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Aesthetic Vulnerability: An Experiential Category for Anthropogenic Sensory Pollution
Brit Kolditz
Abstract
This paper introduces ‘aesthetic vulnerability’ as a critical concept for analyzing how exposure to anthropogenic sensory pollution transforms multidimensional aesthetic experience. By differentiating and relating aesthetic sensitivity and sensibility, it shows how altered experiential qualities shape what can be perceived, felt, and valued. In relation to lived sky experience, such exposure is specified in terms of frequency, intensity, and duration. The analysis brings into view the ambivalence of aesthetic plasticity: altered environments may be absorbed into shifting experiential baselines, but they also may be experienced as disruption and loss that resist normalization and can motivate aesthetic agency.
The empirical core is an aesthetic-environmental monitoring experiment centered on the sky’s deep-blue appearance. It documents the recurring perceptual pattern termed the ‘stripe-cloud-veil evolution’ and offers an aesthetic-phenomenological account of how contrail-induced modification changes the sky’s experiential qualities. The paper thereby raises the broader question of what a viable sensory future ought to look like, including whether the experience of the deep-blue sky ought to remain part of it.
Key Words
aesthetic experience; anthropogenic sensory pollution; embodiment; plasticity; vulnerability
1. Introduction: Aesthetic experience under anthropogenic sensory pollution
We are living in a time of polycrisis, an era in which multiple environmental changes converge and interact.[1] Alongside biodiversity loss and climate change, environmental pollution increasingly is salient as a sensory phenomenon: anthropogenic sensory pollution, understood here as the alteration and degradation of the sensory and experiential qualities of environments through human activity. It includes the growing overload of stimuli and irritants (for example, noise, light, visible pollutants, and olfactory nuisances)[2] in addition to structural transformations such as visual constriction and visual intrusion, spatial densification, landscape homogenization, and soil sealing through impervious surfaces. While these examples do not exhaust the many ways in which human activity alters sensory environments, they point to a cumulative erosion, up to the disappearance, of natural conditions and qualities.
A particularly revealing case is the sky environment, often treated as one of the last shared realms of wilderness. Its deep-blue appearance and the possibility of experiencing it as such increasingly depends not only on natural atmospheric dynamics but also on anthropogenic disturbances including air traffic and air pollution. As sensory environments change and novel phenomena emerge, not only what is perceived but also how it is perceived and experienced may be affected, potentially reshaping capacities central to human life as an aesthetic form of existence. Yet such capacities are not exclusive to humans. Rather, aesthetic sensibility can be understood as a biological grounded and evolutionary differentiated dimension of life that takes different forms across species.[3] Anthropogenic sensory pollution therefore concerns not only human experience but also the vulnerability of other living beings whose sensory relation to their environments likewise is susceptible to disruption. While this broader horizon remains important throughout, the present paper focuses primarily on the transformation of human aesthetic experience.
At the same time, within today’s widely invoked “transformative turn,” aesthetics risks being reduced, especially in some scientific contexts, to measurable proxies such as pleasantness or appeal. In broader sociopolitical contexts, aesthetic concerns likewise are often marginalized as a dispensable luxury, as reflected in financial cuts to cultural and educational sectors, constraints on artistic autonomy, and reductive calls for sufficiency.
Research on anthropogenic sensory pollution so far has primarily focused on ecological effects on nonhuman species, while pathways of harm and underlying mechanisms remain insufficiently understood.[4] For humans, despite growing work in the health sciences and expert reports establishing thresholds and guidelines, the implications of sensory harm for lived experience remain only partially grasped. Although the sensory turn in the humanities and proposals for a Sensory Anthropocene have broadened attention to sensing, the vulnerabilities of human aesthetic experience under sensory environmental change and their implications for the aesthetic quality of life remain underexplored.[5] Where sensory harm is discussed, it is often framed in sociopolitical or legal terms (for example, environmental justice debates on sensory inequities), [6] or in cultural terms emphasizing the socially shaped character of perception.[7] Against this backdrop, a pressing question arises: how do contemporary forms of environmental sensory pollution contribute to the ongoing remaking of experiential qualities and capacities, and what is at stake in that remaking? The diagnostic aim is therefore inseparable from a practical one: to articulate conditions under which heightened aesthetic vulnerability can support aesthetic agency, resisting the normalization of altered sensory environments and the drift of shifting experiential baselines.
