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truth

Thursday, 14. March 2013 | 00:00 (tz: Europe/Amsterdam)

Aesthetic Journalism

aestheticjournalism

Although some readers might uphold the 20th century definition of aesthetics as concerning subjective forms or 'beauty' enforced by a group of modernist believers, others would rather engage with a more open-ended terminology. Take for example, Alfredo Cramerotti's: 'a process in which we open our sensibility to the diversity of the form of nature (and man-made) environment and convert them to tangible experience.’ So in other words, most anything that is produced nowadays could be considered aesthetics? What is perhaps most engaging is how aesthetics is taken up in journalism, in other words what Cramerotti entitles aesthetic journalism, with his eponymous book.

Cramerotti states that this concept makes possible contributing to knowledge building with a new aesthetic regime, which, in turn, questions the truth-value of a traditional regime. More importantly, it denounces that the system of representation is the same as what it represents as journalism is thought of trying to do -being the same as the facts represented. According to him it involves those artistic activities in the form of investigating social, cultural and political circumstances that take shape in the art context, rather than media.

 
01/01/2010 - 31/12/2010 (tz: Europe/Amsterdam)

ERRARE HUMANUM EST: The pursuit of error

vivre-sa-vie

The pursuit of truth seems to have been pretty much a constant in the official history of all human endeavor: science, ethics, politics, education, even aesthetics and romance all take their bearings from the implicit and apparently self-evident horizon of Truth. Even liars adhere to the supremacy of the truth they strive to travesty or conceal. Yet, ensconced as it may be in common sense, that apparent self-evidence is somewhat troubling. For the paradox, of course, is that if we need truth as our guiding beacon then it can only be because we are errant bodies in a world replete with error. And being in denial about that paradox has led our verists to some massive hypocrisy and not much verism of any substance at all. But what if it were the other way round? What if truth was not an earthly principle at all? Where would that leave us?

 
01/01/2010 - 31/05/2010 (tz: Europe/Amsterdam)

ERRARE HUMANUM EST

This online forum paves the way for next year’s International Congress of Error and Errorism to be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on the occasion of the bicentennial of South American independence – or two hundred years of error in Latin America. The point is to deepen our level of error in anticipation of the Congress. It is not clear to the organizers who in their right mind yet, with enough money to fund such an endeavor, would agree to part with it for such a carnival of gleeful and erroneous folly! But be that as it may, International Errorists shall convene in Buenos Aires in early 2010 to consider the abyssal philosophical subtleties, political substance, scientific ramifications and aesthetic emancipatory potential of the idea according to which errare humanum est and above all that somos todos erroristas.