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Aesthetic Experience of Processes

We live in a world populated with things. In everyday life, we perceive things usually in relation to our goals, the world full of affordances. We also live in a world of processes. What appears to us as fixed objects are, in fact, not fixed at all. Things come to be all the time, they change in relation to their surroundings, in dialog with other things, including us. This becomes clear if we just look at the way our perception and our experience per se structures what is taken up by our senses in such a way that it makes sense in the context of our ongoing experience. The world we live in splits open: into a world we perceive, commonly as ordered, as meaningful to the subjects we are – and into a world that happens below the threshold of our awareness.

 

But these worlds are not separate, in fact there are not even two worlds. if we distance ourselves from the assumption that what we perceive is an objective reality and instead become open to the idea that our engagement with the world is processual, a broad field of potential relations opens up instead of a split. In the first half of the 20th century, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed how the assumption of two realities had been taken up by the sciences, which led in the following to disciplinary differentiations. What he called the bifurcation of nature differentiates between phenomenology - what is perceived through the senses - and that which causes such phenomena to appear - such as atomic particles and gravity. Whitehead deemed the understanding of this appearance of two realities as truth a fallacy and dedicated his work to explore the processes that precede it (Whitehead [1929] 1985).

 

An awareness of the processes leading to the perception of objects is central to the development of a new understanding of the human-environment relationship. The bifurcation of nature splits reality into an objective reality and its subjective perception, which leads to a dichotomic relation of subject and object, and, in the following, allows the object’s utilization. By contrast, becoming aware of the coming-to-be of objects and subjects, enables new potential restructuring - not only of the senses but also our beliefs, values, and desires. 

 

In aesthetic perception, which is one mode of perception (Seel, 2005), we might get a glimpse of what comes before our objectifying grasp. We might come to see an object in its appearing, as it emerges from a context, registers in different sense modalities while our senses begin to unfold as well, highlighting the processuality of perception itself. 

 

What if we would become attentive to those different phases of our experience that come before conscious thought, before we identify something as a fixed object? Can we think of an aesthetics of processes that makes sense-able the ways our embodied selves interrelate with our surroundings to produce a meaningful continuum? 

 

In the following I will look at the aesthetic experience of metabolic and atmospheric processes on the example of aesthetic milieus – art installations, design prototypes, research-creation projects – that utilize air, light, or temperature to impact our subjective experience. In particular, I will show how artworks, in changing the atmosphere of a place, shift our awareness to the role of different sense modalities in aesthetic experience, besides the usually more dominant, visual sense. 

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