Renjie Li

This paper examines temporality in the information age, drawing on the philosophical works of Martin Heidegger, Bernard Stiegler, and Hubert Dreyfus. By re-investigating the analysis of the Being of equipment in "Being and Time", the paper argues that Heidegger not only unwittingly foresees the future of technological planetarization but also touches on the question of ‘real-time’ in the use of tools. Retrospectively, Stiegler radically re-elaborates on this question through the figures of Prometheus and Epimetheus, who give the structure of temporality in the name of what he called tertiary retention. However, the paper will show that when one thinks of the determination posed by modern algorithms in machine learning, the question of the future becomes significant. What characterizes the power of intelligent machines is the predictability of the future. However, this is not the spontaneous and subjective anticipation of the individual, but rather leads to the degeneration of the synthesis of reason and various misunderstandings of intelligence. Therefore, the paper suggests rearticulating the light-speed temporal dimension, emphasizing its relevance to concrete technologies and its ongoing significance for cognition in the digital era.

In 1942, C. S. Lewis employed the wisdom of a reversed perspective in The Screwtape Letters to show how the young human spirit was tempted and misled during World War II. Almost simultaneously, on the other side of the globe, philosophers and historians from the Kyoto School claimed that world history should be rewritten from a reversed perspective: not from that of Europe’s decline, but from Japan’s standpoint (p. 3). Yuk Hui draws on phenomenologist Jan Patočka’s argument that Europe lost its status as the world’s center after World War II, and titles his monograph Post-Europe (p. 1). For Hui, Patočka’s Nach-Europa (post-Europe) underscores the necessity of formulating a post-European philosophy that critically... Read More.

In the context of art history, the rise and fall of linear perspective in painting is typically discussed as a framework for studying changes in artistic styles. This essay aims to re-examine the modes of thinking behind artistic practice between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, investigating how shifts in ways of thinking have been applied to artistic creation and noting that the rise and decline of linear perspective are aligned with changes in philosophical thinking in the corresponding periods. Furthermore, cybernetics has penetrated contemporary artistic creation as a further current in organic thinking. The current tendency in contemporary Chinese art is towards technological art, which is based on a cybernetic mindset rather than traditional Chinese art. Focusing on linear perspective in artworks, I compare the relationship between linear perspective, mechanism, and organicism during the same period, in the hope of bringing an appreciation of the sublime back into the work of art, whilst also, countering the sinking homogeneous tendencies of technological systems established by cybernetics.

This paper endeavors to investigate how we can understand creativity concerning computation by rearticulating imagination in artistic practices. Drawing on Yuk Hui’s concept of artificial imagination and Bernard Stiegler’s thinking on organology, the paper uses the Choi Hung Estate project as a case study demonstrating the potential of Gaussian splatting as a supplement for the imagination in producing dynamic, interactive digital artworks that open the path for conceiving collective memories. By thinking of creativity and beyond computation, the paper unpacks the possibilities for re-grounding the philosophical foundation of Gaussian splatting from an organological perspective.