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<div class="csl-entry">Bühlmann, V. (2023, August 9). <i>At the Portico</i> [Keynote Presentation]. The Image Act : Art and Mathematics – Unlearning, Buti, Italy.</div>
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http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12708/192953
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dc.description
The Image Act : Art and Mathematics – Unlearning
Nothing has, perhaps, oriented modern architecture more than a keen interest in relating art and architecture with mathematics – the mood in current institutional interests to establish a scientific culture of artistic research is rather not to continue, but ‘to be done’ with this. Also the New Bauhaus Initiative of the EU Parliament does not appear to continue the enthusiasm of the moderns into that relation. But to negate what gives orientation still means to remain bound by it’s axis – even if the axis is being ‘canceled,’ it still continues to silently ‘give’ orientation to the socio-political agendas. Our question hence is this: what would it mean to invert the relation rather than affirm or negate it? This means paying attention to how the nothingness of the axial ‘origin’ informs the axiality that gives orientation – like a cipher informs the codes that articulate it.
Much of the promise of the early attention to mathematics from within the arts was inspired from relating mathematics to learning (Gk. mathēma, literally “that which is learnt,” from manthanein “to learn, what can be learnt”). In this tradition, learning is implicitly bound to a forgetting (since mathematical learning is remembering, anamnesis) that had been praised as “innocent” and in the service of a so-deemed “original universality”. Arguably, much of today’s cultural agendas that sail today under the flag of “unlearning” mainly seek to expose such cleanliness as fake.
Our interest is neither ‘to be done with’ relating art/architecture with mathematics, nor to sail under the current socio-moralist flag, nor to directly continue it in the modern gesture. What if we chose the optics of the Mechanic rather than that of the Epistemologist/Moralist, and ask about the relation between art and mathematics as one motivated by euphony (Greek euphonia “sweetness of voice,” related to euphonos “well-sounding,” from eu- “good” (see eu-) + phone “sound, voice,” from PIE root *bha- (2) “to speak, tell, say.”) – hence with an equal interest also in unlearning as in learning?
With this interest in axiality, for which learning and unlearning play together like positive and negative charges do in physics, we want to bring into play what Horst Bredekamp has aptly called “the image act”, with which he brought attention to how vicarious orders of substitute relations endow images with activity whose experience is as technical as it is real, and whose theorisation involves theology as much as technology.
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dc.description.abstract
At the Portico
I will mime Luce Irigaray’s gesture when pursueing my interest in “forgetting” and unlearning. In The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, she is far from pointing to such forgetting as an avoidable failure on the side of the philosopher of Being and Time – while installing herself as the one who sees, points out, and “fixes” the framing. Rather, she engages his thought in an erotic dialectic, a loving encounter with her own thinking that cannot, properly speaking, ever take place: “This portico would be the image of the place of relation, both past and to come, ‘between’ her and him.”
My informing optics will be what Michel Serres introduced as an “epistemogonical” optics, for which mathematics is specifically bound to music. Epistemogony is specifically concerned with the genesis and the propagation of what he calls the “music sum”, whose rhapsody is being told, as he maintains, by the Grand Récit-voice that speaks through science; there is reserved a constitutive role for forgetting in epistemogony that results from a pluralisation of the Platonic notion of mathematical “anamnesis”: there is an inventive kind of recollection at work in anamnesis because forgetting, in respect
to mathematics, involutes wrought certainties,
by learning them bodily, by incorporating them. Mathematical learning is embodied learning in Serres’ approach, sexedness and universality go together in
an irreducible ethics of difference. Specifically, my interest in exploring if and how “the portico” is the place that could host and accommodate experiences
of the Mystery of Maria in Irigaray’s thought, where relations are to be ‘consummated’ rather than ‘consumed’ – the portico would be, then, the “image of the place of relation” that were neither a fertile ground nor a native earth/land, but rather the opening of a self-referential ‘reason/cause’ that is without ‘why’ – as Irigaray cites Angelus Silesius: “The rose is without ‘why’; it flowers because it flowers.”
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en
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dc.subject
Feminism
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dc.subject
Art
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dc.subject
Mathematics
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dc.subject
Architectonics
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dc.subject
Luce Irigaray
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dc.title
At the Portico
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dc.type
Presentation
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dc.type
Vortrag
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dc.type.category
Keynote Presentation
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tuw.researchTopic.id
A1
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tuw.researchTopic.name
Development and Advancement of the Architectural Arts
