CMCI’s Dr Richard Howells was a plenary speaker at the “No Future” conference staged by the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Durham.
His paper, “Beyond Bloch: Creation, Creativity and a Utopian Theory of Design” linked the visual arts with Bloch’s concept of “atheistic Christianity” and was ironically counter-pointed by the bells of Durham Cathedral, which rang out loudly from the Norman edifice opposite the conference venue.
The conference aimed to stage a series of inter-disciplinary encounters around different senses of ‘No Future’, and to examine the value and implications of adopting a ‘futurist’ position across and between a range of disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences.