Poster Design Contest!

Poster Design Contest
Third Annual Philosophy and the Arts
Conference at Stony Brook Manhattan
March 26-27, 2010
Keynote Speaker—Dr. Simon Critchley
The New School for Social Research

$50 SBU Gift Card for the Winning Designer!

Are you an SBU grad student looking for some extra campus cash? Have graphic design skills and want to add to your portfolio? The SBU Manhattan Philosophy MA program invites all SBU grad students to submit original poster designs for the Third Annual Philosophy and the Arts Conference. The poster designs should reflect or relate in some way to the theme of our conference:

“Collectively”

During a period marked by globalization, proliferating social networking sites and virtual forums, and a reissued political call for increased civic participation, investigating the nature of ‘the collective’ continues to be a vitally important project. The term ‘collective’ itself is heavily politicized, foregrounding the tension between the individual and the whole. While groups may capitalize upon collective force to secure political visibility and achieve goals, collectivization is often a vehicle of homogenization and silencing. Yet many collectives intentionally jeopardize individual visibility as a form of critique. Artists’ collectives like the Critical Art Ensemble and the Wooster Collective, and philosophical collaboratives such as Deleuze-Guattari, question the value of the singular and identifiable, as well as problematizing the market economy that sustains artistic and academic norms. In any case, the notion of the collective raises questions of authority and agency as they relate to knowledge, ownership, and intersubjectivity. What are the mechanisms through which collectives form, maintain their coherence, and engage with other entities? How do various types of collections—museum holdings, units of information, digital and material objects, or persons—relate to classificatory systems, globalized and virtual commerce, and rapidly evolving technologies? As collectives arise and disperse, we often find ourselves with a dearth of criteria by which to judge their success and viability. This conference will investigate the forms, motivations, methods, justifications, and consequences of persons and things acting collectively.

The winning designer will receive a $50 campus gift card, as well as copies of all published material for use in her or his portfolio. The chosen submission will be on display at the conference, throughout Stony Brook University and SBU Manhattan, and the designer will be introduced and recognized during the conference’s opening remarks. The conference will credit the artist on all published material.

HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR DESIGN:

We can accept only one entry per designer. The design must be formatted to include approximately 500 words of text and must be adaptable to fit an 11” x 17” poster. The design may be in either full color or grayscale. Graphic elements of the design will be used in additional promotional material, website content, programs, name tags, and other conference materials. See our website at http://www.philosophyartconference.org for an example of previous designs, and for the full text of this year’s Call for Papers and Artwork.

Please submit a PDF of your design prepared for blind review—include your name, phone number, department, and program title separately on a Word cover sheet—via email to the conference coordinator at philosophyartconference@gmail.com by October 5th, 2009.

Please contact us with your questions at philosophyartconference@gmail.com. Good luck!

2010 Call for Papers and Artwork

Call for Papers and Artwork

Third Annual Philosophy and the Arts Conference at Stony Brook Manhattan

March 26-27, 2010

Keynote Speaker – Dr. Simon Critchley

Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research

The Masters program in Philosophy and the Arts at Stony Brook University in Manhattan studies the intersections of art and philosophy. In our efforts to further the dialogue between these complexly related fields, we offer this conference as an interdisciplinary event. We welcome participants working in a variety of disciplines and media to respond to this year’s topic:

“Collectively”

During a period marked by globalization, proliferating social networking sites and virtual forums, and a reissued political call for increased civic participation, investigating the nature of ‘the collective’ continues to be a vitally important project. The term ‘collective’ itself is heavily politicized, foregrounding the tension between the individual and the whole. While groups may capitalize upon collective force to secure political visibility and achieve goals, collectivization is often a vehicle of homogenization and silencing. Yet many collectives intentionally jeopardize individual visibility as a form of critique. Artists’ collectives like the Critical Art Ensemble and the Wooster Collective, and philosophical collaboratives such as Deleuze-Guattari, question the value of the singular and identifiable, as well as problematizing the market economy that sustains artistic and academic norms. In any case, the notion of the collective raises questions of authority and agency as they relate to knowledge, ownership, and intersubjectivity. What are the mechanisms through which collectives form, maintain their coherence, and engage with other entities? How do various types of collections—museum holdings, units of information, digital and material objects, or persons—relate to classificatory systems, globalized and virtual commerce, and rapidly evolving technologies?

As collectives arise and disperse, we often find ourselves with a dearth of criteria by which to judge their success and viability. This conference will investigate the forms, motivations, methods, justifications, and consequences of persons and things acting collectively. We encourage submissions from across the artistic and theoretical disciplines that approach these themes from practical and theoretical perspectives. Projects may be collaborative in nature, and may examine the collective as an entity or activity.

SUBMISSIONS:

We welcome the submission both of original academic papers and of artwork for exhibition or performance, relating to the above themes, from graduate students across disciplines. All submissions should be formatted for blind review, and suitable for a 20-minute presentation (approximately 3000 words or 8-11 pages). Please visit the Philosophy and the Arts Conference website at http://www.philosophyartconference.org for complete submission instructions, as well as information on past conferences and regular updates. All submissions must be received by January 13^th, 2010 in order to be considered by the conference review committee. Submitters will be notified of the committee’s decision regarding their work via email no later than February 4^th, 2010.

The conference will take place on Friday March 26^th and Saturday March 27th at Stony Brook Manhattan, 401 Park Ave. South. Feel free to contact the conference coordinator for help with additional questions at philosophyartconference@gmail.com.

Just a Trial Run for Now...

To Whomever May Stumble Across This,

This is just a trial run for the conference blog at the moment. With the website and the Facebook page already up and running, I'm not sure whether the addition of the blog will prove necessary or manageable, but the worst that can happen is that I end up shutting this down within a few weeks. No harm done. But since the idea of opening a conference blog had been suggested a while back, I thought I'd give it a shot. Once the semester begins, we'll see just how far off the ground we actually make it.

Ideally, this would be a regularly-updated blog for posting conference-related announcements and publicity. It would also serve as a place for members of the MA program to share their musings on themes related to the conference, or on the intersections between philosophy and art in a more general, wide-ranging sense. I know that blog tools as class assignments haven't worked so well for us in the past, and enthusiasm tends to dwindle as the semester progresses. I think that this is to our own detriment. It would be excellent to see this develop into a regularly-utilized forum for sharing informal writing on philosophical topics, increasing our communication with one another and making connections with people we may not have thought to seek out, who share similar ideas or have relevant contributions to make to our projects.

(Ideally, that is. The realist in me balks at the very suggestion that this could actually take off.)

For now... we'll see. In the meantime, I'll finish setting up the links between all the conference-related pages I've been adding, which may or may not prove an egregious waste of the precious little summer I have left. If you've managed to make it this far and are at all persuaded that this is, in fact, a good idea, feel free to leave a rallying cry...