Cartographies of Sensation

In recent years sensation and its molecular aspects – emotions, feelings and affects – have created a new intersection of artistic, philosophical and scientific practices. At the centre of this new area of interdisciplinary research lies a materialistic conception of the relationship between mental and physical phenomena according to which sensations depend on brain processes.
Within contemporary art practice the notions of affect and feeling interweave in a controversial manner. Affects materialize, in consonant or dissonant ways, the feelings of the artist in the artwork – an entity existing by itself, outside of lived personal experience. As a result, artworks can be seen as a medium catapulting private feelings into the realm of public life, thus conferring a socio-political dimension to the intimate sphere of individual sensations.
The problem of empathic relations to the external world has been determined by the pair of emotion and affect in some contemporary philosophy research. While, on the one hand, emotion is to be understood in personal terms as a subjective fixation of an experience, affect has a more objective character, inasmuch as it is conceived of as an autonomous intensity; that is a mechanical entity acting on manifold parts of the body and defining itself solely by its degree of positive or negative strength. Due to the complex relationship of the bodily parts themselves and their mental correlates, the action of the affect cannot be understood as causally deterministic in relation to the realm of the whole individuality of woman or man; it thus disrupts normative subjective codes in favour of constituting social assemblages through empathic connections.
Recent scientific research has found that feeling, as a subjective and private state, has objective neuronal correlates in physiological changes that are experienced as emotions. As a result, feelings and emotions are treated as separate processes in spite of their close relationship. Emotions are produced by the brain in the presence of an external stimulus, and can be analysed objectively through the visualization of the distinct neuronal centres involved in the process. Feelings, on the other hand, are to be understood as mental representations of the neuronal processes related to emotion. In this sense they are private, but they are not more subjective than other intellectual or cognitive processes such as planning or calculations.
By focusing on the intersection of these disciplines a number of questions arise. How is the relationship between emotion, feeling and affect to be understood? How is it possible to bridge the meanings these concepts have in the specific contexts of scientific, artistic and theoretical realms? Affect has been depicted as an autonomous entity outside the body. Is it possible to give a physiological description of it? Could affect be placed, for example, within the complex landscape suggested by a theory of non-linear dynamics and the insights it gives into complex neuronal patterns? What is the place of the private sphere of feeling within the rigorousness of scientific and theoretical approaches? How do these differential constituents of sensation intersect in the production of subjectivity, and how does this production impact on the sphere of politics?

The conference will explore cartographies of sensation between affect, feeling and emotion that draw equally on recent developments in science, philosophy and art. In this sense its orientation will be inter-disciplinary. The conference is organized into three panels, each of which will contain an artist, a philosopher and a scientist. Each panel is organized around a different theme, constituting the terrain it will map.



This panel intends to explore how sensations operate on and through the body. Sensations produce relationships between aggregates, on microscopic and macroscopic levels. A neurophysiological example of such a connection is given by the activity of the recently discovered mirror neurons. Ensembles of nervous cells have been found to fire, that is to be activated, through a direct stimulus like pain as well as by the indirect stimulus of seeing someone else in pain. "Intersubjective" emotions like empathy can be better understood by observing the behaviours of specific neuronal patterns. In this way, mental and emotional states have been found to rely on a materialistic physiological basis. These premises lead to a series of questions:

• In which way does the analysis of the organic substrate – i.e. the physiological activity of the body – effect the understanding of what emotions and feelings are and, as a consequence, the way in which subjectivity is constructed?
• How do theoretical and artistic practices make use of these scientific results?
• Have the concepts in question – sensation, emotion, feeling and affect – an analogous meaning within the realms of different disciplines?

Here the role of sensation will be examined in the extension of the body’s natural frontiers through its interface with technological devices. This process contributes to the shaping of complex "cybernetic" identities that radically reshape our social and conceptual structures. The following questions will be addressed:

• In what way does this relation change our definition of what is "artificial"? Is "artificial" a term strictly related to technological products, or can its meaning be extended to genetic, cultural and social realms? Does it make sense to speak of "artificial" in opposition to the "natural" or is a change of terminology, e.g. to "human" and "non-human", more useful here?
• Are these two kinds of opposition different or are they intertwined in a new "human-machine aggregate"?
• What are possible visualizations of these complex forms of aggregation at microscopic as well as macroscopic levels?
• What political implications might be drawn from the previous considerations?

Sensation will be discussed in this panel as an encounter between the self and the world, with beauty being the result. As a result, beauty is not understood here as the individual’s faculty of subjective taste nor as an objective state of art, but as a process of autopoiesis out of which the new can emerge, like a proof that determines a result in a surprising way. In this sense aesthetics, by operating through and with sensation, is seen to play a central role in subjective and social formations and transformations.

This definition of sensation cuts short the absolute objectivity of a reality independent of subjective interaction, as well as the purely individualistic constructions of facts.

• How then is the notion of an "event" as the determining factor leading to a scientific discovery or an artistic production to be understood?
• Scientific activity has been more concerned with the epistemological question related to "truth"; can these questions be extended to artistic practices?
• Can we use the same concept of beauty to discuss scientific, theoretical and artistic practices, or do we need to distinguish differentiated kinds of beauty?