Islands

Emre Huner Anthropophagy 2013

What is neso-aesthetics?

(How are islands useful in thinking, even generally, about art’s relationship to the world?)

Neso-aesthetics has developed from my materialist approach to art in general. I take the position that aesthetics is first of all an exploration of our sensible experience, a pursuit of articulating the material and affective properties of art, an exploration of the ways in which art itself opens up our sensible experience of the world. That is, I view art as an important practice of creating or “inventing” new spaces of possibilities and new sensations.  Our experiences of art, at their most transformative, are not only semiotic, but kinesthetic, material, active, multiplicitous events, moments of intensity that provide a destabilizing relationship with the world, access to what we do not know about it and each other. I also consider art a part from/ and apart of the world.  In many ways, to make a quick and dirty metaphor, like an island.  It is own entity (apart – one word, but meaning separation), but also a part (two words, but meaning conjunction) of the unfolding experiences that we have of the world and interpretations we make in the world. 

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