Philoweb

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

October 16, 2010

You see a young man holding a large plastic bag in front of his face and torso. The bag is filled with paper waste.

Midas, C-print 100 * 80 cm.
Johan Nieuwenhuize & Eric Schrijver

You see the back of a man wearing a colourful hooded sweater. He holds a small piece of paper clenched in his left hand, which is pressed to his back.

Every sentence is an observer constructing an ontology, C-print 80 * 110 cm.

You see an old-fashioned university auditorium covered in wooden panels. A man wearing colourful garments smiles at the onlookers. He holds a microphone in his hands. The blackboard, the wall, and a desk in front are covered by large pictures. The pictures depict men who somehow hide their face.

Exhibition / presentation.

You see a young man standing in what appears to be a bathroom. He is wearing a blue tank top and blue shorts. You see him from beneath, in profile, starting from the thighs. You can not see his eyes. His right hand holds a remote release firmly. The flash of the camera has overlit his hand and produced a large shadow to his right.

You don’t wanna be alive when you’re 25, C-print 60 * 60 cm.

Philoweb as a conference hopes to play a foundational role in helping to define what a genuine Philosophy of the Web would be. The symposium itself includes presentations by both scholars in philosophy and computer science and engineers. My role was to re-examine the topics from another point of view, that of the artist.

My presentation first went into semantics, as a reaction to the talks on the conference which had to do with codifying semantics for the internet. I talked about what semantics means to an artist, and how categorisation and description are not all that meaning amounts to (and neither are they value free, for that matter).

Then I introduced the pictures by telling a story about a friend who is on a meaning diet.

Philoweb 2010 website

Previous
May 27, 2010
Libre Graphics Meeting
Pianofabriek, Brussel