​

What is an aesthetics of processes and how could it potentially change how we interact with the world?

 

An aesthetics of processes might ultimately allow us to re-imagine our relation to the environment in expressing the already existing interrelations between perceivable matters in our world as well as their affectabilities, which suggest potential new interrelationships, different intensities of relations, directionalities of relations, as well.

 

The aesthetic experience of metabolic and atmospheric processes enables us in this way to get a sense of processuality at the root of meaning making. It further can make us aware of new relations with the world that start to matter because they can be sensed as a part of ourselves while at the same time maintaining the limitations of that relation.

 

Turning to our relationships with the environment expands the process of experience and includes besides subjective experience also the affectivity and affectability of others. Regarding our build environment from a metabolic perspective, the potential of architecture and design becomes significant. By aestheticizing our environments, by creating spaces that draw our attention to processes of interrelation in everyday life, we can speculate about long-term effects on our co-existence that are on a different scale than mediation and individual lines of research. 

 

By attending to the atmospheric and metabolic relations that embed us into the world, we can better understand how our interrelationships with the world are continuously configured through material and affective processes. Design and architecture that bring into resonance the inherent disparities of these interrelationships, instead of obscuring them with ideas of balance and resilience, give us the opportunity to attune to other, processual levels of the relations between humans and their environment. Even if not explicitly politically motivated, such a move towards a sensitization for what usually remains unnoticed is deeply rooted in ethical and aesthetic considerations.

​

 Bibliography

​

Böhme, Gernot. “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics.” Thesis Eleven 36, no. 1 (1993).

 

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee, [1934] 1980.

 

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, “The Intertwining – The Chiasm,” in: The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

 

Schmitz, Hermann. Body, Space, and Emotions. Ostfildern: Edition Tertium, 1998.

 

Schmitz, Hermann. Atmosphären. Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2014.

 

Seel, Martin. Aesthetics of Appearing, Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.

 

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, edited by David Ray Griffin, and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, [1929] 1985.