Dr Anton Killin (ANU) will be presenting a talk on ‘Music Pluralism, Realism, and the Archaeological Record’ at Macquarie University’s Dunmore Lang College on one-day workshop on Friday,19 October 2018.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together leading experts in aesthetics, cognitive theory, and philosophy of film to explore new interdisciplinary research focusing on key aspects of our engagement with cinema and other arts. Audiovisual narratives are a pervasive feature of our cultural environment; but the precise manner in which perception, emotion, cognition, and imagination are integrated in our experience of cinema remains a relatively unexplored area of research. What light can cognitive psychology, evolutionary aesthetics, neurocinematics, and phenomenological theory bring to our understanding of how cinematic narratives work? How do these perspectives help us to analyse key aesthetic elements of cinematic art? What insights can they bring to the understanding of cinema’s psychological, cultural, and ethical effects? What implications do these theoretical perspectives have for practices of filmmaking? This workshop explores these questions drawing on a variety of approaches to the aesthetics and ethics of film narrative, with a focus on empirical psychological research, cognitive and evolutionary theory, and phenomenology of cinematic experience.