Metabolic processes are all chemical reactions that take place within the cells of a living organism that provide energy for vital processes and for synthesizing new organic material. Beyond the individual organism, metabolism also is the sum of the metabolic activities taking place in a particular environment. One can speak of the metabolism of lake Michigan for example.

 

With an aesthetics of metabolism, I explore how we can become aware of the way internal, bodily processes relate to a surrounding atmosphere and how this experience of interrelatedness becomes meaningful. 

 

One example of an aesthetic milieu that explicates this process, makes it sense-able, is the installation Hormonorium by Architects Philippe Rahm and  Jean-Gilles Decosterd (first exhibited at the Venice Biennale 2002). The piece seemed to be a simple white and empty space. But its invisible atmospheric condition was manipulated in such a way that the visitors were to experience first signs of altitude sickness after just a few minutes, as if they had been transferred into an alpine region. As a consequence of low oxygen levels, cool temperatures, and bright daylight lamps, the bodies of the visitors would produce and suppress certain hormones that would possibly make them more awake or nervous. 

 

An aesthetic of metabolic processes makes sense-able exactly these biochemical processes and makes available to us, how they impact what we feel and potentially even how we act. In Hormonorium, we do not attend to a WHAT, to an object of perception, but to HOW we perceive. The context of our experience begins to matter and the way we experience becomes meaningful. 

 

In this way, Rahm’s work re-perspectivates the weight of human consciousness. Body and environment are experienced as interrelated, which brings to mind Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body: the body as at once the sensing body, and the object of conscious reference in its sensing.

 

Merleau-Ponty understood the lived body as a medium that interrelates subject and world and that as a medium would not be static but in fact transformative. So the way a subject experiences its world and itself as a subject through the lived body, changes because those experiences transform the lived body in turn. As a structuring force, the lived body is directed to the world in what Merleau-Ponty called “operative intention” (Merleau-Ponty 1968).

 

But this intentionality that drives the lived body’s directedness is not the same intentionality as we refer to it in everyday-speech: as connected to our consciousness, to our goals, etc. Instead, operative intention is pre-cognitive, it allows for the world to be structured in a meaningful way that only then can be grasped by a consciousness. In this structuring, the sensory awareness of things external to our body and the bodily awareness of our body itself, are merged in such a way that a steady background is formed.

 

Merleau-Ponty called this steady background the “perceptual field.” From this field, certain objects or characteristics are brought to the fore and become the meaningful object a subject refers to. Meaningful reference, therefore, is enabled by the body, because it is at the same time sensorially extended towards the world and sensual in itself. This being of the body as at the same time sensitive and sensual is central to the aesthetic experience in Hormonorium.