Reshaping Aesthetics and Aesthetic Sensibility in a Hybrid Environment
Aleksandra Łukaszewicz
Jakub Petri
Abstract
The contemporary environment in developed countries is highly urbanized and technologized. It is not only physical but also virtual, created with the use of cyber-techniques and the internet. The two layers of the environment are: the physical places, persons, objects, etc., and the virtual – electronically-emerged places, persons, and objects, etc. Therefore, it is correct to overcome the enforced conceptual dualism between what is virtual and what is physical, as proposed by Michal Ostrowicki (aka Sidey Myoo) in calling for the recognition of the hybrid status of reality, by pointing to symbiosis within the context of lived experience. This raises questions on the kind of experience one has in a hybrid environment, and how this in turn influences one’s practices and forms of being with others.
Trying to respond to these questions will lead us to recognition of the ongoing transformation of aesthetic sensibility in a hybrid environment, and of the need for aesthetic reflection to respond to this. This will be done in the following paper by recognizing the community-building potential of art in both layers of a hybrid environment, the physical and the digital, which leads to emergence and functioning of communities in such an environment, showing the necessity of broader research in this field.
Key Words
art, community, environmental aesthetics, hybrid environment, sensibility, somaesthetics, technology
1. Introduction
The contemporary environment in developed countries is highly urbanized and technologized. It is not only physical but also virtual, created with the use of cyber-techniques and the internet. The two layers of the environment are: the physical places, persons, objects, etc., and the virtual – electronically-emerged places, persons, and objects, etc. This construction of a new hybrid environment is made possible through and is realized by the advances of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), already reality in many areas of our daily life.[1] The implementations of Artificial Intelligence, the internet of Things, 3D printing, “green energy” systems, quantum computing, and robotics all are blurring the boundaries between the physical (also biological), and the virtual which emerges from digital matter. In both layers humans conduct various activities, working and spending free time alone or with friends. The two layers also interact continuously with each other, because the majority of people in developed countries are parallelly physically and online, as when walking the streets and having a video chat with a friend.
Regardless whether the global situation develops peacefully or not, it is very probable that technological development will proceed towards virtual reality and augmented reality, either creating worlds for escape, or adding information and functionality to the perception of the world around us. Therefore, it is important to consider the approach to these realities and not to deny them substantial existence.
From an ontological perspective, virtual reality and partly augmented reality have different material from physical reality – not appearing as physical matter, but as digital matter. However, human persons live in both these realities, because nowadays the internet is not a space visited on random occasions, but a net that connects us with work, friends, our interests, governments, and global corporations. Therefore, it is correct to overcome the enforced conceptual dualism between what is virtual and what is physical, as proposed by Michal Ostrowicki (aka Sidey Myoo) in calling for the recognition of the hybrid status of reality[2] by pointing to symbiosis within the context of lived experience.[3]
This raises questions on the kind of experience one has in a hybrid environment, and how this in turn influences one’s practices and forms of being with others. Trying to respond to these questions will lead us to recognition of the ongoing transformation of aesthetic sensibility in a hybrid environment, and of the need for aesthetic reflection to respond to this. This will be done in the following paper by recognizing the community-building potential of art in both layers of a hybrid environment, the physical and the digital, which leads to emergence and functioning of communities in such an environment, showing the necessity of broader research in this field.
