Lona Gaikis

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Austria (residence), Canada, Germany (citizenship) °1982
affiliation: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Die Angewandte Vienna
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Lona Gaikis is a curator and writer in media art and electronic music. She is a lecturer on current debates in philosophy, society, and the arts and holds a doctoral degree (Dr. Phil.) in Philosophy, Art and Cultural Studies from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Her research (2017) focused on the “new key” in the American philosopher Susanne K. Langer, and the meaning of music in artistic practice.

 

Most recently, she has joined—as the philosopher in the group—an artistic research project that investigates the possibility of prosthetics and phantom limb phenomena as an aesthetic experience (@University of Applied Arts Vienna). Headlined as “An Aesthetics for Prosthetics”, she reflects upon Langer’s Philosophy of Feeling by contrasting it with Kant’s idea of the pathological to possibly expand it by looking at artistic methods and neurophysiological experiments with hand prosthesis.

research

research expositions (collaborated)

  • TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS FOR PROSTHETICS 2022 (last edited: 2022) author(s): Barbis Ruder, Lona Gaikis This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    This research project integrates artistic and philosophical practices with design strategies as a novel paradigm for the development of medical products—in particular arm prostheses. We propose a framework for medical engineering that considers performance art practices as a means to get a better understanding of the needs of traumatized and damaged bodies. We raise attention to marginalized bodies in medical design processes and question the foundations upon which aesthetics itself, as a theory of feeling, is based on. Not only do we envision its idealist limits by asking how much further the damaged body can feel, and whether the medically imposed task to un-feel one’s body in prosthetics wearers can be a commonly shared experience, but we recognize parallels in the promises of the industrialized fabrication of objects that virtually touch the body (as they are worn directly on the skin and are incorporated in body movement), and today’s commercial production of evocative art objects. In both, we see a need to exorcize an aesthetics that has lost touch with the ‘pathological’.
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