thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices
Alex Arteaga | Emma Cocker | Nicole Wendel | Sabine Zahn
This project focuses on ways in which aesthetic research practices realize a specific form of thinking: aesthetic thinking. Since 2020, we — four artistic researchers: Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker, Nicole Wendel and Sabine Zahn — have been working together intensively within a series of exploratory online sessions or even ‘laboratories’, inquiring through specific aesthetic research practices in different media (drawing, video, sound, language, body movement, material encounters, spatial configurations) the concept, performance and conditions of and for a specific form of thinking: aesthetic thinking.
Whilst geographically distanced (working in Barcelona, Berlin, Sheffield), we have found new ways for sharing practices within an online environment, for exploring the potential of both being together and being apart, for harnessing the media specificity of online technologies as site of aesthetic enquiry. We have been testing how platforms such as zoom can be activated as a creative tool of engagement for bringing different practices into relationship with each other, making available and enabling (through various devices of text, sound and image recording and display) a mode of aesthetic conversation or correspondence between material entities, places, and other agents.
The aim of this project is to explore the following working hypotheses through aesthetic research practices:
- Firstly, aesthetic research practices systematize forms of preeminently sensorimotor and emotional action, which are neither target-oriented nor will-based.
- Secondly, aesthetic action enables and intensifies immediate and unmediated interactions between researchers and the inquired issues, co-constituting a field of nonhierarchical, shared agencies.
- Thirdly, aesthetic interaction conditions the ongoing processes of sense-making between researchers and the inquired issues with the agency of destabilizing the habitualized forms and meanings with which these issues appear.
- Fourthly, on this basis, aesthetic thinking allows for disclosing new intelligibilities for the researched issues, that is, it enables the potentialities of radically new understandings to arise.
Through the process of our shared exploration, further questions have emerged in relation to five interrelated foci:
MEDIA: How do different media enable the conception and performance of different aesthetic research practices? Through these practices, how does each medium contribute to realize aesthetic thinking?
PRACTICES: How do specific aesthetic research practices enable/enhance aesthetic thinking? What kinds of practices can be developed, tested and shared?
ECOLOGIES: How does the coexistence, coinciding and mutual conditioning of different practices enable/enhance aesthetic thinking? Exploring connectivity and collectivity, how might we bring different practices into relation?
CONDITIONS: What are the conditions for aesthetic thinking, and how might these conditions be nurtured? What enables/supports the emergence of the conditions for aesthetic thinking, and what inhibits/limits the emergence of such conditions?
AGENCIES: Who/what are the agents of aesthetic thinking?
Rather than attempting to 'answer' these questions through a retrospective process of 'reflecting on' our shared research activities after-the-fact, in this research exposition we endeavour to 'show' our enquiry and its discoveries through evidence of the: (1) Single Practices; (2) Ecologies in Action (the bringing-into-relation of different practices); (3) Artefacts generated through both Single Practices and Ecologies in Action. [See 'Navigational Menu' on the left hand side of the frame].
Central to this exposition is the presentation of various ecologies of aesthetic research practices — a set of interconnected aesthetic practices in action with aesthetic thinking as the focus of inquiry for these various research practices — which aim to provide conditions for evidence of what aesthetic thinking might be. ‘Evidence’ is understood here not in the sense of ‘proof’ or ‘demonstration’ (as used in the natural sciences or in law) but in its original sense of bringing ‘something to light’, or ‘allowing something to be seen’. In this sense, the performed practices are not presented as illustrative examples but rather as aesthetic thinking in action — as ongoing processes of research, as components of emerging ecologies of aesthetic research practices in action that facilitate an aesthetic access to aesthetic thinking.
In parallel to this exposition, we have explored ways for SHARING our research within various conferences and symposia through the live activation of what we call an ecology of aesthetic research practices — a set of interconnected aesthetic practices in action — which aim to provide conditions for evidence of what aesthetic thinking might be.