Our deep, ancestral past continues to live on in humans of today, despite the vast changes in our modern way of life.  What universities now call science, art, and humanities were originally embedded in human nature as a single world view, instilled through ritual ceremonies in which everyone participated. Although our contemporary approach to understanding the world is different, similar biological capacities and needs underlie our investigations.

Autofocus Research Seminars on Architecture∩Philosophy∩Neurosciences are designed to provide a cross-disciplinary forum for considering the universal cognitive and emotional foundations of our individual and cultural lives in biological and social environments. Our first international academic event -  From Darwin to Dissanayake - will consider the nature of the arts particularly as they relate to the built environment and architectural theories. To this end, our special guests are authors Ellen Dissanayake and Harry Francis Mallgrave (whose chapter title in a recent book gave us the name for our seminar).

Ellen Dissanayake’s unique writings use an ethological, Darwinian approach that considers art as something that people do ('make special' or 'artify') rather than as the standard focus on 'works of art'. Her cross-disciplinary studies include paleoarchaeology, developmental psychology, neurosciences, anthropology, and aesthetic philosophy, all of which are relevant to answering questions such as 'What is art?' and 'Why does art exist in every human society, past and present?' Harry Francis Mallgrave’s presentation will link the history of architectural history to the architect’s brain, introducing an embodied neural domain for design theory as embodiment and architecture.

The speakers will invite discussion on philosophical issues that underpin relations usually subsumed as 'practice vs. theory' - that is a recasting of design theory from 'the objects as subject' to 'the agent as subject', as Mallgrave puts it.

photo PbDEa

A Novel Defense of the Internet

A Novel Defense of the Internet

Will Reading Romance Novels Make Artificial Intelligence More Human?

Will Reading Romance Novels Make Artificial Intelligence More Human?

Architecting a Verb? | OUPblog

Architecting a Verb? | OUPblog

Are Discipline and Play Compatible? With High-Wire Artist Philippe Petit

Passage lost - Foci

Poderá a neurobiologia ensinar-nos alguma coisa acerca da consciência?

Poderá a neurobiologia ensinar-nos alguma coisa acerca da consciência?

Diálogos Transatlânticos

Mais um passo no Projecto Autofocus, desta vez em Curitiba (Brasil), em formato presencial, como a foto documenta. A "voz" foi a do Gustavo Luiz Gava, no passado dia 30 de Junho e o local a Universidade Positivo. Como ele escreveu sobre o que disse: "Quinta-feira passada dei um workshop na Universidade Positivo sobre Cérebro Global e Educação a Distancia. Apresentei um pouco a proposta do Autofocus, do MLAG, do professor Pedro Borges de Araújo e da professora Sofia Miguens Travis, bem como outros integrantes. Foi muito bom." 
Muito bom - dizemos nós - é mais uma vez cruzarmos o mar para estes diálogos transatlânticos!

Petra Ceferin, Architect

Petra Ceferin, Architect

iGesto'17 | Conferência Internacional sobre Gesto e Multimodalidade

Thursday, February 2, 2017 at 9 PM

 

Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto   Via Panorâmica, s/n, 4150-564 Porto, Portugal

50%

dos "convidados" a contribuir para a animação desta intersecção académica já andaram por aqui. Falta-nos ainda a actividade que se deverá supor. 

Arrisco - no vídeo que deixo - um desafio à necessária sincronicidade.

C-MLAG2016 | 06.16

Manhã
Eylem Özaltun (Koç U.Instanbul) Quassim Cassam (U.Warwick)
Sofia Miguens (U. Porto)

The essence of architecture

What are the arts for?

Self-Knowledge and the First Person

 Paul Klee, Insula Dulcamara (1921-1938). Zentrum Paul Klee (Bern) 

'Self-knowledge' is a standard rubric under which a variety of central and perennial problems in philosophy sort. These questions span the areas of philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, epistemology, and to some extent philosophy of language. Analysing the problems related to self-knowledge, Wittgenstein has developed two coordinated lines of thought. One line stresses the importance of thirdperson perspective with respect to mental life in order to resist introspectionism and discard the illusion of inscrutability of other minds. The other line of thought meets Frege’s idea according to which, in ordinary forms of self-awareness, one is presented to oneself as one is presented to no other. This conception affords first-person perspective a particular status, not by virtue of special access to some specific realm of facts over which one allegedly exercises expertise, but rather by virtue of the particular kind of authority and authorship one claims to enjoy with respect to one own mental life. The C-MLAG conference includes a selection of leading scholars addressing these questions from different perspectives: some starting from problems in philosophy of psychology, some from problems in logic and language, some from concerns with the relation of philosophy to ordinary life. 

C-MLAG 2016

C-MLAG 2016 | 16-17 June 2016

C-MLAG 2016

PROPÓSITO

Arquitectura, Filosofia e Neurociências - sejam designações de distintas áreas de investigação técnica e científica ou traços da diversidade cultural do animal humano - mostrar-se-ão sempre entrosadas entre si e no contexto de cada uma das culturas históricas que queiramos considerar e observar. Será nesses estratos de transversalidade que o Projecto Autofocus pretende estabelecer-se como matriz do domínio de investigação e reflexão.

AIM

Project Autofocus aims at establishing a research domain founded on the porosity of knowledge and which comes off as a result of intersections. Architecture, Philosophy, Neurosciences are the broad constituents of the domain. All of them take the real world as their object and living agents as subjects.
Autofocus grows out of the Mind, Language and Action Group. For the design of its programme it sticks to the unifying role of the three topics. Yet its scope is expanded to the built reality, where they merge and from which it emerges.
Autofocus was designed as a network of individual and institutional partnerships, capable of meeting the objectives of interdisciplinarity. As a research community we aim at postdisciplinar intersections.