Materia: Investigación artística para la creación documental. Tema: Investigación como producción de sentido. Profesor: Pablo MZ

“The ancient Greeks used the word aisthesis to describe that which
pertains to the senses. Aesthetics thus concerns the experience of the world.
It involves sensing – the capacity to register or to be affected, and sensemaking
– the capacity for such sensing to become knowledge of some kind.
The finding or invention of means to achieve such effects is to aestheticise.
Defining aesthetics in this way allows us to derive two other terms:
hyper-aesthetics , which we consider to be the augmentation and elaboration
of such experience, and hyperaesthesia , which we consider to be the state in
which experience overloads or collapses, and, as a result, sensation stops
making sense.
In this expanded meaning, as a way of sensing the world, aesthetics does
not exclusively refer to a property or capacity of humans. It equally refers to
other sensing organisms, such as animals and plants, which themselves
apprehend their environment. Further, we argue that sensing is also found in
material surfaces and substances, on which traces of impact or slower
processes of change are registered, including in digital and computational
sensors, which themselves detect, register and predict in multiple novel
ways.” (p. 33).

“Sensing is thus only a part of the more complex question of sensemaking. The former is the result of the receptive action of a sensory organ, a material or a system. The latter involves experience and understanding of what is being sensed, a perception and conception, or a world view, if you like. 

Making sense involves constructing means of sensing. This can take place through the design and development of technologies and techniques – literally making senses – or of reflections and enquiries into sensing, making sense as reasoning of different kinds. The sense-making aspect of material aesthetics is more complex and always involves relations between substances and organisms. We should also keep an open mind as to whether artificial forms of sense-making might arise.” (p. 34)

“Both sensing and sense-making, then, each necessarily involve a tension with the other. They may even sometimes seek to undo each other.” (p. 34)

“In the unfolding of each sensing entity and process of sensemaking, aesthetics is situated and perspectival. Each particular form of experience has inherently unique aspects that not only shape it but constitute it. This given, aesthetics can also be a collective practice which assembles the multiple varied and sometimes seemingly incompatible situated experiences – of different individuals and groups, of matter and code – into a poly-perspectival rendering of a situation, combining multiple views from within.” (p. 34)

“So aesthetics is an approach that is fundamentally about assembling, and finding the means to recognise, a multiplicity of different forms of sensation.” (p. 35)

“Aesthetics is always relational” (p. 35).

“Communication is not simply about sending signals, but it is about transformative interconnection” (p. 36)

“… to be politicised is to increase one’s ability to be aestheticised to the world” (p. 36).

“Hyper-aesthetics is an expanded state of aesthetic alertness” (p. 37).

“hyper-aesthetics becomes particularly palpable through the incorporation of human sensing within a network of devices that monitor, count and measure” (p. 37).

“…a differential regime of aesthetics that defines emerging geometries of domination. Hyper-aesthetics is saturated with new formations of power” (p. 38).

“An important factor in hyper-aesthetics is the way in which different substances – from the most abstract to the most concrete – communicate and share, or competitively and collaboratively, or indeed indifferently, coexist, in sensation” (p. 39)

“investigative commons, or even a common sense” (p. 39).

“…sensing, or being a sensor, is not only a quality inherent to a specific kind of instrument. Rather, it is a name for the activity of all manner of material things that elaborate sensitivities to the thing they come in contact with” (p. 44).

“…it is precisely in differentiation that sensing becomes significant. Sensing is transformation, and patterns of transformation can also be sensed” (p. 46).

“Information should be understood as ‘matter in-formation'” (p. 46).

“To trace patterns in a complex dynamic ecology one must learn to pay attention to tis own aesthetic refrains and variations. To do so in this case, one must recognise the active shaping of the world by plants” (p. 49).

