Lecture at POSTSENSORIUM – RIXC Art-Science Festival 2021

PostSensorium RIXC 2021


PostSensorium festival aims to provide a platform for artistic interventions and critical discussions on the 21st-century’s virtual sensing technologies, science, and aesthetics, reconsidering the relations between the actual and virtual, organic and artificial, natural and techno-social, human and “more-than-human”…

https://festival2021.rixc.org/

Panel 4A. (AI/ECO) INTELLIGENT ECOSYSTEMS AND MORE-THAN-HUMAN CONDITIONS – 25th September

Lecture – Aesthetics of Perception, a historical approximation to inhuman vision and its ecological meaning

Aesthetics is derived from the Greek term aisthetikos, meaning “aesthetics, sensitive, sentient, about sense perception”. First considered as the critic of taste [Baumgarten, 1750] aesthetics was enmeshed in a historical narrative that imposes a distinction between the cognitive-semantic and the affective-stimulant. This paper will sketch a different narrative in which perception is linked to knowledge. In this history, art is an experimental endeavour in which media are resurfaced as constitutive of our experience and always linked to situated histories and politics. Media digital or analogue links the viewer in networks of transindivituation that go beyond their organic limits [Stiegler, 2009, Colebrook, 2014].

This history starts in Modernity with Goethe’s experiments on the perception of colour that led into the avant-garde, this introduction will link with contemporary art and New Media. The possibility of interpretation and action always relies on a complex relationship between digital and analogue, or the capacity to reduce differential complexity to already established units of recognition [Bergson, 1912]. Artworks that process data implementing interfaces and ‘intelligent’ systems whit purposes other than efficiency, control or organic live maintenance engage us in complex ecologies that go beyond our organic limits and our milieu as a given system. This creative process opens our perception to a posthuman world, Gaia evolving indifferent to us [Margulis] and into the possibility of other futures.


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