On 15. – 17.06.2015 the second annual joint Summer School between Aalto ARTS and the art and design doctoral curriculum in Estonian Academy of Arts will take place in Kallio-Kuninkala, Finland. The event entitled “Posthumanism and New Materialism” follows the first summer school “Movements in Human-Centredness” organized in Esna, Estonia in June 2014. The Summer School will offer a chance for reflecting on how posthumanism and new materialism can provide novel ways of conceptualizing and investigating notions of subjectivity, power, political agency, spirituality, materiality and ethics.
In artistic research posthumanism has questioned theories of creativity and human condition as the source of art and art significance, meaning making and ethics. In practice, such a challenge attempts to relocate aesthetics, put it back to senses and to the interaction with natural world.
Scholars on New materialism have shown a critical stance toward the dualist view of material/immaterial and elaborated the concept and practice of materialization as a possible starting point to include subjection, embodiment and thinking as the sources of artistic research.
The general aim of the Summer School is to develop international collaboration between doctoral students in artistic and practice based research.