“Aesthetics is understood here as the sensing capacity of entities, which are themselves momentary concretions emerging out of relational forces inherent to matter in various forms, via the remote, proximate or overlapping presence or action of other entities and forces. Sensing is the internalisation, and hence mediation, of environmental conditions into the organisation of an entity. That entity, like most matter and all organisms, is quite likely a composite one, and as something that emerges from and through relations, it is traversed by other entities.” (p. 51)

“All of these terms describe an entity in relation to others, and constitute those entities as a set of interacting relations of different kinds. These elements are mediatic because they contain and express information about their environment.” (p. 51).

“Expressions of code” (p. 53).

“The specific grammars of exposure and relay that each platform adopts and shapes for facets of such a development”

“Aesthetic act” (p. 53).

“Hyper-aesthetics is an expanded and ramified aesthetics, in which both sensing and sense-making are intensified. Hyper-aesthetics increases sensation in three different ways.

First, it amplifies the sensitivity of an entity to detecting the environment around it. The capacity for such attunement is increased in conceptual and material ways. To hyper-aestheticise is to exacerbate the capacity of bodies, technologies or other states of matter to sense, sometimes to record what is sensed, and thus to increase the growth of sense-making experience.

Second, it multiplies and varies the number of ways in which entities act as sensors. This multiplication might entail translation within vertical chains of sensation, for example digital sensors reading and interpreting physical ones. Third, it generates and builds assemblies that synthesise multiple sensations horizontally. While all matter can potentially be read as sensors, the reorganisation of relations between organic and inorganic sensorial matter, people and computers, can increase non-hierarchical sensorial assemblages and even seek to harvest or ‘rescue’ traces from beneath layers of erasure. Hyper-aesthetics is an elaboration of this general condition of aesthetics – its interlinkedness – to a point where it mutates and becomes reflexive. Thus the three articulations of hyper-aesthetics are amplification, multiplication/variation/translation, and synthesis.” (p. 58).

“The assembly of a distributed sensing body becomes a technology in itself. In such a context, an important part of that is counter- or anti-aesthetic strategies, means of escape, evasion and camouflage that may numb hyper-aesthetic capture by dominant powers.” (p. 59).

“To hyper-aestheticise then is to heighten, elicit or exacerbate the capacity of the bodies, technologies or other states of matter to sense and increase perceptual experience; it entails an increase in sensitivity and can perhaps augment a capacity to care” (p. 58).

“Here, ‘information’ is never disembodied, but always manifest in and as stuff – ideas, chemicals, media, organisms, photographs and so on – all of which transform and translate these transitions. In turn, information is only ever accessible as information through a means of accessing and filtering it. These means will always have their own perspectivalism. These may be incongruous and asymmetrical to the sources of what is treated as information. This difference creates further information through the very way in which it is translated or incorporated.” (p. 58-59).

“These transformations can be interpreted as an informational change that makes hyper-aesthetics valuable for investigation. Hyper-aesthetics multiplies dimensions of sensing and thus provides routes to its intensification. New channels and gateways articulate and transform the more generalised sensing of aesthetics.” (p. 61).

“Evolving or designing new sensors and capacities of sensation, perhaps in such chains of technologies and organisms, implies constructing new figurations of reality and points of passage from one system of sensing into another.” (p. 62)

“All bodies of matter and all surfaces are exposed to the environment around them; some impressions linger and register, others are erased and get lost.” (p. 63)

“processes of aesthetic refinement” (p. 64).

“As with new aesthetics, hyper-aesthetics is also formed in composition with fields of power” (p. 65).

“Documentary architecture”

“But formations of power, for instance those of a social movement, can also be militant and a hyperaesthetic strategy can also be adopted from this direction. Integrating things, people, organisms, languages into convergent systems of power recalibrates their aesthetic dimension.” (p. 67)

“…to contest the violence of borders, one needs to contest the boundaries of what can be seen and heard, and that to provide evidence of past shipwrecks is also to provide information to help migrants decide upon future strategy.” (p. 69).

“Three other categories of sensing can throw light on hyper-aesthetics: kinaesthesia, synaesthesia and chrono-aesthesia. Kinaesthesia describes awareness of position and movement.” (p. 73).