To address this gap, ‘aesthetic vulnerability’ is introduced as a systematic diagnostic and critical category for analyzing how anthropogenic sensory pollution can impair multidimensional aesthetic-environmental experience, and how such impairment affects what is perceived, felt, and valued. It asks in what ways experiential qualities and capacities are at issue, what existential meanings they carry, and why they matter for shaping a viable sensory future.
The empirical core draws on experiential data from an aesthetic-environmental monitoring experiment centered on the sky’s deep-blue appearance.[8] Conceived as an observational practice unfolding across time and place, it combines sustained aesthetic attention, experiential notation, and visual documentation. The present paper draws selectively on this material.
The paper unfolds as follows. First, it elaborates the multidimensionality of aesthetic experience amid environmental change and develops aesthetic vulnerability together with its key differentiations—aesthetic sensitivity and aesthetic sensibility, in addition to the associated notion of aesthetic plasticity. It then turns to the human experience of the sky under conditions of anthropogenic sensory pollution, introducing the ‘stripe-cloud-veil evolution’ phenomenon as an empirically grounded perceptual pattern. Finally, it offers an interpretive analysis of the resulting experiential material in order to disclose deeper temporal, mnemonic, and existential implications of anthropogenic sensory pollution.
2. Multidimensional aesthetic experience and aesthetic vulnerability
Aesthetic environmental experience is intrinsically multidimensional, unfolding through a co-constitutive interplay of sensory, bodily, affective-emotional, cognitive-imaginative, mnemonic, and meaning-making dimensions, among others, whose relations may be disrupted under conditions of anthropogenic sensory pollution.
Aesthetic environmental experience is rooted in perceptual engagement with environmental phenomena. In the case of the sky, vision, our most far-reaching sense, at first glance appears to be the only sense that can reach it. Yet this visual perception is inseparable from a bodily movement: one must lift the head upward, orienting in a way the body toward the sky. Although such human mobilization seems no longer a common part of everyday movement, it reminds us that perception emerges with and through the living body, as a bodily integrated field of experience.
The holistic understanding of perception resonates with Merleau-Ponty, who emphasizes that “sensing comes before the senses” and describes the sensing body as a “synergetic whole” whose unity underpins perception.[9] His phenomenology, however, deliberately brackets the question of how such multisensory inputs are physiologically synthesized. Contemporary neuroscience adds this perspective by showing how the brain integrates sensory streams into a coherent field of experience, while also remaining shaped by lived experience including aesthetic experience. In this sense, today’s insights complement rather than contradict the phenomenological account: perception unfolds as an entanglement of body and brain, where experience both relies on and transforms the structures that sustain it.
What may appear as a simple kinaesthetic gesture such as raising one’s gaze to the sky is thus mediated by multiple and distributed bodily senses. Interoceptive processes, proprioceptive adjustments, and vestibular rebalancing all contribute to such skyward attention.[10] For the present work, this recognition matters: when asking how human aesthetic experience unfolds under conditions of sensory pollution, it becomes evident that disturbances can affect all of these dimensions at once, from multisensory conditions that underpin aesthetic perception to specific capacities in terms of bodily gestures and orientations through which experience takes form. Such changes can become phenomenologically visible, for instance when the upward movement of the head and the opening of visual and bodily space it enables is limited or altered. In such moments, the susceptibility of aesthetic experience becomes visible at the intersection of sensory, bodily, and environmental relations.
Advances in neuroscience and related research offer valuable insights into multisensory integration, yet they do not dissolve the ambiguity of lived experience. While such research advances functional explanations, it also leaves unaddressed the aesthetic-phenomenological opacity of lived experience, namely, that what is ordinarily experienced as immediate and self-evident in everyday life often conceals deeper dimensions not readily accessible to functional description or measurement.
In addition to the sensing body as medium of aesthetic experience, Gernot Böhme formulates radically: What we call an environmental problem is, first and foremost, “ein Problem der menschlichen Leiblichkeit” (“a problem of the human body,” my translation).[11] This refers to Böhme’s diagnosis of a twofold crisis in the human-nature relationship: alongside the external ecological crisis, he identifies an “innere Krise der Naturbeziehung des Menschen” (“internal crisis in the human relationship to nature,” my translation), rooted in detachment from nature and manifesting as a loss of embodied relatedness and the capacity to enter into relations with the world. For Böhme, this inward turn can result in a condition of “psychic deprivation.”[12]
Notably in this respect, research in environmental neuroscience suggests that the brain processes natural qualities and environments with comparatively little cognitive effort.[13] Consider, for instance, when you last found yourself bodily or cognitively exhausted from looking at the sky, an experience that contrasts with the demands of contemporary urban environments.
