SBU Philosophy and the Arts Conference

Still Life?

Call for Papers and Artworks

The Masters program in Philosophy and the Arts at Stony Brook University in Manhattan focuses on intersections of art and philosophy. In an effort to encourage dialogue across disciplines, we offer this conference and concurrent month-long exhibition in Chelsea as an interdisciplinary event and welcome participants working in a variety of fields and media to respond to this year’s topic:

Still Life?
Dr. David Wood, Keynote Speaker
Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University

Reynold Reynolds, Artist Speaker
Experimental Filmmaker, Berlin


The theme Still Life? might provoke an existential, ontological, and/or ethical questioning of life as we know it. Additional topics might include: questions about (universal) human rights; the distribution of protections and risks; personal freedom, agency, and choice; disability and dependency; aging, decay and entropy; becomings, stunted potential, stutters and stammers; material, cognitive, affective or spiritual motion/mobility; vitality, time and rhythm; practices of preservation, plasticization and documentation; distillation and/or dilution; memory, nostalgia and haunting; exchanges, transitions and continuities between life and death; conceptualizations of eternity; enduring, waiting and patience; the life of art objects; ephemera(l) tracings; questions of motion and stasis; the uncanny or animate-inanimate; the inorganic life of things; causa sui or nascent morphology; contemporary still life; the endurance of painting/the painted gesture; the 'freezing' of photography; the stillness or kinetic affect or quality of sculpture; performance and the moving image.

For our fifth annual Philosophy & Art Conference and Exhibition, we welcome papers and artworks that explore the diverse relations between motion (and stillness) as well as the concept of life broadly construed. Please read the submission instructions carefully and submit your work by or before the deadline to ensure consideration.

SUBMISSIONS:
We welcome the submission of both original academic papers and of artwork for exhibition or performance 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 for complete submission instructions, as well as information on past conferences and updates on this year’s events. All submissions must be received by January 13, 2012.

UPDATE: The submission deadline was extended to January 23, 2012 and applicants will be notified of the committee’s decision regarding their work via email after the completion of the blind review process in mid February. The conference and exhibition will take place at the AC Institute, 547 W. 27th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Artworks must be available for the duration of the month long exhibition, opening Thursday, March 29th 2012. Contact conference coordinators Shannan Hayes and Darla Migan at philosophyartconference@gmail.com.