Annual Students Conferences at Humboldt: Conferences
 
Poietic Spaces. Communicating Landscapes of Imagination


Introduction

The Wizard of Oz
If we understand art as a communication of ideas and concepts, there is a sender (the producer of art), the message (the text, the piece of art itself), and the receiver (the consumer of art), each influencing, constituting and enabling the others.

The bond between these three 'participants' opens to a space of expectations and presumptions, haunted by the dreams of fulfilling and challenging multiple perspectives and ways of seeing and experiencing. These, understood as a process, may allow for commenting on the "real" and escaping into an "other world" over the rainbow, full of allegories, symbols and associations.

Art therefore can be a mediatory space, if we understand spaces as juxtapositions of social interrelations which imply and generate action offering options for different perspectives. Fields are established for involvement by reading and writing, producing and receiving. Not as a process of synthesis, but as a process of variation and repetition, different landscapes may open up and render possible the potentials of imagination. This may be observed as a steady progress of changing and interchanging relations of structures.

Such a poietic space, in the sense of a productive field creating something by an act of poiêsis, communicates differences related to and still different from everyday experience, accessed as landscapes of imagination, attempting to overcome the assumed limitations of structures and convention, as art always strives to create alternative modes of seeing. Is this set between the eye of the beholder, the perspective of the text and/or the I of the author?

In our Fourth Annual Students Conference we will thus take a look at the function and workings of such poietic spaces, from the point of view of both the producer and the consumer of art. (The texts under discussion can be anything related to art, poetry, narrative fiction, essays, diaries, (auto)biographies, painting, photography, music, television, movies &c.)

The conference is organized by students of the American Studies Program at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. All students interested in the project are invited to join. The presentation of a paper is not a requirement for participation, so please feel free to come and enjoy exciting papers, interesting discussions and related poetry readings and art presentations.

see also:
program flyer
leaflet: call for papers

Pictures

Photographs used on the site © Dr. Philipp Kneis except where indicated. Institutional logos and images of paintings CC Wikimedia Commons.