“The environment itself is a distributed and variegated sensing assemblage, a non-totalised concatenation of sensory fields.” (p. 73).

“Inhabiting an image means accepting the image being of all material surfaces, and one’s own actions, and constitution, within them.” (p. 79).

“To act, to live is to continuously image and be imaged. This changes a substantive thing: the relation between an event and an image is not one of action and its representation, but rather one in which the action of matter, from the most abstract to the most obviously physical, continuously images itself. This state paradoxically suggests that we need to be reading reality as a self-referential image: a meta-image. Here, the image is figured as a sensory trace, or cluster of sensory traces, that in certain perspectival conditions gains a capacity to cohere or perhaps to persist.

But – being material – images have real physical resistance, even when they are encoded data and their material surface, their micro-topography, can take part in and shape an event without going through communicative meaning.” (p. 80).

“Hyperaesthesia describes a neurological condition in which sense perception radically overloads.” (p. 83).

“…erasure is always a form of registration” (p. 84).

“Hyperaesthesia becomes a form of breakage in sense, a blockage in the capacity to make sense” (p. 85).

“A question for aesthetic practices is how to develop or to recognise such hyperaesthesia as a collective event, or as a societal condition” (p. 87).

“Hyperaesthesia can be what reality forces into effect the moment it is no longer possible to reduce such a problem to a set of simpler ones. It occurs in a cognitive system, one that may be biological or programmatic, individual or distributed, at the moment evolved or designed filters and constraints fail to maintain proper levels of sifting and security. (…) hyperaesthesia is also an opportunity, a moment of crisis that allows us to reorganise the field of sensation of the sensible, and its relation to sense-making. In consequence we are calling for a terrain of experimentation. One that develops means of reading, perceiving and connecting sensory modes to aid and sometimes constitute political and cultural interventions.” (p. 88).

Two modes of aesthetic power today: affect & effect

“The extensions of sensing technologies of effect thus tends to provide a ground for the techniques of affect” (p. 93)

“Affect and effect overlay and reinforce each other” (p. 93).

“Prediction and detection are codependent: the power to detect over time enables the calculative capacity to predict” (p. 93).

“Sensitisation is also calculative” (p. 94).

“The surveillance, targeting, adjustment and modulation of human behaviour are perfected through leveraging preference, desire and emotion. Private experience becomes the raw material of predictive behaviour.” (p. 96-97).

“The interwoven manifestation of aesthetic power has a place in the genealogy of state power.” (p. 97).

“Historically, aesthetic power owes its existence to two developments that defined the early twenty-first century – the ‘war on terror’ on the one hand and the development of digital economies and social media on the other.” (p. 97).

“These aesthetic decision-making processes are not open to scrutiny, perhaps in an analogous way to that in which eighteenth-and nineteenth century aesthetics conceived itself as beyond reason and beyond calculation. Each of these stages of translation is aesthetic, but not because they necessarily involve an evaluative judgement of beauty passed through human discretion. These registers are aesthetic because they involve the complex politics of sense and sense-making across contexts that are themselves the result of the ongoing accumulations of such processes. Any challenge to aesthetic power will have to learn to recognise this and come from within the aesthetic field of operation.” (p. 102-103).

“Film director Jean-Luc Godard famously described the interplay between making political films and making films politically. In the former, representations of politics are stored on celluloid. In the latter, the way the film is made, not just what it shows, is subject to political enquiry and reinvention. Following this, we are concerned not only with ways to make political investigations, but also to think about investigation politically. This demands a different response in relation to each of the different sites in which investigations are performed: the field , where incidents happen and where traces are collected; the lab and the studio , where they are processed and composed into evidence; and the forum , where they are presented. Each site requires a different level of participation, a different process by which evidence is worked on and socialised. The community of practice that arises around the process of evidence production is an investigative commons. The investigative commons brings together a combination of aesthetic, political and epistemic structures.” (p. 196)

“In the lab and the studio the commons emerge as sites of the diffuse and collective labour of enquiry forged through composition and invention. In the forum the commons emerges by socialising the presentation of evidence, and finding new locations and platforms where the articulations of political claims can be seen and heard.” (p. 196).

