Contemporary culture, through the powerful impact of new technologies and economic incentives, has increasingly emphasized the value of speed. We want not only our machines but also our human performances to function more quickly and efficiently. We expect faster results and rhythms in our daily life, and we grow impatient with things that take more time. Fast food is now ubiquitous, and its unsatisfactory aesthetic qualities have stimulated a response of resistance, such as the slow food movement.

Our ability to savor art in a slow and deep manner is increasingly threatened in a lifeworld that always privileges speed. At the same time, the design of human computer interaction and digital services demand a much deeper insight into the aesthetics of experience. Aesthetic experience has traditionally found its value in a fullness and wholeness that calls for extended attention that requires taking one’s time.

We will combine reading and lectures in aesthetic philosophy and learning theory with a temporally extended, full-bodied aesthetic experience of interacting with works of art by traveling with and in them as they move slowly through an aesthetically attractive countryside in North Jutland. The course will be interdisciplinary, combining perspectives of artists, art critics, philosophy, and theories of learning and human-computer interaction.

German philosophers of art distinguish between two forms of experience. On the one hand, there is Erfahrung that requires taking time and that is characterized by development and movement towards wholeness and completion of meaning and form. The word contains the verb form of “fahren” which means travel and thus implies taking time. In contrast, there is Erlebnis, that is a more sudden and sensational experience, something that is simply lived through. The summer school will focus on aesthetic experience in the sense of Erfahrung and will take the idea of travel literally by involving travel with and in selected artworks.

The summer school will explore aesthetic experience and the aesthetics of slowness through a number of questions:

• Aesthetic Experiences of Slowness: Time, space, materiality, and atmosphere
• How artworks afford the experiences of slowness? And how are the participants enacting the experiences of slowness?
  • What is the individual/group resistance / pleasure/dynamics to get into the mood of slow experience?
  • How do the participants integrate the experience of slowness to their hyper-networked and busy everyday life?
• How does slowness enable a clearer perception of the environmental contexts in which our aesthetic experiences and perceptions of art unfold.
• How to reflect the aesthetics experience of slowness in the PhDs thesis-work?

Lecturers:

• Visual artist,  Marit Benthe Norheim: www.norheim.dk   www.life-boats.com
• Sculptor  Claus Ørntoft: www.orntoft.dk
• Adjunct professor, Else Marie Bukdahl, Department of Communication, Aalborg University and former Rector the Danish Royal Art Academy
• Professor, Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University
• Professor, Richard Shusterman, Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University