We are celebrating the centenary of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus (published 1921) and the bicentenary of Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s birth (born 1821).
This video is my tribute to both. I aim to show that there is more that connects these thinkers than accidental numbers. The video is based on Chapter 1 of my book.
Category: aesthetics
Why Garden?
Many of us are dreaming of a garden in these pandemic times. But why is this so? What makes us desire gardens and why do we garden at all? My newest video discusses just this.
Urban Aesthetics and Technology
What makes environments beautiful? What distinguishes the beauty of the city from that of a meadow? How do technologies like self-driving vehicles and 5G shape our aesthetic experience of the city? These are some of the questions I discuss in an interview with the Finnish philosopher Sanna Lehtinen.
Interview: Photographing Cities
What is the difference between a travel influencer’s and an artist’s approach to capturing pictures of cities? I address this and many other topics in my interview with the fine art photographer Lance A. Lewin.
Video: Transcultural Urban Aesthetics
Asian cities are usually seen as chaotic. However that is because those of us who grew up in Europe and North America are accustomed to linear orders of things, be they buildings or written words. In my new video I talk about the logic behind Asian urban aesthetics.
Video: Urban Aesthetics
Urban aesthetics is a marginal, though emerging field. This is surprising since it addresses a fairly common intuition that cities can be breathtakingly beautiful, and in a different way than paintings are beautiful. In my new video I talk about recent developments in the field and suggest that cities are not only beautiful because of their looks but also because of the dreams they allow us to dream and the stories they afford for our life.
Publication: Techne and Poiesis
My paper “The Techne and Poiesis of Urban Life-Forms” can now be purchased online along with other fascinating chapters of Technology and the City, published by Springer!
See here!
Publication: Urban Kinaesthetics
The special issue of Contemporary Aesthetics, “Urban Aesthetics” was just published! One of my essays, “Urban Kinaesthetics” is a part of it, which is really cool. It’s a paper that discusses in how far can the city be appreciated as a beautiful object by first asking how the city can be treated as an object of perception in the first place. Spoiler alert: sensorimotorics and the enactive concept of perception play the lead role.
