind. To help imagine such dimensions, this paper examines the opportunities and challenges of technologies offering new ways of creating things while also nudging and “hypernudging” our actions. Such developments may initially seem trivial but they are changing our relationships with one another and with ourselves. After a brief, …
Human And Ai Perspectives On Academic Aesthetics,
2025
University of Bologna
Human And Ai Perspectives On Academic Aesthetics, Gioia Laura Iannilli, Ossi Naukkarinen
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The purpose of this article is to examine how current AI tools can be used in aesthetics research and teaching. We focus in particular on one theme: how traditional ways of describing the field of aesthetics as a whole could relate to descriptions made with the help of artificial intelligence. Describing the field and its main questions is unavoidable when we teach and research aesthetics; our question is, how can AI be used for that? Starting from a new meta-aesthetic tripartite model of aesthetics that we introduce, we raise a set of questions to pave the way to a more …
Anticipation And Aesthetics After Automation,
2025
University of Copenhagen
Anticipation And Aesthetics After Automation, Tanya Ravn Ag
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This paper explores generative technology’s ongoing aesthetic evolution through the lens of anticipation. It proposes anticipation as an alternative perspective to automation to understand the implications of generative technology in relation to aesthetic production and evolution. By focusing on anticipation, the discussion shifts from merely considering AI’s impact on aesthetics as instrumental to creative production to examining the anticipative behaviors and affective responses these technologies develop, engage, and cultivate through our interactions with them. Understanding generative technology as anticipatory highlights how deeply human and cultural expectations influence the design, recursive adaptation, and future anticipations of AI systems. Viewing our engagements …
Aesthetics In The Age Of Ai: A Methodological Self-Delineation,
2025
Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe
Aesthetics In The Age Of Ai: A Methodological Self-Delineation, Anne Virginia Meindl
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Current debates on AI entering aesthetic practices often take on a normative stance by evaluating the artistic status of AI art. This article seeks to develop a different perspective by referring back to the original descriptive meaning of ‘aisthesis’ and also to the origins of aesthetics as discourse on the senses and art. Introducing a Hegelian understanding of the artistic medium—as formally modeling a certain structure of consciousness rather than just as a neutral means of representation—this article provides a methodological starting point of an aesthetically engaged critique of AI’s implicit subject model. Rather than operating with abstract definitions of …
An Agent Or A Tool? Artificial Intelligence, Heidegger’S Robot And The Ignorant’S Toaster,
2025
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
An Agent Or A Tool? Artificial Intelligence, Heidegger’S Robot And The Ignorant’S Toaster, David Holtgrave
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Be it in art, aesthetics, or anywhere in or beyond academia, artificial intelligence, or AI, often is said to do a lot of stuff formerly done by humans. In this essay, I will argue that this line of thinking is to some extent misleading. On my account, it is still humans that do the same stuff, only by different means. Taking its employment and discussion in the arts as an example, I will set up and discuss what I call the ‘agent view’ of AI and show how, for those cases in which we typically attribute agency to AI, this …
The Mimesis Of Difference: A Deleuzian Study Of Generative Ai In Artistic Production,
2025
Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic; Metropolitan University Prague
The Mimesis Of Difference: A Deleuzian Study Of Generative Ai In Artistic Production, Jakub Mácha
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This study uses the traditional concept of mimesis, reframed by Deleuze as a repetition of difference, to investigate art created by large language models (LLMs) or generative pretrained transformers (GPTs). The current rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is intensifying the mimetic repetition of the different. An AI system repeats carefully selected elements from its extensive training dataset. Rearranging these elements introduces differences in the mimetic repetition. Since the training dataset is updated over longer time frames, it is analogous to a static Platonic universe. Once AI can update its static elements with each repetition, it will become the true Dionysian …
Is Generative Ai In Aesthetics Really New?: The Visualist Perspective,
2025
Shenkar College of Engineering, Design, and Art
Is Generative Ai In Aesthetics Really New?: The Visualist Perspective, Michalle Gal
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The concept of AI in aesthetics is encountering interest as new algorithmic machines now generate visual works alongside philosophical discourse, sparking both enthusiasm and concern. Yet, this idea has deep roots, reflected in longstanding debates within the discipline. These discussions, which are similar to the new ones, have examined issues like the illusion of an image or object’s ontological stability; the nature of function and user control; distinctions between the natural and artificial, authenticity and forgery; the divide between handmade and mass-produced items; the challenges of readymade and indiscernibility in art; and the potential of ekphrasis. As a result, skepticism …
On Deepfakes And Dog Whistles: Thinking Aesthetically About Generative Ai,
2025
Aarhus University
On Deepfakes And Dog Whistles: Thinking Aesthetically About Generative Ai, Maja Bak Herrie
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This article focuses on the aesthetic dimensions of contemporary media created with generative AI, challenging traditional dichotomies of truth and falsehood, real and fake. It draws upon diverse examples including Samsung’s “Space Zoom” images of the moon, AI-driven political imagery, and the randomized aesthetics of Google’s Gemini. Additionally, it examines two artistic projects by Elisa Giardina Papa and Trevor Paglen. The article argues for an aesthetic analysis that goes beyond debates over authenticity, highlighting instead the inherent complexity and weirdness of these digital artifacts by exploring how AI reshapes perceptions of reality. By invoking, among other things, theories of agnotology, …
Prompting Aesthetic Ideologies Of Generative Text-To-Image Ai,
2025
Aarhus University
Prompting Aesthetic Ideologies Of Generative Text-To-Image Ai, Lotte Philipsen
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In generative AI, text-to-image prompting has gained popularity, which calls for image theoretical attention. This article evokes critical image theory, developed by Norman Bryson and W. J. Thomas Mitchell in the 1980s and 1990s, which offers important, relevant nuances when analyzing contemporary AI image-tools. By investigating specific cases of text-to-image AI through this theoretical filter, the article demonstrates how certain aesthetic ideologies—especially perceptualism, the idea of natural images, and splitting and hierarchization of text and image—govern generative AI.
Beauty And The Bit: Ai-Driven Philosophical Aesthetics,
2025
Institute for Sciences and Technologies – National Research Council
Beauty And The Bit: Ai-Driven Philosophical Aesthetics, Stefano De Giorgis, Aldo Gangemi
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This paper presents a novel computational framework for formalizing and analyzing philosophical aesthetics discourse through the integration of knowledge representation techniques and large language models (LLMs). The framework introduces a structure based on four elements combining source texts, core ontology, knowledge graphs, and interpretative mappings to systematically capture both explicit content and implicit semantic relationships in aesthetics texts. Through a case study analyzing works by Dewey, Danto, and Sibley, we demonstrate how this approach enables the systematic reverse engineering of aesthetic analytical methods while maintaining semantic stability and interpretative clarity. The framework leverages human expert annotation alongside LLM capabilities to …
