thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices by Alex Arteaga

THINKING AESTHETIC THINKING THROUGH AESTHETIC RESEARCH PRACTICES focuses on ways in which aesthetic research practices realize a specific form of thinking: aesthetic thinking. The aim of this project is to explore the following working hypotheses through aesthetic research practices as a foundation for different forms of reflection and dialogue between philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic research. - 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. 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 sessions or even ‘laboratories’, inquiring through specific aesthetic practices the concept, performance and conditions of and for aesthetic thinking. This exposition presents a set of aesthetic research practices, a series of "Ecologies in Action' (a set of interconnected aesthetic research practices in relation) and research artefacts generated through this research project.

Through evidence of single practices generated, adapted and tested through our live enquiry we address the questions:

PRACTICES: How do specific aesthetic research practices enable/enhance aesthetic thinking? What kinds of practices can be developed, tested and shared?

- FRAME

- SINGLE PRACTICES

- ECOLOGIES IN ACTION

- ARTEFACTS

- SHARING

SINGLE PRACTICES (ACTIVATED IN THIS PROJECT)

- Practice of Attunement

- Practice of Conversation-as-Material

- Practice of Explorative Drawing

- Practice of Exploratory Essay Writing

- Practice of Material Encounter

- Practice of the Nahbereich (Proximate Sphere)

- Practice of Reading

- Practice of Very Slow Video Observation

- Practice of Voicing Observation

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