DEM’ARTS international workshop Fact, Fiction and Post-Creation
La Maison Française of New York University
Directed by
Yann Toma, Sandra Laugier, Azadeh Nilchiani, François Noudelmann
The DEM'ARTS project, the result of a long-standing collaboration between ACTE Institute and ISJPS at Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, and New York University, was recognized as a laureate of the Sorb'Rising call for institutional projects in spring 2023. It focuses on the relationship between the arts and democracy through the prism of pragmatism and new technologies. DEM’ARTS aims to set up a creative platform to study the development and democratization of the arts through digital technology, its effects and risks, in particular with its two new partners in computer science, the CRI of Paris 1 and the JFLI (IRL 3527, CNRS and Sorbonne University). One of the original features of the research already undertaken by members of the DEM'ARTS team is to combine pragmatism and meliorism (Shusterman 1999) in aesthetic research and practice, and to combine concern for the self, collective practice and the democratic project of an ordinary aesthetics. This project of transactional and ordinary aesthetics is rooted in a renewed knowledge of pragmatism. It involves questioning the theme of artistic creation in order to promote a democratic and shared conception of the arts through the digital practices. Digital art makes it possible to pursue the central political challenge of a pragmatist aesthetic, which is to ensure that meaningful aesthetic experiences are open and accessible to the widest possible audience.
Based on these ideas, and in continuity with previous events organized at the Maison Française de New York University—Arts and Pragmatism: New Issues (2022) and Arts & Pragmatism: From Ordinary Aesthetics to Post-Creation (2023)—this year’s workshop intends to deepen the inquiry into how aesthetic practices mutate through the theme of Fact, Fiction, and Post-Creation.
The concept of Post-Creation engages intense aesthetic experiences that remain open and accessible to a broad audience. The workshop aims to create a connection between Aesthetics, Perception, Post-Creation, and Post-Cinema, where the very experience of creation produces knowledge and transforms what is outside art's specific field of perception into new spaces of creation, opening areas of perception and viewing hitherto unavailable. We need to think of a new concept of creation and perception, rooted in digital art, in film “projection”, and in reality itself.