Silence and Sound
Nanyang Technological University English Graduate Research Symposium
4-5th October 2024
Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan (SHHK) Building
48 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639818
Sensory Aesthetics
Day 2, 18 February | 10.15AM - 11.45AM
Moderator: Nadia Alang
1 Aesthetics: From Sense-Making to Sense-Engaging
Nadia Alang
2 A Touch of Oil: An autoethnographic braid
Marc Nair
3 Lost Horizons: Constructing a fiction of knowledge
Debbie Ding
Aesthetics: From Sense-Making to Sense-Engaging
Nadia Alang
Aesthetics (derived from the Greek ‘aisthanomai’ for sensory perception) began in the eighteenth century as a study of how to refine our sensory faculties vis-a-vis the ‘higher’ cognitive faculties, that of the mind. In other words, how to refine one’s ‘keenness of sensation, imaginative capacity, penetrating insight, good memory, poetic disposition, good taste, foresight, expressive talent’ (Richard Shusterman). Elsewhere, in their writings on aesthetics, British philosophers like Lord Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson and Edmund Burke were emphasizing a mode of sensory perception not centrally driven by desires but by an ‘absorption in the object for its own sake.’ (Jerrold Levinson) Thus, we see how aesthetics early on was intertwined with discourses regarding the nature of perception in the context of mind-body dualism and theological associations of the body with carnal desires.
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I begin with investigating how the scope of aesthetics and particularly the role of the body within aesthetics has evolved since, and how it relates to the literary arts today. For instance, Peter Lamarque has observed that aesthetic takes on literature often deviate into discussions about the cognitive and ethical significance of a work, the role of emotions in reader responses, the philosophy of language, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and moral philosophy. To wrest the focus of aesthetics back to the realm of perception and the sensorial experience of art, I explore questions like: To what degree does perception operate on the level of sensory feeling and on the level of cognitive processing? Can there be a clear distinction between feeling and thinking in our experiences with art? More specifically, how can we feel a literary work on the level of sensory perception or is there perhaps a mode of feeling that is not restricted to the sensate?
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Works Cited:
Lamarque, Peter. ‘Aesthetics and Literature: A Problematic Relation?’ The Opacity of Narrative, Rowman & Littlefield
International, Ltd., 2014, pp. 169–83.
Levinson, Jerrold. ‘Philosophical Aesthetics: An Overview’. The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, edited by Jerrold
Levinson, Oxford University Press, 2003.
Shusterman, Richard. ‘Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 57, no. 3,
June 1999, pp. 299–313, https://doi.org/10.2307/432196.
Nadia Alang is a postgraduate student at Nanyang Technological University whose research is on Aesthetics and contemporary literature. She holds a BA in English Literature and Art History. She is particularly interested in the affective-emotional dimension of art which leads her to analyse how the human body – the site for sensorial experiences – is treated in literary and visual arts. Her research is multidisciplinary as she draws from strands of Affect Theory, Philosophy of Art/Literature, and Art History.
A Touch of Oil: An autoethnographic braid
Marc Nair
The braided essay (Miller & Paola, 2005), in creative non-fiction, is a form that brings together two disparate narratives, twining them through theme or image. It is a form that isn’t meant to make logical connections between the two, rather, like a metaphor, makes the reader work to guess and probe at a possible range of meanings. Responding to the idea
of motion, this essay takes a twin autoethnographic lens, one in the present, one in the past. In the present, I write about attending a full body oil massage course and all of the attendant adventures that come along with it. In the past, I am thinking about my own history of touch as an evangelical Christian; from being prayed over to praying for others to anointing someone with oil. These two experiences are essentially autoethnographic in nature, situating the self within wider settings that contain meaty resonance between the personal and the political. An excellent definition of autoethnography by Christopher Poulos (2021) positions it as “an observational, participatory, and reflexive research method that uses writing about the self in contact with others to illuminate the many layers of human social, emotional, theoretical, political, and cultural praxis.” In this essay, issues of consent, privacy and permission jostle alongside an understanding of the body located within a frame of meaning, whether it is the sanctified, redeemed body in Christianity or the body willingly subjected to ministrations in massage.
Marc Nair, PhD is an educator, poet and multidisciplinary artist. He has exhibited photographs, performed spoken word and worked with numerous artists over the past twenty years, both in Singapore and internationally. Author of six collections of poetry, he has collaborated with graphic artists, photographers and visual artists on another four books. A recipient of the 2016 Young Artist Award, he is currently working on an autoethnographic exploration of the loss of faith.
Lost Horizons: Constructing a fiction of knowledge
Debbie Ding
This paper explores the author’s “Lost Horizons” project - an immersive artwork which constructs a fiction of knowledge by experimenting with the juxtaposition of different perspectives and framing in order to produce a poetic immersive
experience. The work takes its inspiration from spectatorial affinities that the virtual reality medium shares with cinema, cartography, and other older immersive visual technologies such as the camera obscura, magic lanterns, dioramas, stereoscopic images, holography, photography, and 360 video. The immersive media takes advantage of what Michel de Certeau describes to be a “lust to be a viewpoint”. The use of game-engine technology allows for the design of virtual spaces which go from claustrophobic to opening up into expansive vistas within a few steps, and to fluently switch between everyday street eye’s view to the aerial view, the all-seeing celestial eye.
In the artwork, you find yourself in a maze-like bookstore, attending a book launch of a novel which tells the story of a group of passengers who have crash-landed in a mysterious country that is off the maps, prompting the rest of the world to surmise that the passengers must be lost. If you journey to the east, you’ll find yourself in the plane’s crash landing site amongst vast mountains. To the west, you’ll find yourself in a labyrinthine utopia that doesn’t seem to be on the maps. To the north, you’ll see a glimpse of the reality that you left behind, the headquarters command room for the international search for the missing plane. And to the south, you’ll find yourself in a mysterious map room, in which the maps are oriented differently from how we know them, where all the places have swapped names...
This paper documents the work-in-progress process, as well as findings and discussion from workshops and the presentation of the work at CO Berlin’s festival in Dec 2022.
Debbie Ding is an artist/technologist whose interests range from historical research to visions of the future. She received a BA in English Literature from National University of Singapore and an MA in Design Interactions from Royal College of Art, London. She had solo exhibitions at The Substation Gallery (2010) and Galerie Steph (2013). Notable group exhibitions include “Radical Gaming” (HEK Basel, 2021), “Wikicliki” (Singapore Art Museum, 2021), “President’s Young Talents” (Singapore Art Museum, 2018); “After the Fall” (National Museum of Singapore, 2017); Singapore Biennale (2016).