SYMPOSIUM
BRUSSELS (BELGIUM)
JUNE 16th - 18th 2026
Mind, Art, Knowledge: Dialogues between Cognitive Science, Artistic Practice, and Philosophy
How can artistic practice produce knowledge? How can artists learn to generate and articulate knowledge via their practice? And how can philosophy of mind and cognitive science help us understand — and perhaps expand — this epistemic potential?
This three-day symposium explores these questions by bringing together artists, artistic researchers, philosophers, and cognitive scientists. It will investigate how artistic knowing emerges from the interplay of perception, embodiment, and cognition, and how it can be articulated in dialogue with philosophy and science.
keynote speakers
16 -17 -18 JUNE 2026
Elisabeth Schellekens
Jacopo Frascaroli
Iris Vidmar Jovanovic
Maarten Coëgnarts
Marina Iosifian
Daisy Dixon
Murray Smith
Sander Van de Cruys
Marc Leman
Hans Maes
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Elisabeth Schellekens is a Swedish philosopher and Chair Professor of Aesthetics at Uppsala University (since 2014). Previously, she was Senior Lecturer at Durham University (2006-2014). Schellekens is known for her works in aesthetics.[1][2][3] Her research interests include aesthetic cognitivism and objectivism, aesthetic normativity, Hume, Kant, aesthetic and moral properties, conceptual art, non-perceptual or intelligible aesthetic value, the relations between perception and knowledge, the aesthetics and ethics of cultural heritage (esp. in armed conflict), and the interaction between aesthetic, moral, cognitive and historical value in art.[citation needed]
Schellekens was co-editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics between 2007 and 2019. She continues to serve on the journal's editorial board, and has served on a number of journal editorial boards, including the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and Estetika.
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Iris Vidmar is an assistant professor currently employed at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Croatia. Her area of specialization includes philosophy of art and aesthetics, with particular interest at philosophy of literature, poetry and Kant’s aesthetics. Her area of expertise includes epistemology and metaphilosophy. She taught a wide variety of courses pertaining to these areas, and extending to ethics, bioethics, emotions, philosophy of sexuality and modern philosophy.
Iris Vidmar defended her PhD after completing a doctorate program at the University of Rijeka in 2013, on the topic of literary cognitivism. She continued to explore the topic ever since, with particular interest in literary forms and genres, ranging from realism to science fiction and from poetry to mystery novels. Working at the intersection of philosophy and literature, she has written on various aspects of literary experience, exploring it from ontological, epistemological and ethical perspectives. As an associate at the research project Identity, funded by the University of Rijeka, she was concerned with fictional characters, and the ways in which literary and art experiences relate to one’s notion of self. As a member of the research center dedicated to the exploration of language, she is concerned with poetry and poetic use of language. Her most recent interest extend to cognitive aesthetics, where she is exploring connections between philosophical and scientific ways of discussing art and our cognitive faculties that enable us to create it and respond to it. In her writings, she unites philosophy with literature and literary criticism, arguing for the importance of humanistic disciplines more generally. She also works in Metaphilosophy, where she is mostly interested at accounting for the particular value, role and function that philosophy has for our practical lives, and in the overall educational system. She is the lead researcher at the project entitled Literature as a domain of ethics, funded by University of Rijeka. -
As a researcher in psychology, Marina focuses on the intersection between cognition, emotion and art. She explores how art influences everyday cognition by connecting distant concepts and enhancing social cognition by assigning social meaning to ambiguous visual stimuli.
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Murray Smith is Professor of Philosophy, Art, and Film, and Director of the Aesthetics Research Centre. Murray joined the University of Kent in 1992 and became Professor in 2000. He has served as Director of Research for the Faculty of Humanities (2008-11), Deputy Divisional Director of Research for Interdisciplinarity (2021-2), Deputy Head of the School of Arts (2022-3), REF Co-ordinator for the School of Arts (2011-17), Head of Film (1999-2003, 2007-8), and Director of Research for Drama, Film, and Visual Arts (2001-4). He was a Leverhulme Research Fellow (2005-6), a Laurence E. Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University’s Centre for Human Values (2017-18), and President of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (2014-7).
