Science and Communication

Art is action – and aesthetics is a hot topic. Based on these two assumptions, the publicity project of the CRC 1391 mediates between scholarship and the general public, between the past and the present. This approach takes up the CRC’s main thesis: we can only comprehend aesthetic acts and artefacts if we take into account the interplay between the inner logic of artistic processes and techniques (the autological dimension) and the logic of everyday life in the context of social practices (the heterological dimension). Consequently, the CRC’s publicity project ‘translates’ scholarship and knowledge into social practice and interaction in order to stimulate an intense and interactive dialogue with former ‘present ages’. Three perspectives provide conceptual orientation:

• The sociology of knowledge perspective: How can specialized academic research (autological dimension) be made accessible to a society in which the media are pluralistic and diverse (heterological dimension)?
• The transdisciplinary / transcultural perspective: In what way does the dialogue between the humanities, natural sciences and social sciences shed new light on functions of the aesthetic?
• The epistemic perspective: In what way can a historical viewpoint help us understand the ubiquity of the aesthetic in our present age? Where (and how) can we observe analogies and differences when interacting with art and aesthetics today?

The CRC’s publicity project envisages art as well as discourses on art as a public sphere of action and aesthetic experience, as set forth in recent concepts of performance theory in museum education as well as media and theatre pedagogy. Thus, we go beyond regularly publicizing research findings in media-compatible formats. Though we also use the typical formats of science communication, we enhance them by exploring the potential of exhibition projects, a ‘special lectures’ format, and the series ‘art in public space’. Thus we not only inform the public about the latest research in our projects, but also raise the issue of art and its role in our time from a new theoretical and practical point of view. In that way, the CRC’s model of a praxeological aesthetics will be tested and explored from perspectives that lie beyond our focus on the pre-modern period. This should enable us to find out whether the CRC’s praxeological model can be used to grasp recent developments within the ‘art system’ and place them within a historical context, for example the current debates concerning the autonomy of art, freedom of expression and censorship, sexism, racism, ‘safe spaces’, etc.

Through the interaction between the scholarly findings of the CRC and the social practices of our present age, the publicity project hopes to create continuous feedback loops which will also influence our overall research design. At the same time the publicity project wants to highlight the University of Tübingen as a regional and international forum for the study of aesthetics.