2. Community-building potential of art
Art is a cultural phenomenon which irresistibly opposes attempts to enclose it within definitive boundaries.[4] However, this does not make it impossible to examine it under various perspectives to bring the art closer and take approximate views of it. One significant perspective is social: seeing art through the practices of art creation, performance, and reception, rather than focusing on objects. In the case of art creation and performance, we may talk about the “social turn” in reference to artistic practices which are collaborative, participatory, and involve people as “medium or material.”[5]
A significant example of such artistic activity comes from a Polish background and refers to the social and cultural geography of the city of Kraków. Cecylia Malik is a Polish performing artist who initiated a cyclic event called Wodna Masa Krytyczna (aquatic critical mass).[6] The idea of this action blends social engagement of Kraków’s citizens with artistic means provided by cultural animators, to obtain a perceptive breakthrough and critical change in collective awareness of Kraków dwellers in regard to their relations with neglected and polluted rivers flowing through the city, especially the main river, Vistula. Each year in June, Malik and other members of the artistic collective “Niedzielni” invite Cracovians to run down the Vistula River on prepared small boats, platforms, and any possible devices that can displace passengers in water. The aim of this gathering is the creation of what Malik calls a “critical mass,” composed in the embodied actions of performers, their thoughts and opinions, imaginatively shared in spheres of traditional as well as social, electronic media. This kind of accumulation of means is obtained directly in the local community, thanks to collaborative work and engagement of its members.[7]
Therefore, in the case of art reception and philosophy, we advise to follow the pragmatist approach, which closely bonds arts, communities, and daily life experiences,[8] and which treats each community member as a potential artist, capable of an “artful life of social interaction” with a potential to transform the community.[9] The artistic activities considered do not necessarily need to take place in formal spaces of art institutions, as they can comprise artistic engagements and interactions in everyday environments.
In the present, with many activities realized by means of digital media, common experiences, sharing, and co-operating are not just occurring in physical space, but also in virtual spaces, with a visible overlap and constant mutual interference of these layers – as for example, in various fandoms: these are communities of appreciation, sharing interests and co-operation. Until the end of the 20th century they were physical, using print and traditional post, sometimes also television, while today they are both physical and online. Comic heroes can be reimagined by the viewers, performed by them with their own bodies on the screens of televisions, computers, iPads, or smartphones as well as physically, during events and conventions (such as one of the biggest, Comic-Con International). Fans cooperate using their bodies and minds in a reality that is hybrid, physical and digital at the same time, to construct together an aesthetic community, fluid and without set management hierarchy, which can also be called hybrid.
Of course, apart from hybrid communities there exist other traditional and virtual ones. A traditional community is one whose members co-share the same space and are interrelated. If they use digital media, this use is barely limited to social media for communication and information-sharing. A virtual community is composed of individuals from across regions, countries, and around the world, who establish or appropriate for themselves some virtual space and relations using such technology as VR. In virtual communities members generally do not meet in person. If they wish to meet, they do so online, via chat or teleconferencing platforms.[10] These are media for having discussions, sharing texts, images, audio, and video materials, for being and doing together through means of online communication.
The communication in which individuals are immersed in any kind of community – whether traditional, virtual, or hybrid – is not a flow of abstract symbols but a process of environmental information exchange in which individuals emerge through participation. Experiencing together and cooperating, they build up a community to which we may appeal as an aesthetic community. We may use here the pragmatist notion of community as an aesthetic community, defined through a pervasive continuity of perception, which is characterized in terms of “immediacy that is directly present and real to experience.”[11] This definition corresponds with the current trend of abandoning object-oriented artistic methodologies in favor of a “process-based, performative approach.”[12] In this regard, Grant Kester uses Peter Dunn’s famous metaphor to differentiate between what he calls “object providers” and “context providers,” to identify the latter as representatives of the new “dialogical art”[13] which creates bonds with performers and community, and provides tools for their mutual transformation. Arnold Berleant points to the same process of contextualization and the importance of the switch from object-oriented, contemplative approaches to direct engagement:
The aesthetic community is a community in and of experience. Its resemblance to the situation in which we experience art lends it its name. In art when the potential of the aesthetic field is fulfilled, a rich reciprocity develops among the artist’s creative force, the art object, its appreciator, and the performer or activator of the work. Contemplative distancing and the presumed objectification of the knowledge process are foreign to this situation. Aesthetic engagement defines its character instead. The same reciprocity of constituent parts, the multiplicity of interrelated functions, the assimilation of observer into participant, the salience of qualitative experience – all these distinguish the aesthetic community, as well.[14]
Such understanding of community through processes of aesthetic engagement implies, however, two important consequences which can’t be left unrecognized. The first one relates to the matter of dialogicality and the other to social-material aspects of performance.