Building on Böhme’s diagnosis of detachment, anthropogenic sensory pollution may further intensify bodily estrangement today, increasingly alienating humans from such distinct natural sensory environments and the very possibility of aesthetic relatedness to them. Yet the challenge remains to grasp the aesthetic experience and the ways in which it becomes vulnerable when disrupted or diminished through sensory pollution.
Among the dimensions of aesthetic experience in relation to the sky, blue occupies a prominent position, yet its apparent self-evidence is historically and medially produced. Cultural histories of blue show that its affective and symbolic salience has shifted across periods and societies and is therefore neither timeless nor perceptually “given.”[14] Media-studies perspectives further underline how digital environments and institutional visual cultures, through screen-based color regimes, interface aesthetics, and stock imagery, circulate a calming blue, thereby shaping expectations that feed back into how blue is noticed, valued, and taken for granted.[15]
The focus here, however, is not on color as an objective physical or atmospheric property but on the phenomenal quality of the deep-blue sky as it is lived in experience. In earlier work, this distinctive experiential quality was described as sky-blue beauty as a way of approaching the aesthetic meaning of its lived atmospheric appearance beyond color understood as a physical property.[16] In this sense, the expression ‘deep-blue’ does not merely denote the chromatic signifier ‘blue,’ but evokes a range of lived sensory qualities such as depth, openness, vastness, and distance. In reference to Böhme’s work on atmospheres, it points to the synesthetic character of atmospheric experience, in which visual tone is inseparable from felt spatiality and affective
attunement.[17]
The sky, and the aesthetic experience of blue, has been shared across cultures, geographies, and historical periods as an affectively charged site of human–environment relation. Today, however, the perceptual experience of the sky as deeply blue is increasingly disrupted by anthropogenic sensory pollution, including air and light pollution and aviation-related atmospheric modification, that interferes with the clarity and intensity of its appearance.
Against this backdrop, the persistence of the ‘blue’ assumption can become perceptually misleading. What is commonly discussed as color constancy, the tendency to stabilize appearances and maintain familiarity across changing conditions, may here take the form of a blue constancy: the sky is still taken to be blue through habitual recognition and culturally reinforced expectation, even when lived appearance has shifted. While such stabilization is ordinarily adaptive, under systematic environmental alteration it can function as a perceptual bias, obscuring experiential degradation and reinforcing unnoticed shifts in experiential baselines.[18]
Moreover, the aesthetic experience of the deep-blue sky is rarely that of a featureless monochrome. Episodes of deep blue commonly arise in interplay with cloud formations, where white clouds accentuate depth through contrast and rhythm, structuring perception through a dynamic alternation of form and openness. Yet the experience of a more unobstructed deep-blue sky remains a distinct aesthetic phenomenon. Precisely because it condenses a recognizable horizon of atmospheric clarity and openness, its increasing disruption by sensory pollution warrants closer analysis of its experiential, affective-emotional, and cognitive meaning.
According to the aesthetician Arnold Berleant, emphasizing the aesthetic in experience is “to engage in openness, cooperation, connectedness, vulnerability.”[19] This formulation is instructive in two respects. First, it foregrounds the sensory-bodily openness of aesthetic experience; second, and more importantly for the present argument, it introduces vulnerability as an aesthetic category. While vulnerability has been widely discussed in ethical, political, and ecological discourse, it has been remarkably underexplored within aesthetic theory itself.
This paper addresses this lacuna by developing the concept of ‘aesthetic vulnerability’ as a means of better understanding how multidimensional aesthetic experience is rendered susceptible to environmental and ecological change. Building on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) definition of vulnerability as “the degree to which a system is susceptible to, and unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change,” the concept of aesthetic vulnerability designates the ways in which aesthetic experience becomes exposed, responsive, and potentially disrupted under conditions of anthropogenic sensory pollution.[20] Importantly, this concept does not frame vulnerability as mere weakness or passivity but as a constitutive condition of aesthetic openness and relationality.
To further specify this concept, the paper distinguishes between ‘aesthetic sensitivity’ and ‘aesthetic sensibility.’ Sensitivity refers to the immediate, bodily-mediated reactivity of the experiencer. It encompasses sensory and somatic capacities such as interoception, balance, proprioception, and kinesthetic attunement, including immediate atmospheric experience of the environment, all of which are particularly exposed to changes in sensory environments.
