Sensorium and Aesthetic Experience Human Self-Reflection in Technological Art

Pol Capdevila Castells

Modern Sensorium and Technology

(Joness Essay The Mediated Sensorium)

Historical Development: - wider and more specialised knowledge of each sense; - a subsequently technological improvement, - which makes possible a segmentation and intensification of the senses (glasses, Hi-Fi, accustical isolation, prothesis, computers)

- colonisation and control of the body functions

- todays comfortable self-access and control of these functions

Recent History of our Sensorium

Denigration process of the sense of smell Growth, segmentation and purification of hearing visi-textuality as model for ocular-centrism

segmentation, hierarchysation and instrumentalisation

of senses in the production of subjects

Jones Theory Virtues and Vices

Virtues 1. Narrow approach in the relation between current social order and human understanding (genetic methodology) 2. More plausible than its orthodox Marxist-Darwinist version 3. Useful instrument to describe the mutual influences between art and society Vices epistemological problem (notrecognised prejudices) Forgetting phenomena Generalising Greenbergs reception of Mid-Century art. lacks a concrete conception of the role of the aesthetic experience

Conditions for a Theory of the Experience of Art

(compatible with Jones poststructuralist approach)
Emotional and bodily elements.
Justify the artistic formal means as an important factor in the artistic effect Justify the intersubjective self-reflection of the experience of art

(this gives an implicit conception of the world, the subject etc.)

Aesthetic Autonomy

Figure 1: J. Cardiff & G. B. Miller, Opera for a small room, 2005, MACBA, 2007
Photo: Lisbeth Salas

Figure 1: J. Cardiff & G. B. Miller, Opera for a small room, 2005, MACBA, 2007
Photo: Lisbeth Salas

Figure 3: J. Cardiff & G. B. Miller, The Killing Machine, 2007. MACBA, 2007

Figure 3: J. Cardiff & G. B. Miller, The Killing Machine, 2007. MACBA, 2007 Photo: Seber Ugarte