As for the former, we recognize the importance of supplementation of Berleant’s standpoint in terms of communal dialogicality. Berleant emphasizes greatly the aspect of unity of perception in terms of communal inclusion, however at the same time seems to neglect somewhat the ability of the aesthetic community to self-reflect and transform. Our further understanding of community arises then from the idea of so-called “non-consensual democracy,” which promotes the notion of democracy as a medium of communication.[15] In this notion, the community is identified as “critical,” as it reveals such features as dialogicality, self-reflection, and ability to discuss its own tradition.[16]
In respect to the latter, we would like to enhance the category of aesthetic engagement through a push on its material aspects in context of its pragmatic environmental and aesthetic dimension. Recognizing the consequences of the “material turn” in humanities, we define it in terms of a discourse of social-material practices.[17] Thus, we treat communication as a kind of material agency, which is producing understanding through embodied intra-action of actants.[18] This means a dynamic, processual concept of environmental information exchange in which individuals are emergent through activities. Therefore, aesthetic means informative, as circularity of sensory stimuli is a foundation of information. We follow the environmental perspective here, where aesthetics blends with ecology, through recognizing ecologic structures as context for communication.[19] In this area, we recognize the importance of categories of “apparatus”[20] and “assemblage”[21] in relation to communities established through “open-ended practices” and defined as “open-ended gatherings.” We follow such understanding of those categories according to which they play a key role in ecological redefinition of communal activities, understood as a kind of evolving practice producing new life patterns.[22] Community is then understood more as an ephemeral collective, a kind of a happening, definitely not as a pre-established entity with a limited set of rules. This seems to add an additional, somatic aspect to Berleant’s notion of community through the category of continuity, which is defined “beyond measures of absorption or assimilation and external relations between separate objects” but establishes itself through “connectedness within a whole.”[23]
Emergence of virtual and hybrid communities should evoke reflection on the aesthetic dimension of the social-environmental transformation enabled by 4IR. The contemporary world is existentially different from the former period, before going online, which emphasizes the transformation of sensibility and senses as means of connection to the environment of sentient beings.[24] Until now, in a striking contrast to the progress that 4IR enables in spheres of production and management, there exists a distinct lack of recognition of important ethical, sociological, and aesthetic issues.[25] 4IR’s explicit aim of creating and exploiting synergies among biological, physical, and technological components speaks to its purely economic origins; it simply does not discern the moral, social, and aesthetic consequences of its uptake.[26] It is the aesthetic responsibility to adjust to the current worldly situation and consider its concepts and mechanism in relation to the hybrid environments, focusing on emergence and functioning of various kinds of communities nowadays.
Environmental aesthetics, as established by Arnold Berleant,[27] is a philosophy which can embrace hybrid environment and communities and keep its close relatedness to art, despite some features of sensible feelings from the physical world that are lost in translation or transposition to the augmented or virtual world. In these losses and gains, another kind of sensibility is appearing and developing with AR and VR technologies that allow for multisensory stimulation; although we may long for more pure physical sensible perception, it is no longer easily (if at all) accessible to us. Nevertheless, sensibility and senses still play the key role of connecting the individual with the environment, allowing for mutual influences of the individual and the environment, including social and cultural dimensions. The transformation of the environment stimulates the senses, motivating activities undertaken by individuals, groups, and communities upon this environment.
3. Technological environments and their influence on sensibility
Performing interactions through hybrid, media-layered environments, including with the use of AR and VR, requires the use of contemporary communication techniques and their specific interfaces. These include both two-dimensional monitors and three-dimensional headsets, such as Oculus Quest or HTC Vive.[28] These 4IR technologies enable progressive ways of creating multilevel interaction and promoting the building of participatory networks that incorporate aspects of dialogue and negotiations.[29] This is a significant element of the so-called metaverse (metaversum), a newly developed and graphically homogenic 3D internet where participants are invited to present themselves purely from a first-person perspective. In this context, the AltspaceVR platform for virtual presentation of live events appears closest to natural, intuitive, human experience. Importantly, AltspaceVR is recognized as a far easier vehicle to use than classic, two-dimensional interfaces.
