Book presentation: Michel Tombroff & Matt Hare (FR/EN)
Conference and debate on the occasion of the publication of Zéro dièse existe : Art, mathématiques, inesthétique by Michel Tombroff (Éditions Mimésis, Collection Philosophie).
After a brief presentation on the essay, Matt Hare and Michel Tombroff will discuss the connections between art, mathematics and philosophy, and how these were transformed during the transition from the modern to the postmodern in the 1960s.
WIELS Auditorium
Book on sale in the WIELS bookshop
Event followed by a drink
Art and mathematics have always enjoyed an intimate relationship, as illustrated by the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Béla Bartók, Bernar Venet, Roman Opalka, Manfred Mohr, Ryoji Ikeda, Hollis Frampton, Shigeru Onishi and many others. Since the 1960s, however, this relationship has begun to weaken, and a certain distance has appeared between these two domains of human creativity. Tombroff takes us on a journey to discover the reasons for this bifurcation between art and mathematics in the postmodern era and identifies a prime suspect: infinity. For this investigation, he draws on the work of philosopher Alain Badiou, and in particular on the concept of inaesthetics, a novel approach that challenges the conventional notion of aesthetics that Badiou introduced to account for the specific yet universal nature of art’s truths.
Biographies
Michel Tombroff (b. 1964) is a visual artist who lives and works in Brussels. He graduated in electrical engineering from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and in theoretical computer science from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). His artistic research explores the links between questions of formalization, subjectivity and aesthetics in art, mathematics and philosophy.
Matt Hare is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London, working on a PhD entitled "The Effects of Concatenation: Jean Cavaillès and Mathematical Philosophy". His research focuses on the epistemology and history of modern mathematics (especially in France), the historiography of philosophy, and the tradition of rationalist philosophy (both early modern and contemporary).