**Attendance is limited to current New School faculty and students. Must have an @newschool.edu email address to register.**
Join us for a series of keynote presentations as part of the 2025 Institute for Philosophy and New Humanities: Iconoclasm: Past and Present.
The internet (and AI) have made us acutely aware of the power of images, and how it can come to seem reasonable to want to destroy these images as a defense mechanism. The idea of the seminar would be to take up not just explicit bans on images or various forms of censorship, but the philosophical underpinnings of iconoclasm: namely, the view that images are not bearers of truth, are antithetical to human efforts at making the world intelligible, and psychologically deleterious. We hope to invite people with art historical perspectives, alongside philosophers of art with things to say about the fate of iconoclasm beyond its ancient pedigree (Plato, the Bible) into the contemporary world.
KEYNOTE LECTURES AND Q&AS
Tuesday, September 2, 4-6 pm
Birgit Mersmann, University of Bonn
"Love and Fear of the Synthetic Image. AI Imaging and Post-photographic Iconoclasm"
Thursday, September 4, 4-6 pm
Ned Block, New York University
“Can only meat machines be conscious”
Friday, September 5
10am-12pm
Alva Noë, University of California, Berkeley
“Love and Consciousness”
4pm-6pm
Erin Thompson, CUNY
“Iconoclasm without Icons: Protesting the Monuments of Generative AI”
Presented by the Institute for Philosophy and New Humanities at The New School for Social Research and University of Bonn.
An art historian and image theoretician, her work focuses on global contemporary art, art in the context of technology and electronic media from photography to digital image-generation, and the history and theory of the museum. As well as being an historian and theorist, she has contributed to exhibits on AI art and imagistic representations of migration. Her most recent book is Über die Grenzen des Bildes. Kulturelle Differenz und transkulturelle Dynamik im globalen Feld der Kunst.
Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a leading figure in the philosophy of perception and analytic phenomenology, known for his extensive and influential work on consciousness. More recently, he has also turned his attention to art and aesthetics, his latest book The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are was published by Princeton in 2023. He is currently exploring the relations between love, consciousness and pictoriality, with a focus on what these relations tell us about artificial intelligence.
Erin Thompson is a professor in the Department of Art and Music at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York). A lawyer and art historian, her work focuses on the intersection of art and crime, investigating phenomena such as looting, forgery, art theft and iconoclasm. Her most recent book is Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments (Norton 2022). Besides her academic work and frequent contributions to the media, she is also the curator of several exhibits, including "The Missing: Rebuilding the Past" at the Andrew and Anya Shiva Gallery, John Jay College, and "Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo" at the President’s Gallery, John Jay College.
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