The senses that dominate movements and actions in hybrid and virtual reality are sight and hearing, and it is also possible to digitally evoke sensations of touch. The extension of scope to include smell and taste seems also feasible, and is the subject of the current research.[30]
This convergence of senses in acts of perception is also characteristic for situations in physical life; we turn to Marshall McLuhan’s idea of returning to the commonality of senses due to the use of electronic media.[31] According to McLuhan, the commonality of senses brings the human back to himself/herself, to one’s sensible body, after a long period of focusing on sight[32] as the most privileged sense in European and American culture, and on mind.
The sensual experience in hybrid environments is of course different than in the “tribal” stage of development of media communication, described by Marshall McLuhan, which is based on the synergy of senses involved in the process of exchange within a certain surrounding.[33] In being online, the experience of an individual is layered, although the layers – like in geological strata – permeate. One example of this permeation can be seen in telematics, understood as sensing the digital environment: that is, sensual stimulus which one has while experiencing various objects, places, and persons in a digitally-created environment. The doubt expressed by Sidey Myoo, of telematic basis in association of relevant senses or with direct sensual sensations,[34] can be responded to in neuroaesthetics research observing brain activity; for example, touching the surface of water and reflecting oneself in it, in a physical life situation, in comparison to the same but created digitally with the use of cameras, screens, touchpads, and audio speakers [35] – as was done in “Liquid Views. Narcissus’ Mirror Senses” (1992-2009) by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss. Senses are transmitters of the stimuli to the brain, and it is the brain that is sensing. The source of the sensations is different across different layers of the world: in touching digitally, we physically touch the touch screen, and the sensation of touching and feeling the water, digitally appearing, are combined.
Telematic experience of the digital environment is not restricted to the individual, only offering solipsistic interactions with objects and places. It also relates to experiences of being together, sharing common space. Being together either in role play computer games or in environments like Second Life or AltspaceVR, Google VR gives a feeling of conviviality and communication. Persons engaging themselves in such environments are together realizing various activities: discussion and chatting, listening to music, fighting, having sex, forming various relations with others inhabiting these spaces. In our time of accelerated technological development,[36] whether at peace or in war, it is very probable that humans will live not just in the physical world, but in a hybrid one – with virtual and augmented elements to realize their social activities and to experience the environment.
Therefore, regarding mutual responsiveness of technological environments and sensibility, we promote use of the term “hybridity.” Hybridity denotes the sphere of intertwining traditional and digital environments in lived experience. The term is meant to encourage cross-conceptual dualism between what is virtual and physical,[37] and to point out its symbiosis in the context of lived experience.[38] Such an approach, however, still needs some methodological refinement. It is deeply ingrained in methodological issues of cognitive inquiry, where one of the main problems refers to the fundamental gap in experience between subjective experience of one’s personal life and experience of physical processes taking place in the “outside world,” as pointed out by Francisco Varela.[39] In this regard, hybridity shouldn’t be clarified only in terms of the gap: we need also to elaborate on how sensations coming from physical and digital spheres relate to each other. One significant attempt to resolve the aforementioned problem comes from Francesco Varela himself, who promotes the strategy of dissolving the subjective-objective gap through carefully applied strategy of pragmatics of experience.[40] Keeping that in mind, we can imagine hybrid environmental inquiry as “embracing its pluralistic and open-ended nature – destabilizing first-third person connections through the process of constant (methodological) refinements. A key component of this process is the exploration of various first-person methodologies.”[41] We expect that their inclusion within the hybrid environmental inquiry will significantly improve the quality of studies on communities of appreciation by exploring and promoting knowledge on somatic aspects of engagement.
