Cultural Production: Aesthetics and Materiality

Our objective here is to study cultural production historically and comparatively. In studies and comparisons of how creative practices are situated, we will explore and use methodological and analytical tools from a wide range of disciplines from the humanities and the social sciences. We are interested in how materiality is transformed, e.g. how something that is a simple, everyday object in one place becomes an objet d’art or cult item in another place.

We are also interested in aesthetic practice, understood as aesthesis, acquiring knowledge through the senses. How does cultural production presuppose and constitute specific aesthetic forms of understanding? And how is the context of the production related to the context of the consumption?

We will illuminate these questions by for instance studying different arenas for cultural transformation. One such arena is to be found in the logic of institutions and of the institutionalization processes. Another arena for the transformation is the concepts themselves and their historical alterations. Finally, we will also study how cultural production has its own transformative power. How can deliberate fashioning and design transform events and experiences to new cultural products and new knowledge?

Leader: Anne Eriksen.