Hylozoic Man
I watched with great interest Philip Beesley talk at Carnegie Mellon University. It reminded me of how much I owe to him, to the point of dedicating a good part of my master's thesis to his work. Beesley is a mix of Oskar Schlemmer - for his multidisciplinarity, ranging from fashion design to architecture - and George Gurdjieff - for his quasi-mystical character. It is amazing how he resumes some of the discussions of art history, such as those that separated organic and geometric sculptures, vitalism versus mechanism, etc. And, while the ancient sculptors valued the "synthetic realization of the mass ponderability of the object" (Jack Burnham), Beesley goes further and speaks of its “disposition”, elevating it to the quasi-organic category, or revealing the way in which technical objects are nothing more than "organized inorganic matter" (Bernard Stiegler). Of course, there are ambiguities, such as when he updates the Vitruvian ‘triad’, tran...