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<div align="center"><big><big><b><br>
<big>Vital Beauty - Symposium and Publication</big></b></big><br>
</big> <b><big>Date: May 16, 2012 | 09:00–17:15<br>
Location: de Balie, Amsterdam</big><br>
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You are cordially invited for the symposium <i>Vital Beauty</i>,
organized by V2_ as part of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival 2012.<br>
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The symposium focuses on the question of how the age-old notion of
beauty can regain an importance appropriate to the 21st century. Our
need for beauty has not diminished, as hard as modernism tried to
erase it from art and life and supplant it with the sublime. It was
a sublime that increasingly associated itself with negation and
deconstruction. In contrast, vital beauty, as defined by John
Ruskin more than 150 years ago, is a beauty of sympathies and
affinities with life forms. Yet vital beauty must be reinvented,
since life forms today can be technological as well as natural. The
concept of vital beauty raises the question of how we should design
our environments, our objects and our lives, and of how we might
one day invent a politics of beauty.<br>
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"Beauty is a wider, and more fundamental, notion than Truth"<br>
Alfred N. Whitehead<br>
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<b>Program:</b><br>
09:45–10:30 Lars Spuybroek: Introduction and moderation<br>
10:30–11:30 Thierry Bardini: Hints of a Junk Aesthetic<br>
11:30–12:30 Wendy Steiner: Beauty as Interaction<br>
13:30–14:30 Arjen Mulder: The Beauty of Agency Art<br>
14:30–15:30 Tim Ingold: Lines and the Weather<br>
15:30–16:30 Philip Beesley: Protocell Field<br>
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Tickets available at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.deaf.nl/program/modules/symposium-vital-beauty">http://www.deaf.nl/program/modules/symposium-vital-beauty</a><br>
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The publication <a href="http://www.v2.nl/publishing/vital-beauty/"><i>Vital
Beauty: Reclaiming Aesthetics in the Tangle of Technology and
Nature</i></a> will be released during the symposium. With
essays and interviews by Thierry Bardini, Caroline van Eck, Gustav
Fechner, Mark Frost, George Gessert, Tim Ingold, Arjen Mulder, John
Ruskin, Wendy Steiner and Daniel N. Stern.<br>
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<div align="center"><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="http://www.v2.nl">www.v2.nl</a> | <a
class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.deaf.nl">www.deaf.nl</a>
| <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="http://www.debalie.nl">www.debalie.nl</a><br>
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