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Sprint3_Week7#‘Beyond the Visual’ Assignment

“Embodied knowledge, while often denigrated and disavowed within the modern colonial episteme, confirms that Western scientistic validity comprises only one kind of knowing. Manifest through poetics, aesthetics, and other bodily attunements, sensuous knowledges open to alternative modes of relation. […] A sensory, embodied, affective, and imaginative relation to the world opens to a different kind of ethics and politics.

At the end of this sprint, we should return to the Problem Scenario and write a reflective post of 1,000 words that critically responds to this and the ideas within it.


Questions:

  • Do you agree with Neimanis that “sensuous knowledges open to alternative modes of relation”?
  • Do artworks focused on senses other than sight negate the visual completely or do they still have a visual aesthetic? Can you give examples to support your answer?
  • Should galleries consider the multi-sensory? Why / why not?

1/ Yes, I agree. The body as site of climate catastrophe, this is a point from Neimanis.

(Who are you, breathing in the ash of one and a half millennia of white body supremacy, of witch hunting and holocaust, of slavery and colonialism and persistent incandescent survival in the wakewho are you, breathing in all that is wasting and worlding at the bottom of the sea; who are you not to feel this? This is also what made you. The rain whispers back.) As we try to reshape the world with scientism and human civilisation, what we should be aware of is that our bodies, our senses, are the bearers of the forces acting on the world, and what we do comes back to us. According the article, only by taking a comprehensive look at the “lived experience” can a structure of feeling be identified. It permeates every part and cannot be confined in any of them. The lifeworld will be saturated in intricate ways by a structure of feeling, like mood, attitude, manners, emotions, and so on. Thus when we use our senses to experience the world and break free from the ‘bondage’ of modern colonialism, our bodies form a different mode of relationship with the world that is full of tragic aesthetics.

Your body is the whole ocean. My body is the droplet, or the spark, forming below your tongue. 

2/ I suppose that artworks focused on senses other than sight negate the visual completely still have a visual aesthetic. 

A movie with a blue block covering the entire screen, for instance, is called The Blue. In addition, there is background music. No one will dispute that, though, since as you view the blue screen, images will flash through your head. The blue that you see when you close your eyes for a moment, the scenes that you imagine through the blue filter of your mind while listening to the narrator of the AIDS patient, or even the scenes that might be relevant to where you are at the moment, the sunset with its tragic aesthetics, the river without any ripples like the voice of the narrator, etc. The visual is only one of the sensory forms and does not have a decisive role in the aesthetics of art. Sound, images, touch, can all be forms of artistic expression.

Another nice example is the assignment in our Basho. When we got to Calton Hill, we realised that Calton Hill was telling the story, not what we had heard. The idea of the argument is that the sounds we hear every day cannot be ignored although they are so prevalent, which is also the thesis of the book Deep Listening. Our ears are used to help us analysis and process while receiving the sound, leaving “useful” information. The art of hearing, however, is equally significant even if we neglect the visual senses because, when we ignore the visual senses and concentrate on hearing, we discover that every sound has its own rhythm and poetic beauty. For this reason, in my opinion.

3/ I think that galleries should consider the multi-sensory. The senses are related, in my opinion. In terms of the most basic and popular types of art, such as photography, music, or even actual works of art. Since you must see a photography exhibition in a space with minimal background noise, music, and light foot traffic, they are actually engaging many senses. You cannot categorise viewing photography as a single-sensory act of art appreciation because all of those things contribute to the environment for the photographic exhibition. And this point is the same as other forms of art.

The multi-sensory experience in new media art brings a deep sense of immersion to the audience, allowing them to experience and understand the meaning of the work across language and cultural barriers, while the strong interactivity of new media art works can bring a strong sense of participation and immersion to the audience, and the work is completed by the audience and the author together. At the same time, new media artworks also face many problems such as over-emphasis on audio-visual effects of sound and light, leading to sensory overdraft and a serious lack of actual moral of modularity. This will create more excellent new media artworks, bringing a full range of multi-sensory experiences.


More about myself reflective and critical thinking (of the assignment and the sprint):

On a typical trip to Calton Hill, we tend to place more emphasis on the visual experience of the summit view, the sky, the clouds, and the sea, with the auditory senses serving as a minor aid. However, in our research, we use the auditory senses as the key element from a decolonized perspective, exploring various ways of connecting with the world beyond the visual senses.

Our research has shown that Western scientism’s colonialism and anthropocentrism are constricting. We formed a new resonance and connection with Calton Hill in the form of hearing when we truly thought of him as a unique, sensory-rich human. This new sensory relationship led to a new way of interpreting the world through bodily senses, which was an imagined embodiment of relationship. We did not perceive the extinction of the visual senses in the sensory mode dominated by the auditory senses; rather, we formed images in our own minds through the process of auditory attunements, as we witnessed in BLUE, creating an infinite visual universe with a static and pictureless visual presentation.

More thinking:

Is art an attempt to imagine what lies beyond the horizon?
We can imagine the following scenario about the physicality of the human body: if we close our eyes or cover them with eye shadow and try to contact the environment, other people and other objects without visual means. What kind of space are we in if we close our eyes or blindfold ourselves with eye shadow and try to engage with our surroundings, other people and other things without visualising them? What kind of world are we in? What kind of world are we in contact with? According to Gormley, we are in a “subjective, public space… a place where the imagination runs wild, a space of potential.
What are its characteristics? There is nothing here, nothing at all. There are no borders, no boundaries, no endlessness.

4 replies to “Sprint3_Week7#‘Beyond the Visual’ Assignment”

  1. s2419012 says:

    The author’s response to each question in the article is complete and thought-provoking. I agree with the author’s idea that negates the visual completely still have a visual aesthetic. The five senses of human beings coexist and interact. Even though people often think that vision is the main way humans perceive the world, all senses are equally important. A single mode of dissemination is not enough for people to get sufficient information. Multi-sensory experience not only brings a new feeling to the viewers, but also maximizes the information expression of art works.

  2. s2325791 says:

    I think your understanding of experiencing the world through the senses and breaking free from the “bondage” of modern colonialism is very profound, and our perceptual structures can be integrated in many ways. Even without the visual system, we can still access the perceptual level of attunement

  3. Guyin “Alexa” Deng says:

    This is a very good point that the five senses of human actually are linked together. I never thought about this. In my post, all I could think of was works that focus on other senses while still have visual aesthetics. However, you mentioned that even negating the visual completely, visual aesthetics still exists.
    And you managed to answer every question proposed in this blog in a clear way.

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