Conference

Engaging with forces is an integral part of artistic processes. Pull and push, gravity and levitation, imprint and pressure already pertain to a concrete handling of material. Kinesis and motor activity, motion and emotion take effect in dance, theatre, film, and literature. Imaginations of force have also guided theoretical reflections, as well the production and reception of art in most essential ways. In classical rhetoric, for example, energeia, vis and movere designate the performance and potential of speech; notions which have also been used to describe the effects of poetry and painting. In turn, anthropological and especially perceptual and psychological concepts play a crucial role in the attempt to validate the plausibility of such a force of the arts. Yet it still remains to be investigated how the arts fashion themselves when interacting with natural forces – be it in terms of using, examining, or metaphorically comparing themselves to forces of form and movement effective in nature. This is where we want to start out from in the course of the first conference of the CAS »Imaginaria of Force«.

The idea that a certain type of forces induces both the formation of matter as well as the transformations via movements can be traced back until antiquity. For instance, the Aristotelian notion of the soul understood as “the principle of movement,” associated with inherent, self-accomplishing forces (entelechia) became a powerful concept unfolding in natural history and anthropology, rhetoric, aesthetics, literature and art. Moreover, Aristotle’s distinction between dynamis – the latent capacity to change conditions – and energeia – the actual manifestation of such changes – as well as concepts of kinetic movements have been taken up and negotiated in diverse fields of science, in the visual arts, and in literary fiction until the present day. Just as influential has been Newton’s differentiation between immanent, idle forces and those violent ones impinging on bodies from the outside – a dual principle sparking ideas about forces of form and movements in physics, biology, and mathematics, but also in areas transcending the natural sciences.

These are points of departure for questions meant to be discussed at the conference from a transdisciplinary perspective: Which notions of forces of forms and movements are crucial in specific historical periods, in different fields of knowledge and in the arts? How are these notions represented conceptually and aesthetically? And how can the relation between forces of form and movement be described at all? How were and are they interrelated in abstract and figurative terms (regarding, for example, the idea of forces of form as catalysts of epochal or generic change), or in concrete designs, such as the figura serpentinata? The conference assembles contributions from the history of art and knowledge, from literary and cultural studies, as well as from life sciences interested in history and theory, which seek to open up the field of the forces of form and movement.

Programme (updated 16.01.2020)

Venue: Warburg-Haus, Heilwigstraße 116, 20249 Hamburg

Thursday, 16 Januar 2020

03:00 pm	Welcome: Frank Fehrenbach, Cornelia Zumbusch
03:30 pm	Moderation: Frederike Middelhoff Vera Keller (Eugene, OR): »Redirecting Force in the Kunstkammer: Johann Daniel Major (1634-1693) and the Tactica Conclavium«
04:15 pm	Coffee break
04:45 pm	Moderation: Lutz Hengst Isa Wortelkamp (Leipzig): »Transformationen. Der ›Serpentinentanz› Loïe Fullers in Bewegung und als Bild«
05:45 pm	Ivo Raband (Hamburg): »Der SchwerKRAFT enthoben: Fliegen und Schweben in der Skulptur der Vormoderne«

Friday, 17 January 2020

9:30 am	Moderation: Cornelia Zumbusch Simone de Angelis (Graz): ›Ins Innere der Natur dringt kein erschaffner Geist‹. Albrecht von Hallers Konzeption der ›Kraft‹ und die strategische Rolle der ›Wissenschaften vom Leben‹ in der Beziehung von Anthropologie und Geschichtsdenken der Spätaufklärung
10:30 am	Hubert Thüring (Basel): »Viel ›Form‹ und wenig ›Kraft‹. Bildung bei Karl Philipp Moritz«
11:15 am	Coffee break
11:45 am	Moderation: Dominik Hünniger Ryan Feigenbaum (Notre Dame, IN): »The Limits of Force to Explain Life in Early German Biology and Beyond«
12:30 pm	Matthew Vollgraff (London): »Botanik als Technik«
01:15 pm	Lunch break
02:45 pm	Moderation: Adrian Renner Malika Maskarinec (Basel): »The Will to Form: The Forces of Form and the Shape of Objects in nineteenth-century German Aesthetics«
03:30 pm	Jasmin Mersmann (Linz): »Starke Stimmen. Zur Transformation der Kraft des Samens in Gesang«
04:15 pm	Coffee break
04:45 pm	Moderation: Caroline Herfert Caroline Torra-Mattenklott (Aachen): »Plötzliches Italien. Bewegungskräfte und literarische Form in Kafkas frühen Reisetexten«

Saturday, 18 January 2020

9:30 am	Moderation: Frank Fehrenbach Magdalena Holzhey (Krefeld): »Materielle und geistige Kräfte der Transformation: Joseph Beuys und Marcel Duchamp im Dialog«
10:30 am	Schirin Kretschmann (Berlin): »Liquid Matter(s)«
11:15 am	Coffee break
11:45 am	Moderation: Philipp Müller Janina Wellmann (Lüneburg): »Moving at Low Reynolds Number: Viscosity, Inertia and Icroscopic Swimmers« Unfortunately, Janina Wellmann's lecture has to be cancelled at short notice.
	Sophie Wennerscheid (Kopenhagen): »Die unheimlichen Kräfte der Natur im zeitgenössichen skandinavischen ›Speculative Fiction‹-Film«
01:30 pm	Departure

>> Download Conference-Programme (PDF, in German language)