Graham Harman | Human Curator: Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Graham Harman is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Liberal Arts Program Coordinator at SCI-Arc. He was born in 1968 in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, and earned his BA from St. John's College (Maryland), his MA from Penn State University, and his PhD from DePaul University. He is the author of eighteen books, most recently Art and Objects (Polity, September 2019). Graham is the 2009 winner of the AUC Excellence in Research Award. In 2015 he was named by ArtReview as the #75 most powerful influence in the international art world, and in 2016 was named by The Best Schools to their alphabetical list of the 50 most influential living philosophers.


Summit One
Beyond the Horizon: Inventing the Reality

“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.”
J.G. Ballard, Crash

Reality is not made out of representations but is what makes representations possible. The mind-independent reality withdraws from any direct relation and remains unseen and untouched. Furthermore, the thing-in-itself adds to the mind-independent reality of what we may term conditions of knowability. Therefore, our understanding of the mind-independent reality is continuously conditioned. There can be no absolute knowledge of reality nor a concrete representation of it. Everything falls into the realm of what we may call distortion, like a mere symptom of the hidden reality.

Beyond the Horizon: Inventing the Reality explores conditions of knowability and the relation between mind-independent reality and representation. It investigates how artists utilize different approaches to challenge “that which is” in favor of “that which is not” or “that which could be possible” through their artistic practices. How artists, through dialectical relations, can disclose and elicit new potentialities from reality and challenge our limited understanding of the world’s haecceities?