Sensorial experience

Prior to joining the XPUB program, I have a small body of work, and my interests are loosely connected. The small body of work is consisted of three publications of color. The thematic interest on color is due to my interest in theories of vision from sporadic readings of Merleau-Ponty, Descartes, and Massumi. I am interested the way these authors write about sensorial experience in its most nascence. To unpack how I understand nascence, Merleau-Ponty reconstitutes an experience of seeing a red book as firstly perceiving a certain redness, which is in turn the manifestation of a red surface, which is the manifestation of a piece of red cardboard, and finally, the manifestation of the outline of a red thing, namely, this book.

The phenomenological approach is valuable to my research since it affirms in my practical work, the centrality of bodily perception. I like how Foucault summarizes the text of Phenomenology of Perception: “the body organism is linked to the world through a network of primal significations, which arise from the perception of things.”

Prior to entering the XPUB program during the interview, I was asked about my choice of extracting color from IKEA catalog. At that point I did not know how to answer. The answer is as simple as I like the color palette of IKEA, I like the way individual color swatches rhythmically resonate from one another.

The formation of the public sphere is comprised of what is presented public, hence, our perception and notion of the public is conditioned by what is already presented as public. This process neglects the margins away from the centralized and the more often attended. As an individual, my perceptive experience is conditioned by the content in public sphere. I try to go back to Foucault’s summarization again – the body organism is linked to the world through a network of primal significations, which arise from the perception of things. As an individual, my perceptive experience is conditioned by the content in public sphere; that is to say, “the perception of things” is conditioned by the content in the public sphere.