4. Somaesthetic communities of appreciation in hybrid environments
Contemporary psychological studies confirm theoretical reflections on art having influence on communities and indicate correlation between apperception of beauty in art and prosocial behaviors, referring to the results of neuroaesthetic studies. Neuroaesthetic researchers agree that “there are no neural networks (or brain modules) that are dedicated to aesthetics” and the “[b]rain appears to have ensembles of various neural subsystems that combine in flexible ways to provide us with aesthetic experience,”[42] so that they rather observe which parts of the brain are activated, and how, while seeing: landscapes, faces, cities, art works, beautiful and ugly images, expressing joy and sorrow. Analysis of these studies shows that “although a variety of brain regions respond to experiences of beauty, the mOFC (medial orbito-frontal cortex) is the most consistently found to do so across domains of beauty: beautiful paintings, beautiful music, human facial beauty, moral beauty, and beautiful ideas.”[43] Appreciation of beauty, recognized as a trait in psychology which is called Openness,[44] or as close to the virtue of transcendence because of its relation with excellence,[45] or as ability to recognize value,[46] refers not only to natural and artistic beauty, but also to moral beauty and beautiful ideas. Apart from excellence, moral dimension also matters. Diessner, Stacy, Pohling, and Gűsewell report that
the major emotional response to observing acts of moral beauty is the moral emotion of elevation (Haidt, 2003). Along with awe and gratitude, elevation is considered a self-transcendent moral emotion because it was found that elevation leads to transcending the self psychologically by inducing and expanded awareness of thinking about and attention to other people, physiologically by inducing bodily reactions that are associated with human affiliation system, and motivationally by prompting prosocial or even altruistic intentions and behavior.[47]
The philosophical background for Diessner’s, Stacy’s, Pohling’s, and Gűsewell’s psychological perspective is taken from American philosophers like Crispin Sartwell[48] and Alexander Nehamas,[49] who point out the influence of common experience of art on creation of communities of appreciation. Arguing for the social dimension of beauty, Alexander Nehamas writes:
Beauty is something we share, or something we want to share, and shared experiences of beauty are particularly intense forms of communication. Thus, the experience of beauty is not primarily within the skull of the experiencer but connects observers and objects such as works of art and literature in communities of appreciation.[50]
Communities of appreciation emerge in moments of common strong aesthetics experience, generative for psychological emotions like awe, fright, or elevation, for recognition of value and related to philosophical categories of beauty and the sublime;[51] and in a long-term relationship based on common interest and appreciation, often either of high or popular art.[52]
Recognizing such communities, in context of the environmental approach, involves matters of lived experience and embodied cognition; thus it is beneficial to refill the neurological standpoint with soma-oriented, pragmatic approaches. In this field, contemporary neurophenomenology uses the strategy of “constant refinement” to explore the interplay between application of first-person methodologies and processes of bracketing the experience. The constant refinement strategy is understood as an open-ended process, which can be performed “vertically, as it deepens our understanding of a given sector. But it can be also achieved horizontally – by adopting various first-person disciplines – ‘zooming-into’ new sectors of lived experience.”[53] Taking into account the latter perspective, it seems adequate to satisfy the need to “situate knowledge” by including “an overlooked dimension of knowledge that is “concrete,” “embodied,” “incorporated,” and “lived.”[54] A similar strategy is becoming popular also in the neurological approach represented by neuroaesthetics, which focuses nowadays more on processes instead of objects and their representations in studies on cognition. Such perspective has already been present within the field for at least a decade.[55]
Now, thinking on creating and reshaping communities of appreciation through means of constant refinement process, we could also embrace the matter of experiencing informational circularity in hybrid environments. Methods of validation of informational circularity in traditional environments were developed among others in somatics, through somatic learning,[56] and in somaesthetics, through the concept of transactional experiential inquiry.[57] Those methodologies allow us to recognize and manage different types of sensory stimuli and understand their consequences in a physical world. In case of non-orthodox, hybrid environments, we obtain a wider range of stimuli of different classes (physical and digital). The question is whether the mentioned classical methodologies allow for their adequate interpretation; in our opinion, not only it is possible, but also their implementation into modern cognitive inquiry can be perceived in categories of such complementation of the neurological approach, which enhances awareness of somatic aspects of engagement in communities of appreciation.