“The formation of common sense can be seen as a mode of creation, the ongoing development of a commonality – built into the creation of knowledge. Indeed, when common sense becomes recognised as a problem of creation, rather than being a repressive set of implicit norms that are taken for granted, it becomes open for reinvention.” (p. 196).

“Unlike the universal’s implication of a norm that it presupposes, the commons is woven together by a multiplicity of differences – of participants, perspectives, situated experiences, positions and forms of knowledge produced and worked at by practical and experimental intersections. It is a shared rather than a unified or unifying condition.

Such an aesthetic commons is not just held in common by people, but is generated ecologically. It is based on the multiplication of what counts as sensoria and sensing. When you unmoor aesthetics from human judgement, other possibilities open up. (…) In such tensile conditions, there are multiple materials – ranging from the biological and mineral to the political and experiential, including mathematical conceptions and computational devices, stretching from base matter to abstract materialism – that together can constitute an aesthetic commons that has consequences for investigation.” (p. 198).

“Such an aesthetic commons is, of course, not just held in common bypeople, but is generated ecologically. It designates a recognition of the ongoing and massively diffused sensing activity of living and inorganic processes. It implies the development of an inquiring disposition towards being with matter, code and organic substances in aesthetic assemblages.” (p. 201)

“The struggle over sense-making has always been as epistemological as it was political. At this point, what we want to say, then, is that reality is a commons, of a certain sort, and at times, one that needs to be fought for, composed with a lot of negotiation, love and skill. Reality is an ontological commons, in that it is all that is there, all that we have got. It is an epistemic commons in that it is what we must use to test what we can know. It is an aesthetic commons in that it accrues out of tension between sensing and limited sense-making.” (p. 201).

“When they delink, when they use an unproven or more fragile part of the network of sense-making to question or dismantle the entire assemblage, when they insist that only they have the privilege of knowing, denial is aimed not at making new sense but at the uncommoning of the commons. Such fissures in the commons must be repaired. When police say they have shot a person legally the commons has to be similarly repaired. When those in charge claim that the destruction of forests by fire is a seasonal event, rather than a consequence of industrial strength greed, social bonds with nature have to be mended. The stakes, thus, of the formation of reality as a commons are thus of many kinds. Nevertheless, such ruptures can also travel in other directions than simply downwards. The reality-formation routines of hierarchical power can also be broken.” (p. 201-202).

“The sustaining and development of this condition creates a commonality” (p. 202).

“The condition of the contemporary world obliges its inhabitants to struggle to recognise and to produce what it is that provides a means of knowing, communicating and thinking. Virno emphasises the creation of societies by those who are not accepted by them, migrants, women, racial and sexual internal outcasts and others such as those who suffer class domination, all of which he calls the multitude. Only those who don’t fit can fully think, and their condition of strangeness is what allows for the struggle to form the commonplaces that partially overcome this condition. Indeed, the common arises, one can say, from a belonging to a sense of nonbelonging.” (p. 204).

public commons / toxic commons / chaotic commons

“Language is inherently a commons, except when it is a secret one, an encrypted code, in that it is necessary that it be used publicly for it to work. For it to continue to work and remain current, it needs to change, and for those changes to be made by those who have the need to use those changes.” (p. 207).

“It is a vastly multidimensional and experiential space which is composed in conflict but also in community, in conformity but also in the brilliance of invention. It is this kind of quality that we want to propose that language has in common with what can be called an investigative commons. Reality, whether we like it or not, is a commons of this sort, being something arising out of a disjointly collective process of work and becoming, one that is, of course, inherently post-human. Studying and discovering, and indeed inventing, the terms of this process are crucial. Finding the ways in which reality as commons can be attended to and discovered also implies wider forms of commons of the kind to which language belongs. Here, an aesthetic commons would consist of the sensing and sense-making processes that make themselves available for other processes of sensing. This aesthetic commons provides a common ground, something that may be negotiated, fought over, niggled at, worn away, or otherwise ‘contributed to’.

