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.

SCORE FOR THE PRACTICE OF MATERIAL ENCOUNTER *

- Choose a material that relates in its qualities to your curiosity in the context of ‘thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices’.

- Decide for a number you want to explore. Become aware of your body in relation to the material and the space you are in.

- Invite a time of slowness.

- In a receiving mode, but with the enquiry 'thinking aesthetic thinking’ held lightly in your awareness, start to observe the material with an open curiosity.

- Out of a ‘beginners mind’ approach the material first visual and then wait for the clear invitation to start to playfully explore its qualities with the whole range of your senses.

- Let the material move your body in relation with it.

- Observe the appearing phenomena and continue to explore.

* The Practice of Material Encounter was brought to the project by Nicole Wendel.

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