One of the crucial notions in the early work of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1942, 1945)  is the tendency towards an optimal grip (Dreyfus, 2008). This phenomenon is important for understanding our adequate, situated interactions with the material and social environment (Rietveld, 2008, Mind). I have argued that the function of skilled intentionality is the tendency towards an optimal grip on the field of affordances (Rietveld, 2012; Rietveld, De Haan & Denys, 2013, BBS). Affordances are the possibilities for action provided to us by the environment (Gibson, 1979). In the first part of this talk I will discuss the relationship between the tendency towards an optimal grip, the emotive character of the embodied mind (Colombetti, 2007) and relevant affordances. I will also compare the notion of skilled intentionality to Jan Slaby’s (2008) concept of affective intentionality. In the second part of the talk I will present the results of an ethnographic pilot study at the architecture studio Rietveld Landscape (www.rietveldlandscape.nl). Using the method of participant observation, expert architects and visual artists were studied at work in order to develop these ideas on skilled intentionality (Brouwers & Rietveld, in preparation). We will see that expert architects are selectively and simultaneously responsive to multiple affordances, manifesting what I would like to call ‘HyperAffordanceGrip’. This sheds new light on the socially extended mind (Kruger, 2013).

Dr. Erik Rietveld

is a senior researcher at the University of Amsterdam’s Medical Center and Department of Philosophy. He is also a partner at RAAAF [Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances], which was curator of the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010. He was Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley and Fellow in Philosophy at Harvard University. In 2013 Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded him with a VIDI-grant for his research project ‘The Landscape of Affordances’. He has published papers in Mind, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Inquiry, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS).

Website Erik Rietveld: http://erikrietveld.wordpress.com/about-2/

Website RAAAF: http://www.raaaf.com/en/projects/

Informationen zu dem anschließenden Workshop am 13. Dezember finden Sie hier.