Pol Capdevila - Sensorium, Technology and Aesthetic Experience

Sensorium and Aesthetic Experience Human Self-Reflection in

Technological Art

Pol Capdevila Castells

Modern Sensorium and Technology (Jones’s Essay “The Mediated Sensorium”)

Historical Development:

- wider and more specialised knowledge of each sense;

- a subsequently technological improvement,

- which makes possible a segmentation and intensification of the senses (glasses, Hi-Fi, accustical isolation, prothesis, computers)

- colonisation and control of the body functions

- today’s comfortable self-access and control of these functions

Recent History of our Sensorium

• Denigration process of the sense of smell

• Growth, segmentation and purification of hearing

• visi-textuality as model for ocular-centrism

• segmentation, hierarchysation and instrumentalisation

of senses in the production of subjects

Jones’ Theory Virtues and Vices

Virtues

1. Narrow approach in the relation between current social order and human understanding

(genetic methodology)

2. More plausible than its orthodox Marxist-Darwinist version

3. Useful instrument to describe the mutual influences

between art and society

Vices

• epistemological problem (not-recognised prejudices)

• Forgetting phenomena• Generalising Greenberg’s

reception of Mid-Century art.• lacks a concrete conception

of the role of the aesthetic experience

Conditions for a Theory of the Experience of Art

(compatible with Jones poststructuralist approach)

• Emotional and bodily elements.

• Justify the artistic formal means as an important factor in the artistic

effect

• Justify the intersubjective self-reflection of the experience of art

(this gives an implicit conception of the world, the subject etc.)

• Aesthetic Autonomy

Pol Capdevila - Sensorium, Technology and Aesthetic Experience

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