Notably, bodies may register environmental disturbance before conceptual awareness arises. Rising forms of hypersensitivity may be read as signs of sensory overload under anthropogenically changed conditions. Yet increased bodily reactivity is not synonymous with heightened aesthetic sensibility.
Aesthetic sensibility extends beyond immediate sensory reactivity into the lived and the living dimension of experience. In this sense, sensibility is not reducible to a merely cultural refinement of perception but can be understood, following Katya Mandoki’s evolutionary account of aisthesis, as a biologically grounded and more-than-human dimension of living beings, one that takes specifically human forms without being exclusive to humans.[21] It involves forms of attentive awareness, interpretive openness, and more reflective modes of engagement through which aesthetic experience can acquire meaning and potentially transformative significance. Sensibility also includes the integration of contextual understanding (for example, knowledge about atmospheric modification and global heating), which can feed back into attention and interpretation, intensifying what is felt, making change recognizable as change, and counteracting shifting-baseline habituation. Sensibility thus mediates between bodily experience and the broader relational-ecological, cultural, and existential dimensions of experience.
Taken together, sensitivity and sensibility articulate complementary dimensions of aesthetic vulnerability, indicating how aesthetic experience unfolds across the experiencer, the sensory environment, and the relational dynamics between them. Under conditions of anthropogenic sensory pollution, this vulnerability becomes increasingly exposed—not as a mere fragility but as a historically intensified condition of receptivity in which experiential qualities can be impaired, and yet also made available for reflective grasp. It is here that aesthetic plasticity becomes decisive. Aesthetic plasticity names the ambivalent capacity of aesthetic experience to be modulated over time under sustained exposure to anthropogenic sensory pollution. Bodily sensitivity can be dulled, intensified, or dysregulated while sensibility may either cultivate attentive, interpretive responsiveness or gradually accommodate altered conditions. Plasticity is therefore not only a descriptor of adaptation but signifies a critical hinge between silent normalization and aesthetic agency. On the one hand, shifting sensory baselines may recalibrate what is perceived as coherent, acceptable, or even beautiful. On the other hand, cultivated aesthetic sensibility can counteract this drift by rendering change experienceable as change, transforming sustained exposure, as the following sky observation illustrates, into a form of lived knowledge that supports conscious orientation and future-directed relational practice.
Aesthetic vulnerability thus comprises three interwoven dimensions: the experiencer, the sensory environment, exemplified here by the sky, and the relational processes through which aesthetic sense-making unfolds. Under conditions of anthropogenic sensory pollution, these dimensions become destabilized in their interplay. In this context, disruption does not signify creative rupture but a disturbance of the relational fabric that sustains aesthetic environmental experience. While Brown and Perkins describe disruption as a process moving from “predisaster attachment” through disturbance toward possible repair or relocation, such a framework offers only partial insight in the case of disrupted sky experience.[22] Unlike terrestrial places, the sky allows for no substitution or re-placement; its alteration entails the potential loss of shared atmospheric qualities without the possibility of spatial compensation. Moreover, as a multi-scalar phenomenon—extending from the intimate space above one’s head to regional, national, and planetary scales—the sky’s disruption affects aesthetic experience from visual proximity to forms of planetary connectedness and beyond. In this way, the disturbance of the sky intensifies and expands the scope of aesthetic vulnerability.
3. Stripe-cloud-veil evolution in aesthetic experience
Through continuous observation of the sky conducted as part of the aesthetic-environmental monitoring experiment, a recurring perceptual pattern of anthropogenic sky alteration became apparent over time. In what follows, this central observation is termed ‘stripe-cloud-veil evolution’–an aesthetic-phenomenological descriptor of the lived, experiential dimension of contrail-induced modifications of the sky.
The monitoring experiment builds on more than fifteen years of first-hand sky observation across a range of regions in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. In recent years, as sustained aesthetic attention has intersected with intensified exposure to anthropogenically modified skies, these observations have been complemented by systematic aesthetic-phenomenological field notes. These notes record not only what appears but how it appears, with its rhythms and patterns, atmospheres, and felt experiential qualities. This methodological intensification can be read as aesthetic agency emerging from heightened aesthetic vulnerability: repeated exposure has prompted a deliberate effort to discern and articulate environmental change as such, to resist shifting experiential baselines, and to render experiential impairment communicable.[23]
At the same time, the photographic material is included with explicit representational caution. Early documentation deliberately prioritized uninterrupted phenomenological description, and photographic recording was initially minimized so as not to interfere with immediate experience. Moreover, camera processing and display calibration regularly render the sky’s disturbed blue as more saturated or deeper than it is perceptually available in situ. The extent to which such representation may inadvertently aestheticize or downplay experiential place degradation is a question best assessed by specialists in color science and media theory; here, the images function primarily as indicative prompts and contextual supports, not as transparent reproductions of the experienced appearance.[24]
Although the phenomena involved are dynamic—appearing as stripes, clouds, and veils that themselves exhibit considerable variability—they nonetheless form a recognizable pattern. This dynamic pattern and its sensory stages of resolution and varying configurations have been observed across multiple years, seasons, and diverse geographic locations.
