- 1 - Constructions of Beauty 1 Phivos-Angelos KOLLIAS Centre de Recherche Informatique et Création Musicale Université de Paris VIII, France soklamon@yahoo.gr http://phivos-angelos-kollias.com Prelude You may expect to listen from my speech elements about the notion of Beauty that represent aspects of my identity. As maybe the fact that I am born and raised in Greece, that I live in Paris, or that I am a young composer. Nevertheless, I chose to talk only as a human being. A human being that is interested in various aspects of human knowledge and art. Similarly, I believe that I am talking to you, as an equal human being; considering you a human being also interested in various aspects of human knowledge and art. Thus, I am hoping you will find elements in my speech that may interest you, elements that may even inspire you in your personal contemplations. Introduction I imagine you came here to listen about ‘concepts of Beauty’, as the subject of this conference suggests. If we only tried to consider what is beautiful let’s say in music: What is beautiful for you to listen to? What is beautiful for a friend of yours or for the person sitting next to you? What is beautiful for a proportion of the population? For example, what is beautiful music here in Brussels, in Beijing, or in Rhodes? And who is the one to choose it, to capture it, who is the one to define it? Is it an institution represented by philosophers or by artists? Is it a statistical analysis of an arbitrary proportion of the population, and of which population? Is it maybe the number of people attending to a concert that makes it beautiful? Or maybe the amount of money that an artist gained from his discography? Well, I have no real answers to these questions. If you came here to get answers, I have no ready-made solutions to give you, no notions packed like pills for you to take to ease your conceptual pain. And I am sorry to disappoint you but I am unable to give you new concepts about Beauty or about anything else. And that is not because I have nothing to say, or because I came unprepared or something like that. It is because I believe that no one can give you new concepts about anything. Instead, I believe that you already have in your own mental resources, what you need in order to create yourself new concepts about Beauty. You already have what you need through your own personal experience as a living being and above all, as a speaking being. For that, what I’m going to say will be only to provoke your own personal concepts, in order to make emerge something new out of these interactions. 1 The present article is a revised version of the speech I communicated in front of the participants of the Euro-Chinese Cultural Forum under the thematic title "Concepts of Beauty". Here, I chose to keep the speaking character talking to you, as you were now one of the participants of the conference.