ben (e) on art

ben eastham on art via michel bauwens tweet [https://x.com/mbauwens/status/1991008778997936220?s=20]:

* e-flux journal: Issue #156. Séance: Technology of the Spirit. September 2025 https://e-flux.com/journal/156 “we are surrounded by other worlds. these worlds might be accessed through the mediation of technologies including, but not limited to, art.”

art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)

notes/quotes from linked article:

The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale..starts from the premise that we are surrounded by other worlds. And that these worlds might be accessed through the mediation of technologies including, but not limited to, art.

That we are surrounded by other worlds can easily be demonstrated. Take, for example, my dog. He is restless this morning, will not settle in the bed I have moved into the patch of sunlight beside my desk. Perhaps he is unsettled by some high-pitched sound—from a faulty electrical appliance, let’s say—that is beyond my capacity to hear.

I don’t know, because his world is not accessible to me. My sense of smell is not so acute, my range of hearing much narrower. That these phenomena are outside the realm of my perception—that I cannot see or hear them—does not make them any less real. Nor is the world constructed out of these smells and sounds any less complete than the particular nutshell in which I am trapped.

*There might be some technology that allows me to enter my dog’s world. Goggles that transform smells into colors so that I, too, could know which friends or enemies had recently been hanging around my door; a sensor that would alert me to the high whine of the broken air-conditioning unit that will burn down my apartment. **These new technologies might expand the scope of my reality, reveal phenomena that are no less impactful on my life for being otherwise imperceptible, and explain the behavior of the other beings with whom I share a living space. (In “Art as Technique,” Viktor Shklovsky uses Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer” to exemplify the strategy of defamiliarization through which a revolutionary art might change our social relations. The story is written from the point of view of a horse.)

*tech as it could be.. ie: a means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org/hear around legit needs

**we don’t need to ‘expand scope of reality’ in order to ‘explain the behavior of the other beings’ .. we need to .. let go of understanding ness.. ie: graeber can’t know law; graeber unpredictability/surprise law; paul know\love law

It is a secondary premise of the exhibition—which presents the work of fifty artists from the mid-nineteenth century to the present—that *we might think of art as one such technology. To that end, the biennale is conceived of as a “séance,” which is to say, a mediated experience through which we might receive communications, however fragmentary and incomplete, from other worlds. By these means we might be made able to see through another set of eyes, to move through a world built of unfamiliar perceptions and precepts, **perhaps even momentarily to slip the prison of subjectivity entirely.

*if legit art – ie: art as being human.. because then we would tap into the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

**actually .. deeper would be to realize we don’t need to do/be that.. rather.. we just need to trust the dance.. again.. paul know\love law et al.. via pearson unconditional law.. et al

In doing so, these works of art expand the limits of our everyday reality, connecting us to what William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that lies beyond. James makes the point, later advanced by Karen Barad, that our perception is structured by culture as much as biology: *we see what we are raised to see, hear what we are conditioned to hear.

*again.. why we need means for a global detox leap.. ie: a means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org/hear around legit needs

Hallie Ayres argues for the re-enchantment of everyday life as one means of resisting the separation of spirit from body and meaning from material, while Namsee Kim draws attention to the disastrous consequences of dismissing everything beyond the range of human apprehension as unreal and by extension meaningless.

Art is by no means the only conduit to worlds beyond our everyday experience. ..while Daniel Muzyczuk expounds on the capacity of music to both transport us to other worlds and construct entirely new ones.

again.. need art as being human.

The world as we perceive it is not the sum of all reality. Or, as John Berger puts it, “The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective

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