Extending Sensibilities.
On the Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes
In this presentation, I will talk about new conditions of human and non-human sensibility as they arise within immersive media environments. In particular, I will demonstrate how architectural design that utilizes airflow, light intensity, and oxygen saturation to impact how we feel and act in environments, provide an intimate experience of metabolic processes as they happen inside and outside our bodies. Through explicating processes that usually happen outside our conscious awareness, I argue that a metabolic aesthetics enables us to become more sensitive to how we experience, instead of focusing on just what we feel. I propose further that a sensitivity to bio-chemical processes at the root of our meaningful experiences enables new ways to address the ecological crisis we are facing today.
Toward Metabolic Creative Practices
Toward Metabolic Creative Practices presents a set of conceptual and practice approaches and interest for the intersection of logistical, elemental and thermal media approaches. These look like material, cultural ceremonies of thriving and surviving, and enact technological rituals of trust, response-ability and ecological relation. What constellations of techno-science can we devise, together, that might heal the rifts wrought by infrastructural modernism, exploitation and messianism? Critical scholarship and studies of infrastructure, institutions and media, as well as participatory media and artistic work, circulates toward, amongst other approaches, a ‘culinary cosmopolitics’ that relates energy, metabolism, logistics, food and sustenance, migration, labour and community.
Drift towards a Sea Change
The ocean is a sensorium and a place for sensing practices in the making. In its metabolic cycles and dynamics it records and inscribes the transformations of the planetary.The relationship between humans, the oceans and the species in this fragile, complex multispecies environment is mostly mediated and indirect. Establishing a sensitive relationship to the microscopic beings means in this sense becoming attuned to their rhythms and to experience the spaces in between computed models and scientific datasets.
In this space the groups of phytoplankton and their life cycles are taken into account. As abundant keystone species they are vital part of the intricately balanced marine and atmospheric systems. How can we form new correspondences with these beings, how we can sense and make sensible the multiple transformations they are exposed to? What possibilities to think and act otherwise offers this unknown terrain?
What should be the role of design and designers in tackling complex issues and in contributing to a shift in thinking patterns?