While it must be acknowledged that the behavior of contrails is shaped by a variety of meteorological factors, of which humidity, wind, and atmospheric stratification are only partial indicators within a far more complex scientific field,[25] the interactions between such natural conditions, anthropogenic influences, and their aesthetic manifestations are not fully understood. Standard meteorological references reflect these limitations, including the International Cloud Atlas (WMO 2017), which defines contrails only briefly as a form of cirrus that “persists for at least 10 minutes,” without addressing their diverse sensory transformations or experiential qualities.[26]
By contrast, aesthetic observations revealed a wide variety of developments and transformations in these anthropogenically originating formations, whose rhythm and texture differ perceptibly from those of natural cloud phenomena. Crucially, differences do not emerge instantaneously but become recognizable only through repeated and sustained aesthetic observation over time.
Within the visible stripe-cloud-veil evolution, the term ‘cloud’ is used in a descriptive and aesthetic sense, referring to atmospheric formations with a tendency to gather. Aesthetically, such clouds are often perceived as weak, lacking density, and insubstantial. If they exhibit a grayish hue suggestive of impending rain, actual precipitation rarely occurs.
Originating from contrails, their ways of dissipation vary: at times they dissolve rapidly into translucent veils; at other times they accumulate into denser, cloud-like formations. Despite these variations, however, a recognizable pattern of atmospheric-sensory development persists over time, disrupting the experience of a natural sky and its deep-blue appearance.
This disruptive pattern manifests frequently, standing out most clearly in spring and summer, when contrails begin spreading and intersecting across the morning sky. As the day progresses, they dissolve into the sky—sometimes evolving into clouds or bypassing any cloud-like stage—emerging instead as translucent layers that cumulatively overlap, creating an ever-denser veil over the sky and the sun.
Within the stripe-cloud-veil evolution, veiling effects frequently give rise to an unfamiliar atmospheric quality shaped by a changed light regime, in which sunlight itself appears disturbed. Regardless of the degree of persistence or opacity of this blurring, the sun, and consequently the quality of light, was experienced as substantially anthropogenically altered.
In the context of the observational experiment, this alteration distinctly impaired the aesthetic experience of the sky by producing seasonal dissonances: atmospheric and weather conditions were perceived as atypical for a given time of year. For instance, on April 17, 2025, in Potsdam, Germany, a broad array of perceptible qualities arising from the significantly altered sky was already experienceable in the morning, including diffuse light, whitish coloration, elevated temperature, and even a muted soundscape.[27] Together, these qualities evoked the atmosphere of late summer, despite the calendar indicating spring.
Such seasonal dissonances were experienced throughout the year. While they might initially be attributed to climate change-induced seasonal shifts, in this context they emerged from the more fundamental, intimately lived experience of the sky. This embodied experiential knowledge differs from abstract, externally acquired knowledge, such as the concept ‘climate change.’
In this sense, the lived mismatch between experience and environment, arising from disruptions under sensory-environmental pollution, reveals a condition of aesthetic vulnerability. This vulnerability manifests across multiple, intertwined dimensions including immediate bodily sensitivity to altered atmospheric qualities such as heat, light, and sound; extended aesthetic sensibility shaped by memory, seasonal expectations, and reflection; and historically sedimented attachments through which self-identity is formed. Taken together, what is rendered vulnerable here is the embodied, atmospheric, and temporal coherence through which the environment becomes meaningful in lived experience and thus existentially significant.
Drawing on Böhme’s diagnosis of the inner crisis of the human being, understood as a detachment from one’s embodied relation with nature, we can recognize this condition in the present context: an alienation of the human body from familiar seasonal attachments, including those once associated with the appearance of a deep-blue sky. This form of alienation not only undermines embodied connectedness but also fosters forms of withdrawal, as Böhme noted, dynamics that can be further exacerbated by anthropogenic sensory pollution.
