Loo

Creative Arts Research and the Ethics of Innovation

iDARE Conference Melbourne Sept 2016 

Keynote: Professor Stephen Loo

A response in four notes – perhaps accountable and contestable – from contemporary art and design to the ontology of ethical practice

Art and design has, in the name of innovation, conjured spatial, temporal and ecological topologies that call for urgent debates on control and prediction, policy and practice, in a world whose systems reigned by un-probabilistic randomness and non-computable emergence. Ethical philosophy finds itself participating in affectual economies, that is, having to ‘think-feel’ its way through tangential accounts of algorithms and biology, neural-networked digital cultures, planetary change as speculative materialism, and the status of other than human sentience and in ethico-ecological thinking.

Perhaps I will provide a response to the ethical accountability, and the contestability of those accounts, as ontological conundrums framed by four notes: on second order futurities, on the axiomatics of capital, procedure and rights, on (post) Anthropocenic thinking in the service of the coming other, and on performative ethico-aesthetics responses to humanity.

Professor Stephen Loo is Professor of Architecture and Director of University of Tasmania’s Creative Exchange Institute (CxI). CxI responds to the big Anthropocentric questions of the 21st Century through transdisciplinary research, teaching and practice at the crossroads of art, design, performance, environment, history and philosophy; alongside social entrepreneurship and community participation.

Stephen has published widely on architecture and design theory, biophilosophy, posthumanist ethics, ecological humanities and experimental digital thinking. He is a co-editor of Deleuze and Architecture (2012) and Poetic Biopolitics (2016) and is currently working on Insects and their Vicissitudes: Instincts, Ethics and the Entomological Imagination (2017) with Dr Undine Sellbach.

Stephen has a performance-philosophy based art practice and has shown internationally in Paris, Berlin, London, Sydney and Adelaide. He is part of an international collective, The Food Project.

He is a founding partner of award-winning architectural and exhibition practice Mulloway Studio, Chair of the National Education Committee of the Australian Institute of Architects (2010 – 2015) and President of the Australian Deans of Built Environment and Design (2013 – 2016).