Philosophy and the Arts
This semester students in Style and Substance have learned how to comport themselves to art through the apprehension of philosophical ontologies that mirror the art work of a specific period. The archive reflects the art and ontologies covered in the first half of the semester, from the Archaic-Eternal Return Myth to Renaissance-Nominalism. As the course is ongoing so to is the archive. Each iteration of the class will build on the archive. The growth of the archive will be visually represented in a force-directed fractal which serves as the primary navigation tool.
The project is made up of one path with four distinct pages. The first page is this brief introduction, the second is the ontological fractal through which readers can navigate the content of the archive, the second is an ontological map that geolocates each media object. The final page of this project is a midterm reflection by an anonymous student in the course. It serves the purpose of capping off the first-half of the archive and demonstrates 1) how philosophy is inextricably tied to the arts and 2) how it can be used to illuminate the Style and "Substance" of an art work.