The results of implementation of such a pragmatic, process-oriented approach are already visible, as we see traditional first-person methodologies of somatics and somaesthetics working surprisingly well, blended with neuroimaging and biofeedback. A significant project in that field comes from Thecla Shiphorst’s research on somaesthetics of touch, where somatics and somaesthetic methodologies are used for validation and modulation of data obtained from biofeedback devices, recognizing tactile and kinesthetic interaction.[58] The research project:
Explores intimacy and experience through physical interaction with 10-12 networked soft objects that exhibit emerging behavior when touched or moved within a space. The network recognizes the quality of tactile and kinesthetic interaction, responding to how objects are touched or moved. Interaction with the soft objects elicits behaviors such as humming, shaking, sighing, singing, and shared moving luminous patterns. Each soft object is hand constructed and contains a specially designed, hand-sewn, and custom-engineered soft-intelligent-tactile input surface, motion detectors, and an ability to respond through vibration, light, and sound.[59]
A similar approach has been developed in the concept of Somaesthetic Appreciation Design, where the critical edge of somaesthetics and somatic practice of Feldenkrais Method are incorporated as research tools, fostering an open-ended, hybrid environment, where somatic reactions are stimulated by using different modalities such as heat and light, generated through physical and digital means: “We propose Somaesthetic Appreciation as one of the strong concepts that can help serve a generative role, opening a design space with many different applications – applications where the interaction subtly supports users’ attention inwards, towards their own body, enriching their sensitivity to, enjoyment and appreciation of their own somatics.”[60] The authors of the concept are fully aware of the aforementioned experiential gap, which in this case occurs between somaesthetics as being a theory of felt bodily experience, which for many appears as simply abstract, and the realm of practical, embodied design.[61] What’s significant, in this regard, is that they propose applying the constant refinement strategy through cultivation (a term derived directly from Shusterman’s approach to Human-Computer Interaction), to develop synergy between physical and digital spheres of the lived experience:
First, no technological invention of virtual reality will negate the body’s centrality as the focus of affective, perceptual experience through which we experience and engage the world. Second, cultivating better skills of body consciousness can provide us with enhanced powers of concentration to help us overcome problems of distraction and stress caused by the new media’s superabundance of information and stimulation.[62]
5. Conclusions
Hybrid environments are reshaping human sensibility in responding to various types of stimuli, both physical and digital. This transformation should be researched in a broad extent, collecting scientific results from neuroaesthetics, neurophenomenology, biofeedback, psychological studies, recognizing the communal and moral dimension of being immersed in a kind of environment connected with a certain community, and considering a first-person view of somatics and somaesthetics.
This situation also requires aesthetic reflection which is flexible enough and not focused on materiality of objects (following object-oriented methodology on works of art and their value), but on the quality of aesthetic experiences that are forms of engagement with the environment in which one is immersed. The aesthetic experience shared in hybrid environments has community-building potential, though different kinds of communities emerge than those connected within the same physical space (city, school, rural area) and/or family bonds. These communities and mechanisms for supporting community development by means of participation in art creation and reception still should be researched extensively.
Aesthetic reflection should rely then on the general framework of pragmatism, with its focus on experience, engagement, environment, sensibility, and community, acknowledging the change in the kind of environment, communication media, and forms of bodily stimulations.
Aleksandra Łukaszewicz
aleksandra.lukaszewicz.alcaraz@akademiasztuki.eu
Professor in Humanities in the field of Culture Studies, PhD in Philosophy, specialist in philosophical aesthetics and theory of culture and art, presenting an interdisciplinary approach, combining elements of aesthetical and social reflection. Vice-chairman of the Polish Society of Aesthetics. The recipient of various prizes and grants; these include a scholarship from the Kościuszko Foundation for research on art, culture, and aesthetics in the work of Joseph Margolis, and a grant to support the preparation of her book project on the theory of cyborg persons explained in terms of the metaphysics of culture: Are Cyborgs Persons? An Account on Futurist Ethics, Palgrave Macmillan 2021.
The coordinator of two international research consortiums: TICASS (2017-2021) and TPAAE (2020-2023) realizing projects funded by the European Commission within the programme MSCA-RISE H2020, dedicated to visual communication and visual literacy, and to art and art education in intercultural perspective.
Jakub Petri
Jakub.petri@uj.edu.pl
Jakub Petri obtained a PhD in Philosophy from the Jagiellonian University in 2009 with a thesis on aesthetics of urban space, and habilitation in Philosophy from the Jagiellonian University in 2020 with a book on somatics of urban performative disciplines. Petri’s interdisciplinary work includes areas such as: aesthetics of embodiment, urban studies, pragmatist aesthetics, and intercultural/transcultural studies.
