Aesthetics

New Media Writing

anaesthesia, n.
Modern Latin, < Greek ἀναισθησία want of feeling, < ἀν priv. + αἴσθησι-ς sensation, <
stem αἰσθε-, to feel, perceive.
aesthetic, n. and adj.
Ultimately < ancient Greek αἰσθητικός of or relating to sense perception, sensitive,
perceptive < αἰσθητός sensible, perceptible ( < the stem of αἰσθάνεσθαι to perceive
(see aesthesis n.) + -τός , suf x forming verbal adjectives) + -ικός -ic suf x. 
fi
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• language are aesthetics
• metaphors are aesthetics
• senses are aesthetics
• media are aesthetics
• sensors are aesthetics
The swimming sea cucumber,
Enypniastes eximia,
sometimes referred to as
the headless chicken
monster. NOAA Office of
Ocean Exploration and
Research.
 When humans encounter life-forms that are unfamiliar or strange
Imbler
to us, our instinct is often to distance ourselves from them. We
gawk at how the blueprint of their body veers from our own.
Sometimes they confuse or repulse us. Reports about the blue goo
described it as “formless, faceless and limbless,” descriptors defined
in opposition to ourselves, our faces and our limbs. Before we have a
chance to know what the blue goo might be, we are told that
whatever it is, it is not like us.
Imbler
Sometimes this comparison with an alien world becomes more
literal. One popular trope in discussing the deep sea is that humans
know more about the surface of Mars than the ocean floor. But this
comparison assumes mapping a place is all that constitutes
exploration, and it minimizes the knowledge we do have of what
lives on that surface.
 One of the easiest ways to connect with creatures is through
anthropomorphism—looking to organisms for reflections of
Imbler

ourselves. Anthropomorphism has had a bad rap as unscientific, but

it’s a natural inclination, and, in my view, it can be protective. It
prompts us to care about the killer whale mourning her calf, the
elephants burying their family members with leaves and dirt, even the
octopus fleeing an aquarium for the freedom of the ocean. To ignore
or deny the ways we see ourselves in animals might enable our
exploitation of them, such as through factory farms.
 The painting appeals to us precisely
because it both chimes with our
Ingold

experience of what it feels like to be

under the stars and affords us the
means to dwell upon it—perhaps to
discover depths in this experience of
which we would otherwise remain
unaware.
 Of course there could be no experience of light without the
Ingold

incidence of radiant energy, or without the excitation of

photoreceptors in the retina, but as an affectation of being
—as the experience of inhabiting an illuminated world
—light is reducible to neither. Nevertheless this
experience is entirely real.
 To witness the sun is to see by its own light, or, in the
poetic language of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘if the
Ingold

eye were not sun-like, it could not see the sun.’ By

‘sun-like,’ Goethe did not mean to imply a relation of formal
eyeballs. His point was rather that the same sun that
shines in the sky (the beacon) also shines from our eyes
(the beam). It is what we see with.
Ingold

To see the sun, as Goethe had insisted, the eye must

already respond to its light. But conversely, the sun can
only shine in a world with eyes capable of so responding.
Eyes and sun thus co-respond.
 For von Uexküll, however, the sun in its shining was to be
Ingold

understood not as a physical entity but as a manifest

presence in the world of phenomena. And in this sense, just
as the eye, as Goethe had observed, can see only by virtue of
its correspondence with the sun, so the sun we perceive in the
sky, and that lights the world of our experience, can exist only
through its essential correspondence with the eye.
 Sensors observe, assess, synthesize, and manage
Gabrys

measurements of Earth processes. They typically operate

as networks to detect, analyze, and actuate responses
to environmental events.
Gabrys

Yet, these sensor installations are not just ways of

describing environments, they are also ways of bringing
them into being as sociopolitical worlds, with often
disparate power relations.
Gabrys

These planetaries signal how practices of observation

involve ways of experiencing that are also
propositions for how to collectively inhabit a moving
Earth.
 [T]he Coronavirus outbreak is forcing us
to collectively and seriously ask
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ourselves: what is a medium? The

emergency, of course, cannot be
reduced to this question, but doctors and
scientists are telling us they cannot do it
by themselves, that each of us needs to
play our part. Playing our part today
means that we also collectively
process our being media.
Casey Boyle, March 2020.
 It is necessary to underline that this pervasive capacity of media
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and media practices, which directly affect us, is not the result of the
evil of technics or media (another pivotal issue which often becomes
a source of general misunderstandings). The power of technics has to
be ascribed, first of all, to the fact that media answer to a natural
disposition of human beings, that is adapting ourselves to our own
environment through technical artifacts, devices which are nothing
more than bodily and mental extensions.
 We will physically go back to the squares, the classrooms, the bars
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and cafes, with the awareness that living up to being radical
mediators means opening up a new experimental stage in order
to create an increasingly integrative mediality, which can never be
completely substituted by technics. In the aftermath of this crisis we
will be challenged to reintegrate our own mediality with the
sociotechnical networks that are for the time being substituting
for our embodied relationality.
Aesthetics
New Media Writing