Faculty & staff

Tsion Avital was born to Avraham and Preciada Dorit Avitbol Avital, and grew up in the city of Sefrou in Morocco. Avital views this biographical fact as having decisive implications for his intellectual work throughout his life. Sefrou, his birthplace, is an ancient walled city, divided by a river and waterfalls, and its gates were closed at sunset. Sefrou was a cultural bubble which preserved in almost perfect manner the culture of the Middle Ages.

Avital naturally had internalized the strict values of this culture and this had crucial impact both on his personal and intellectual life. This was a mythical, religious, mystic, feudal culture, with a rigid hierarchical structure in which the law governing things is that of fate, identical to the will of God. In Sefrou everything that occurs in phenomenal reality is just a sign or symbol of a reality beyond, and so many Jews of Sefrou studied Kabbala. It is a culture that had not heard of science, and reacted with suspicion and aversion to technology, which was not allowed past the city walls, with the exception of electricity to provide light.

Avital immigrated to Israel with his family in January of 1951, when he was eleven. The encounter with Western culture was a great shock for him, and the deep need to bridge the two worlds, the two cultures, finally led him to discover the structural characteristics common to all cultures beyond space and time, and this became the central subject of all his research.

 

Title of Master's Thesis: An Outline of Artonomy

Name of Supervisors: Prof. Y. Elkana, Prof. E. Zemach

Title of Doctoral Dissertation: Artonomy - A New Type of Art and its Implications for Art Education in the Future.

Names of Supervisors: Prof. Daniel Berlyne, Prof. Anatol Rapoport, Prof. Moshe Caspi

 

Studies included specialization in experimental aesthetics, and the empirical testing of some basic assumptions of the new artistic conception I call "Artonomy".

Period(dates)	Name of Institution (city, country)	Department	Rank/Function
1966-1971	Hebrew University of Jerusalem	School of Education	Research Assistant
1973-1976	Hebrew University, School of Education	Div. of certification in art education*	Lecturer
1975-1978	Vinilit Inc. - rubber and plastic factory, Holon Industrial Park		Manager
1977-1982	Hofen (Experimental Open Education) Institute, Jerusalem		Lecturer
1983	South Africa - invited to present the major ideas of artonomy at six universities	Art	Guest Lecturer
1984	Stellenbosch University, South Africa (second visit)	Art	Guest Lecturer
1988	Beersheba Technological College	Architecture	Part-time Lecturer
1988-1991	Beersheba Center for Visual Art	Visual Arts	Part-time Lecturer
2011	Shandong University, China (September-October 2011)	Philosophy	Visiting Professor teaching M.A. and Ph.D. students
2013	Perm State Academy of Art and Culture, Russia (26 November-1 December 2013)		One-week intensive seminar on: The Confusion between Art and Design
1982-present	HIT - Holon Academic Institute of Technology, Israel	Faculty of Design	1982-1993 Adjunct Lecturer   1993-1994 Guest Lecturer   1994-1997 Lecturer   1997-4.2003 Senior Lecturer (from 1999 with tenure)   2003-2008 **Full Professor   *30/9/2008 Professor Emeritus

* When I completed my studies there was not (and there still isn't) at the Hebrew University or at any other academic institution in Israel, a framework devoted to the study of problems that, according to my understanding, are the truly basic problems of art. Such study requires a complex interdisciplinary approach, but such an approach existed neither among the aestheticians in the philosophy departments, nor among art historians, and teachers and artists at the art academies. From each of these three angles, one sees but one side of the phenomenon (theoretic, historical, or creative), and as a result they cannot see the basic problems of art, and even less so the most reasonable way to a solution. These problems and the ways of solving them can be identified only by a synthesis of the three approaches, with the addition of knowledge from other fields. The vast difference between my approach and that of other teachers of art prevented any communication between us, and as a result, my ideas, which were not understood at all (largely because my colleagues did not have the relevant knowledge necessary to understand them), aroused opposition to such an extent that it prevented any possibility of being hired by any art faculty in Israel. Teaching in the teaching certificate division was then an extremely marginal solution, without any possibility of being a research framework of the type needed. For this and other reasons I resigned from the Hebrew University. Lacking any other possibility of conducting research in my field of interest, I preferred to earn my living in other ways - industry. However, after a few years I felt compelled to return to my research.

 

Period (dates)	Name of Institution (city, country)	Subject
1982	The International Seminar for Education through Art (INSEA), Jerusalem, Israel	Artonomy – The Dark Side of Realism
1984	The Salzburg Castle, Salzburg, Austria	The Future of the Museums and Art
9.1998	4th Interdisciplinary Symmetry Congressand Exhibition of the International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry (ISI-SYMMETRY), Technion, Haifa, Israel	The Breakdown of Hierarchy in 20th Century Art and its Implications for Present and Future Art
4.2002	MATOMIUM 2002 – The Origins of Mathematics and Art, Sint-Lucas InstituteFor Architecture, Brussels, Belgium	Footprints Literacy: The Origins of Art and Prelude to Science
8.2002	Stellenbosch University, South Africa	Footprints Literacy: The Origins of Art and Prelude to Science
8.2002	Port Elizabeth Technikon (Technological University), South Africa	Footprints Literacy: The Origins of Art and Prelude to Science
6.2011	The 1st International Conference - Art,Science and Technology: Interaction betweenThree Cultures, ORT Braude College, Karmiel, Israel, 1-2 June 2011	Art versus Design: TheConfusion between BrainTools and Hand Tools
2.12.2013	Symposium in Memory of Colin Martindale, Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, Russia	Art versus Design

 

Period (dates)	Name of Institution (city, country)	Subject
8.1996	American Psychological Association (APA)Annual Convention, Toronto, Canada	Mind and the Origins of Art

 

Year	Name of Meeting (city, country)
1997	The Int'l. Association of Empirical Aesthetics Annual Conf., Perm, Russia Subject: "Emotion, Creativity and Art” Subject of lecture: Connectivity and Art
9.1998	The XV Congress of the Int'l. Association of Empirical Aesthetics, Rome, Italy. Subject of lecture: Footprints Literacy – The Origins of Art and Prelude to Science
8.2001	The Laboratory of Experimental Aesthetics, University of Toronto, Canada, 1-10 August 2001. A lecture and discussion with the staff of the laboratory regarding some implications of my MINDPRINTS THEORY to art and aesthetics.

Year	Name of Institution (city, country)	Occasion
1991-1994	The Dalis Foundation, Switzerland	Receive grants for Writing a book entitled: "Art out of Mind – Art Versus Nonart"

Year	Society (country)
1996-present	International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry (Japan, USA , Hungary)
1997-present	International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (U.S.A., Germany)