In this context, an affirmative understanding of an aesthetic commons follows through as a political understanding of hyper-aesthetics. If hyperaesthetics is a move towards understanding an expanded ecology of sensing and sense-making, then the notion of an aesthetic commons articulates crucial aspects of the collective political stakes of this condition. It is an open form of assembly that includes humans and other living and inorganic matter alongside sensual technologies such as code.” (p. 207).

“These polyphonic networks are uneven and asymmetrical, skewed by different privileges and degrees of access creating difficulties that need to be recognised and worked at. Creating the commons is hard work, but creates a possible foundation for politics, while itself being a form of political action.” (p. 208).

“…the risk of disagreement is an imperative” (p. 208)

“Working within the polyphony of the investigative commons is what sharpens it, renders it able to sense and make sense.” (p. 208).

“Knowledge is pluriversal. The pluriversity suggests an art of the commons working with affordances, and capacities for invention and for becoming that is ecological in its recognition of multiple and interacting processes of formation and intelligence. Earlier, we spoke about direct action as a form of research and learning. To work in this way means to try to make the most immediate – but patient and careful – contact with reality possible and to change it and ourselves in so doing. Direct action, at its most profound, works to recognise the difficult intermeshing of events and understanding. It aims at being immediate and to have effects by recognising and working with mediation.” (p. 210).

“The lab is the site for the isolation and testing of phenomena according to the strict protocols of scientific practices. The studio sets up a space for elaboration, imagination, composition. It is a kitchen for play, attentiveness, free association and the perverse. Each thus offers infrastructure for different kinds of sense-making and testing of propositions and ideas. Both have their own grammar of action and sometimes develop a different kind of striving for their own independence or conatus. Both are sites where problems and propositions are worked on with a set of internally coherent protocols and with different modes of connection, but also of seclusion.” (p. 213).

“The studio has a longer history than the laboratory. The laboratory proper was founded in the scission of science, or natural philosophy, from a wider configuration that also included art.” (p. 214).

“(…) the lab and the studio have also expanded, as new modes of scientific work and of art and cultural practice developed.” (p. 215).

“Both the lab and the studio have thus become sites of self-reflexive labour. They could be thought of as spaces of differentiation where entities such as images and ideations, physical and organic substances, processes and problems – the things to be investigated – are brought together with concepts, equipment and techniques and those who work on and with them. Both sites entail the work of moving between hypotheses and reality, cultivating attention to reality while constituting it.” (p. 216).

“Indeed, the design and formation of organisations beyond the studio becomes central to forms of culture as collective forms of sense-making. As aesthetic practices more broadly migrate towards being an open field of enquiry that is able to gain and invent forces of sense-making, new organisations that embody and experiment with different diagrams must proliferate. Organisations, indeed, have their own implicit and explicit aesthetic. Their structure, their diagram, constitutes rather than simply and neutrally conveys sense-making processes. This is part of why struggles over institutional forms, such as growing demands for the decolonisation of museums and other cultural spaces, are so urgent. Just as the field, the lab and the studio must undergo mutation, so too must the last domain within which investigative aesthetics is enacted, its sites of presentation, debate and deliberation. These are different kinds of forum , sites of public ritual of truth formation, of institutional sense-making. It too has its own priests who follow their own protocols. Truth claims are performed. Juridical wigs are sometimes worn. Speech acts are enacted, and a determination is reached.” (p. 219).

“As aesthetic practices change, so too do their other associated spaces, such as museums, schools and galleries. To open up problems and events that have been rendered secret, investigative aesthetics rewires relations between such places. In doing so it finds ways of making new kinds of forum, such as collectives and publics.” (p. 220).

“It is in forming this opening to work on fact as a common problematic in all its plurality of conditions, and with all the demands it makes, that investigative aesthetics can take part in the unfolding of the present.” (p. 221).