Published November 29, 2022.
Cite this article: Aleksandra Łukaszewicz & Jakub Petri, “Reshaping Aesthetics and Aesthetic Sensibility in a Hybrid Environment,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 10 (2022), Twenty Years of Contemporary Aesthetics, (accessed date).
Endnotes
[1] Klaus Schwab, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: What It Means, and How to Respond,” Japan Spotlight, July/August, (2016), 3-5. https://www.jef.or.jp/journal/pdf/208th_Cover_01.pdf
[2] Michael Heim, Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 1994). DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195092585.001.0001
[3] Sidey Myoo, Ontoelektronika. (Kraków: WUJ, 2013).
[4] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic theory (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
[5] Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn, Collaboration and its Discontents,” Artforum 44, no. 6 (February 2006). https://www.artforum.com/print/200602/the-social-turn-collaboration-and-its-discontents-10274 [access: 29.03.2022]
[6] Wodna Masa Krytyczna | Facebook (Aquatic Critical Mass).
[7] (26) Temat rzeka. Jak ratować polskie rzeki | Cecylia Malik | TEDxKraków Salon – YouTube
Topic: The River. How to rescue Polish rivers?
[8] John Dewey, Art as Experience. The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953, vol. 10: 1934. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987).
[9] Patricia Goldblatt, “How John Dewey’s theories underpin art and art education,” Education and Culture. The Journal of John Dewey Society 22, issue 1 (2006), 17-34. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1067&context=eandc [access: 29.03.2022]
[10] Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. (Cambridge (Mass.); London: MIT, 2000)
[11] Arnold Berleant, “Aesthetics and community,” The Journal of The Value Inquiry 28, no. 2 (1994), 148.
[12] Grant Kester, “Conversation Pieces: The Role of Dialogue in Socially-Engaged Art,” in Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, ed. Zoya Kocur & Simon Leung (Blackwell, 2005).
[13] Grant Kester, Community, and Communication in Modern Art, (The University of California Press, 2004).
[14] Berleant, “Aesthetics and community,” 152-153.
[15] Leszek Koczanowicz, Politics of Dialogue: Non-consensual Democracy and Critical Community (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
[16] Koczanowicz, Politics of Dialogue.
[17] Kate Lockwood Harris. Feminist Dilemmatic Theorizing: New Materialism in Communication Studies (Oxford Academic, 2016).
[18] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (The Duke University Press, 2007).
[19] Gernot Böhme, Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik (Suhrkamp, 1989). See also Gernot Böhme, Natürlich Natur: Über Natur im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Suhrkamp, 1992).
[20] Karen Barad, “Posthumanist performativity: Toward an Understanding how Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs 28, no 3 (2003), 801-831.
[21] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton–Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015).
[22] Mirko Nikolic, Minoritarian Ecologies: Performance before a More-than-Human World (University of Westminster, 2017). See also Jakub Petri, Somatyka miejskich dyscyplin perfomatywnych. (Kraków: WUJ, 2020).
[23] Arnold Berleant, “Aesthetics and community,” The Journal of The Value Inquiry 28, no. 2 (1994), 148.
[24] Arnold Berleant, Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010).
[25] Rachel Adams et al., Human Rights and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in South Africa, (HSRC Press: 2021), p. 128.
[26] Trevor Ngwane & Malehoko (eds.), The Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Sociological Critique (Auckland Park: Jacana Media, 2021). https://doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2021.1981429;
Jeremy Burford Peckham, “The Ethical Implications of the 4thIR,” Journal of Ethics, Entrepreneurship and Technology 1, no.1 (2021), pp. 30-42. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEET-04-2021-0016 [access: 29.03.2022].
[27] Followed by various scholars, like: Allen Carlson, John Charles Ryan, Sergey Dzikevich, Cheng Xiangzhan, Madalina Diaconu, Max Ryynänen and others.
Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of the Environment. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
Arnold Berleant, Aesthetics and Environment – Variations on a Theme. (Aldershot and Burlighton: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005).
Arnold Berleant, “The Ae