“Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting” Gottfried Leibniz (~1700) Around 500 B.C., Pythagoras showed that when strings have simple ratios of their lengths, they will make a harmoniously pleasing chord when you pluck them. If one oscillates twice as fast as another (at a…

How does the universe sound like? A question mathematician and electronic musician Valery Vermeulen is occupied with. Vermeulen’s interest doesn’t stop there, he manages with the captured abstract scientific data stemming from space to realise innovative ways to compose and perform music compositions. Vermeulen uses two distinct creative processes that facilitate ‘his’ cosmic music possible:…

The contact points between art and scholarship are usually places where both realms face an irresistible challenge, a question: what makes one different from the other? At a time when local art galleries engage in ‘research’ projects and university professors increasingly seek to incorporate “practice-based research” (Nelson 2006) and “auto-theory” (Bal 2013) into their work,…

Valery Vermeulen, mathematician and musician, provided us, in the second TiM seminar, with some interesting insights into what interdisciplinary work can look like. Amongst others, he presented a project where he makes music “using data stemming from space and deep space and astrophysical models” (“Mikromedas – Valeryvermeulen.Net” n.d.). In this blog, I will discuss two…

This piece of writing is the first in a series of short blog posts reflecting on current perspectives for measuring transmissions in motions. The writings specifically draw on references and inspiration shared from a seminar of similar title hosted by the University of Utrecht. Throughout these written reflections my focus will be set on unpacking…

Despite the length of my relatively short-lived career as a student of literature, there is one recurring question I am confronted with on a regular basis that I have learned to answer without hesitancy. To those who inquire on whether investing years of one’s life reading (and, at times, rereading) novels, verse, and comics often…

Following from the notion that agents do not create the technical essence from which technology evolves, but do create the techniques that steer it, Jason Tuckwell identifies art as the sort of work that deviates. For Tuckwell, art’s activity is located specifically in the creative process in which technē (skillfull action) works upon a general…

How does art come to be? Aristotle reminds us that art is not an ontological problem, but rather a problem about causation. In his inspiring lecture Jason Tuckwell defines art as Techné – a skill or a technical capability to deviate processes of becoming. In contrast to poiesis – to make – techné doesn’t have…

During his recent TiM lecture, philosopher Jason Tuckwell argues that Walter Benjamin’s Marxist analysis of material production in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” ([1936] 2008) is symptomatic of a more general tendency to reduce art solely to its mode of production, and thereby foregoes the question of how art…

Jason Tuckwell’s lecture “Agency and technē in creative practice” drew attention to the role of technical skill in the production of art, questioning whether it is worth revisiting the traditional view of “art as aesthetics” rooted in the Platonic concept of poesis. By juxtaposing the “particular” character of technē to the “universal” essence of nature,…