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.

- CONSTELLATIONS

- SHARING

SCORE FOR PRACTICE OF ATTUNEMENT

- Become aware of your body and its needs depending on what practice you come from and in which practice you want to ‘tune in’.

- Choose a timeframe you want to practice the ‘preparatory tuning in practice’ within the field of ‘thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices’.

- Depending on your main emphasis you select a somatic practice out of your personal practices. It can be activating and energizing, slowing down and balancing or centering and opening.

- Activate the practice by bringing your focus on your breath and body in relation to the space.

- If you practice together then one can invite the practice with a clear and calm voice.

- Relate the pace of guidance to the pace of the active body.

- Take a moment to observe of your body after your ‘tuning in practice’ and before you start to practice within the field of ‘thinking aesthetic thinking’.

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