The Hyperaesthetics of Technology

Analog and digital technologies are an immanent part of postmodern lifeworld’s around the globe, and they are a fundament or – in some cases – driving force for mass media, telecommunication, art, and design. This omnipresence and ordinariness of technology make it very difficult to take sides: the defender determines a specific value of technology for creative processes and the opponent proclaims a general worthlessness of technology for artistic creation. This essay focusses not on different judgements, but it will analyze some important aspects of the structural dynamic of technology in the context of a creative mediatization. This means, that a work of art, a design concept or a communication medium has to be understand as a specific aesthetic artefact that enables a perceptual relation or interaction of a technological repertoire, a specific mode of representation and a sensory awareness of the recipient. This interconnection can be understood within a phenosemiotic sign relation that allows an analytical structuring of aesthetic processes as embodied and perceptual processes. This phenosemiotic analysis gives insights in the specific interconnectedness of technological processes, sensory and perceptual dynamics and the construction of meaning in a cognitive perspective that is always embedded in the bodily processes of reception. Additionally, the phensosemiotic framework is also able to give insights into a possible redefinition or enhancement of the concept of aesthetics in general, which is highly correlated with the sensory processes of the recipient: This means, that postmodern artefacts of mediatization are more and more pushing the boundaries of perception and are simultaneously expanding the structural horizon of a classical aesthetics toward a technological-driven hyperaesthetics. Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine ______ ______ 40 Prototype Aesthetics To argue for the concept of a prototype aesthetics we have to consider some analytical implications that are reaching back to the so-called Stuttgart School of Semiotics in Germany and its research in the range of semiotics, information theory and cybernetics. In this perspective every aesthetics or aesthetic field has something to do with creative processes, decisions about materiality, functionality, object perception and action (cf. Bense 1971). That means, no matter if you focus on art, design or mass media, every creative practice can be described as a sign producing principle. The goal of this sign process is a specific aesthetic perception that is triggered by the artefact and consolidates a relation of sign creation, sign manifestation and sign use (cf. Walther 1979). In this perspective, every form of aesthetics or prototype aesthetics has to deal necessarily with the specific creation of a sign in interdependency with the communication effects to make statements about the aesthetic experience: a prototype aesthetics should be able to characterize the relation of the sensation that is triggered by the material organization of an artefact and the perception of form that gives the aesthetic structure. This analytical horizon has a lot of benefits because it transforms aesthetics into a precise methodology that focusses on the specific repertoire of an artefact, describes the media materiality and highlights the perceptual and semiotic dynamics. So, prototype aesthetics is connected with a media aesthetics and the difference of an artwork or design artefact is not established by an innovative singularity but more through a functional embedding in a media ecological context. Therefore, the prototype is in itself an aesthetic object that enables an aesthetic experience through an artefact-driven perception based on functionality. Max Bense, the founding father of the semiotic inspired Stuttgart School, has argued that a design object has a lot to do with the concept of a sign: It is determined by the technologic materiality, the object form and functionality (cf. Bense 1971). The prototype is a design object that offers a specific aesthetic logic of perception, which is not equate to a naïve aesthetics of pure pleasure. In fact, the aesthetic experience is grounded in a perceptual process that is structured by the deployed means – that is the selection decision of the designer. In this perspective, a prototype aesthetics (like every perceptual and phenosemioticdriven aesthetics) is a dualistic construct that categorizes the intra-medial and extra-medial dynamic Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine ______ ______ 41 of an object (cf. Bense 1965). The intra-medial categorization is a micro-aesthetic perspective, in which the structural levels of a design decision and selection can be analyzed and transferred to the object functionality. The extra-medial categorization is a macro-aesthetic perspective, in which the perceptual conditions of artefact perception (sensory and perceptual relation, polysensuality, multimodality, cross-modality etc.) can be analyzed and transferred to evaluation criteria and aesthetic judgements of the recipient (understanding style, form, context, content, figure, ground, historical developments, meaning, expression). If we compare the microand macro-aesthetic features of modern media, we can clearly indicate a broad range of technological decisions based on the digital conditions of software and hardware culture. This indicates an additional shift within the aesthetic tradition, because it is not necessarily a brilliant artist, the myth of a muse or a contemplative inspiration that are consolidating the fundament of an artefact, but more the complex range of material decisions embedded within the artefact. So, the question is, how can we describe the more and more complex material decisions and effects within the micro-aesthetic perspective? Let us search for an answer within the perceptual reality of the recipient. Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine ______ ______ 42 Body and Code The human body is the first interface. But why? There is no uniform tradition of perceptual theories but more a great number of frameworks and different approaches in academia. The phenosemiotic approach is an aesthetic approach to analyze sensory and perceptual processes and it integrates philosophical, phenomenological and semiotic perspectives and findings of neuroaesthetics and perceptual psychology. In short: Every aesthetic experience is a sensory relation of a human body and an artefact. The human body itself is an interdependent perceptual system that integrates a relation of sensory and perceptual modalities. The sensory system is the first interface structure and it transfers energy patterns, which were created by sensory receptors, into sensory codes for a further decoding by the perceptual system. So, the sensory system organizes a kind of bodily pre-processing of these sensory codes whereby the perceptual system activates mental concepts and generates an output that merges into higher order cognitive processing (cf. Mausfeld 2010). If we use this perceptual approach for the analysis, we can understand sensory inputs as a kind of trigger mechanism for mental conceptualization processes. Therefore, it is possible to clarify the conceptualization processing as an biological element of human nature and a necessary condition for consciousness and mental processes: “They form a texture of internal concepts which determine the ‚internal semantics‘ of the system, i.e. the set of concepts that are important for internal processes, and therefore the vocabulary of the system in which the different subsystems communicate” (Mausfeld 2010, 14). These concepts integrate and stabilize a variety of human conditions, like bodily and mental orientation, social behaviour, and perception of emotional states of other people, food search, use of tools and tool creation, action, thinking, anticipation, memory, language and much more (cf. Mausfeld 2010). It is necessary to argue for the fact that the human body is the first interface in every sensory and perceptual condition. And therefore, in every aesthetic condition. This means, that a prototype aesthetics has to clarify first, how the artefact is triggering sensory codes based on the micro-aesthetic strategies or signals of the designer, and second, which concepts the sensory codes are triggering within the perceptual reality of the recipient. If we understand a prototype aesthetics this way, then it is a theory of the transfer of sensory and perceptual information: a tool for the classification of phenosemiotic sign relations. Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine ______ ______ 43 With regard to the recent developments in computer and digital culture it is important to understand that the concept of aesthetics has necessarily to be extended. The reason for this assumption lies in the range of poly-sensual, multimodal or cross-modal effects of modern media technologies. Let us take three interesting examples for a further clarification: 1. HaptoMime (Tokyo University) is a technological media system based on an IR touch sensor with a screen-less frame, aerial imaging plate (AIP), liquid crystal display (LCD) and an ultrasonic phased array transducer. This technical ensemble generates an effective interaction with a floating image, which receives sensory evidence through an ultrasonic tactile feedback by deflecting acoustic radiation pressure. The result is the visual perceiving of a floating virtual screen (Figures 1 and 2) and depicted virtual objects, and the “ultrasonic phased array transducer delivers focused ultrasound onto the fingertip so that it encounters a mechanical force at a position and timing consistent with the floating image” (Yasuaki 2014, 664). Figure 1: Haptomime. Screenshot from “HaptoMime (full version): Mid-air haptic interaction with a floating virtual screen” https://www.youtube. com/watch ? v=uARGRlpCWg8 Art Style | Art & Cul