Murray's first degree was in English Language and Literature at the University of Liverpool; subsequently he gained an MA and PhD in Film Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, under the supervision of David Bordwell.
Murray is a member of the editorial boards of the British Journal of Aesthetics, Series, and Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image. He has served on the editorial boards of Cinema Journal (1997-2002) and Screen (2000-18), and as a corresponding editor for Northern Lights, the yearbook for the Film and Media Studies department of the University of Copenhagen (2007-18). From 2002-6 he was an editor of Film Studies: an International Review, and from 2003-7 a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council College of Peers.
He is a Past President, Fellow, and advisory board member of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI), and has been active as a board member since the organization was founded in 1995. He is also a member of the editorial board of the journal Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, with which SCSMI is affiliated. SCSMI was founded to promote work on film and video drawing on cognitive theory and psychology, the philosophy of mind, and kindred areas of research.
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Marc Leman is Methusalem research professor in systematic musicology and director of IPEM, the institute for psychoacoustics and electronic music at Ghent University. He holds MA degrees in musicology and philosophy, and did his PhD on computer modeling of tonality perception. He published more than 350 articles, and several books with MIT press, Routledge, and Springer. His lab is an international meeting place for researchers working on expressive interactions with music, using embodiment and action theory as a point of departure. In 2007 he became professor of the Methusalem, renewed in 2015. In 2014 he was holder of the Franqui chair at the Université de Mons. In 2015 he became laureate of the five-yearly FWO (Flemish Fund for Scientific Research) Excellence Award Ernest-John Solvay for Language, Culture and Social Sciences.
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Jacopo Frascaroli is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Psychology, University of Turin. Before moving to Turin,he held a Humanities Research Centre Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of York, where he also obtained my PhD in Philosophy in 2022 as part of the Leverhulme-funded interdisciplinary project “Learning from Fiction”. His work brings together aesthetics, philosophy of mind and language, and cognitive science.
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Dr Daisy Dixon is a philosopher of art and an artist. She is now a Lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University, having been a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge from 2018-2022. After receiving a First Class BA (Joint Honours) in Art & Philosophy from the University of Reading in 2013, she began graduate work at the University of Cambridge, gaining a Distinction for her MPhil in Philosophy in 2014. Her PhD was funded by a School of Arts and Humanities Full Doctoral Award at the University of Cambridge, and was awarded in May 2019.
Her research falls at the intersection of philosophy of art, philosophy of language, and political philosophy, and has been published in top-tier academic journals. In her work, she explores how visual art behaves like speech, and how curators can affect what an artwork communicates to its audience. Her current academic project concerns aesthetic injustice and unjust aesthetics: deception in art, artistic hate speech, and protest art. Her teaching interests span aesthetics, philosophy of language, ethics, feminist philosophy, and political philosophy.
Daisy has written for magazines on art and morality, and is a regular guest lecturer with the London Drawing Group, working on outreach feminist art projects which draw international public audiences, and presenting at events accompanying exhibitions and concerts. She regularly gives talks to schools about the philosophy of art, and was recently a mentor for Magdalen College School’s Waynflete Programme.
Daisy is also a trained artist, with an art practice in painting and sonic installation.
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Hans Maes is Professor & Vice Dean at LUCA School of Arts (University of Leuven, Belgium). He has authored papers on a variety of topics in aesthetics, including the art of portraiture, aesthetic melancholy, existential aesthetics, the role of intention in the interpretation of art, and the relation between art and pornography. The latter is the subject of two essay collections: Art and Pornography (co-edited with Jerrold Levinson, Oxford University Press, 2012) and Pornographic Art and The Aesthetics of Pornography (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). His recent books include Conversations on Art and Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2017), Portraits and Philosophy (Routledge, 2020), and Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight: A Philosophical Exploration (Routledge, 2021). Maes is Vice-President of the British Society of Aesthetics, Honorary Lecturer at the University of Kent, and a former Director of the Aesthetics Research Centre at the University of Kent.
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I ’m a postdoctoral researcher in Antwerp Social Lab at the University of Antwerp. I previously worked in the Brain & Cognition Unit at the University of Leuven on the GestaltReVision project.
One of the reasons I get up in the morning (or rather: stay up late at night) is to gain fundamental insight in the sane and insane mind, and in the brain that realizes it. In my scientific work I’m guided by the view of the brain as a prediction engine, continuously and proactively anticipating and constructing the experienced world. I like how this view has deep consequences for the interplay between cognition and emotion. More on this in my academic publications.
My other, intersecting fascination is with internet technology and the new possibilities (and challenges) it holds in connecting people to each other and to useful, reliable information. I’m particularly interested in how humans interact with increasingly intelligent (so predictive) technology, and in how this interaction (re)ignites questions about what it means to be human. I love to write about these topics, both for laymen and expert audiences.
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Maarten Coëgnarts is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Antwerp, Researcher in the Arts at LUCA School of Arts and Research Fellow at the University of the Free State. His research on embodied cognition, metaphor, and cinema has been published in journals such as Art & Perception, Metaphor and Symbol, New Review of Film and Television Studies and Projections. He co-edited Embodied Cognition and Cinema (Leuven University Press, 2015) and authored Film as Embodied Art: Bodily Meaning in the Cinema of Stanley Kubrick (Academic Studies Press, 2019). He is also co-editor of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind.
EVENING@CINEMATEK
Thursday JUNE 18th 2026 from 19h30-22h
Artists increasingly approach their work as a form of inquiry. Rather than treating artworks as mere outcomes, many artists structure their practice as an ongoing research process—formulating questions, testing materials and methods, gathering feedback, and reflecting on results. This research is often situated, embodied, and iterative: it integrates studio experimentation with reading, conversation, fieldwork, and documentation.
Evening@CINEMATEK invites everyone—laypeople and scholars alike—to join artists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists in asking: What is the relation between art and knowledge? Can art produce knowledge? Is knowledge about art possible—and does it change how we experience it?
After the roundtable, a reception with light refreshments will be offered.
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Koen Van den Broek
Born in 1973 in the Belgian town of Bree, Van den Broek first studied architecture and subsequently painting, initially at the Royal Academy of Antwerp and then at the Academy of Visual Arts of Breda. In his opinion, despite his painting studies, he has always remained an architect at heart. Ever since his student days, van den Broek has travelled constantly: around Europe, to the USA, Mexico and even to Japan. Always with his camera close to hand. He takes photos, a lot of photos, which all depict the same subject: the architectural interventions of man on the landscape.
Works by Koen van den Broek are part of major public collections, including the LACMA, Los Angeles; SMAK, Ghent; M HKA, Antwerp; Busan Museum of Art, Busan; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, and Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle. His work has been presented at the Venice Biennial (2015 & 2017); White Cube, London; Kunstmuseum, Bonn; Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Antwerp and Brussels; Seoul Arts Centre, Seoul; Kunsthalle, Mannheim; Royal Academy, London; MAS, Antwerp, and Kunsthal, Rotterdam;
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Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker created her first choreography in 1980, after studying dance at Mudra in Brussels and at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York.
In 1983, she founded the dance company Rosas in Brussels, during the creation of the performance Rosas danst Rosas. Her early works are characterised by strictly geometric trajectories in space, revealing a formal yet emotionally charged relationship with 20th-century classical music.
Since then, her choreographic work has been based on a meticulous exploration of the connection between dance and music.With Rosas, she has created an extensive body of work that draws on musical structures and scores from a wide range of periods, from early music to contemporary compositions and pop. Her choreographic practice also incorporates formal principles derived from geometry, mathematical patterns, nature, and social structures, resulting in a unique perspective on the movement of the body in time and space.
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Eleanor Parks
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