Furthermore, the experience-sky mismatch can be understood as an aesthetic-phenomenological rupture, compelling a renewed cognition of both atmosphere and self, accompanied by feelings of uncertainty, disappointment, and disorientation. A deeper existential dimension emerges through the disruption of lived temporality, affecting not only the present moment of experience but also the already lived past and the anticipation of the future. Memory plays a vital role in this process; we will return to this later.
The examination of experiential disruption through anthropogenic sensory pollution gains further clarification through the environmental-science concept of exposure. Its defining aspects—duration, frequency, and intensity—describe how a stressor acts upon a system and in this context helps articulate how the aesthetic experience, including the sky, the experiencer, and their relational field, is altered under conditions of anthropogenic sensory exposure.[28]
The duration of the environmental aesthetic stressor, namely, the stripe-cloud-veil evolution, refers to the period within a single day during which a sky disturbance persists, from the initial appearance of contrails, through their diffusion into veils, to the modification of the sky into a layered, anthropogenically altered environment. In the observations reported here, experienced as seasonal dissonance and phenomenological rupture, the remnants of sensory alteration in the sky typically persisted throughout the day. As a result, the aesthetic exposure to this disruption was prolonged, intimately intruding upon and altering the otherwise natural experience of the sky.
Frequency denotes how often a disturbed aesthetic experience of the sky occurs within a given observation period, reflecting the regularity with which such disruptions are encountered. For instance, the entire month of May 2025 was documented: only one out of thirty-one days allowed a view into a unblurred, deep-blue sky between white clouds. While this randomly chosen period in Potsdam, Germany, is not exhaustive and natural weather dynamics also played a role, the observation nonetheless indicates that the high frequency of exposure to a profoundly anthropogenically altered sky, manifested in the stripe-cloud-veil phenomenon, and the relative scarcity of deep-blue skies are not anomalies but rather characteristic of sky experience in this region in recent years. These findings are supported by long-term aesthetic observations spanning at least fifteen years, from European to North American and Caribbean sites.
Finally, intensity refers to the magnitude of the sensory impact during each episode of experience. This aspect is difficult to capture, as the sensory alterations can easily be misperceived as normal clouds or sky formations: the actual impact does not look overtly disturbing, and the stripe-cloud-veil phenomenon unfolds as a process that requires sustained attention to become perceptible.
Sustained attention is thus a precondition for recognition, identification, and for distinguishing this anthropogenic phenomenon from ordinary sky appearance. Especially in the later stages of the stripe-cloud-veil evolution, when its anthropogenic origin is no longer visually discernable, a continuously maintained and aesthetically trained awareness is necessary to perceive the disturbance. Over time, however, this training enabled the experiencer to recognize individual stages of the phenomenon even without following its entire evolution through continuous attention, and to distinguish these stages reliably from nonanthropogenic atmospheric appearances.
Taken together, these three aspects—duration, frequency, and intensity—constitute a condition of high exposure to anthropogenic sensory pollution, in which the aesthetic experience of and with the deep-blue sky is rendered profoundly vulnerable.
4. From sensory-aesthetic experience to existential depth
“You are the Weather”[29]
Having described how anthropogenic alteration is given in lived sky experience, the analysis turns to what such experiential transformation brings into view when interpreted for its existential import: what a viable sensory future ought to sustain, and how aesthetic agency can keep that question perceptually and conceptually available.
Aesthetic vulnerability foregrounds the constitutive exposure of human sensory-bodily existence. Yet what is at stake in such exposure often remains imperceptible, precisely because the aesthetic conditions that sustain experience tend to operate pre-reflectively. As Brown and Perkins observe in relation to place attachment, what functions in the background of awareness is difficult to assess.[30] Shared atmospheric givens, such as the deep blue of the sky, tend to become intelligible only in disturbance or loss, and it is retrospectively that their value comes into view. Aesthetic vulnerability thus discloses not merely susceptibility to environmental change but the latent fragility of those background conditions that quietly structure our being-in-the-world.
In relation to anthropogenic alterations of the sky, particularly those associated with the stripe-cloud-veil evolution, the phenomenon described as seasonal dissonance can be understood as disruption of embodied temporality. Experienced as insecurity and disorientation, seasonal embodiment signals not only a sensory deviation but a disruption of the embodied familiarity through which seasonal rhythms are lived and anticipated. What is affected is therefore more than perceptual coherence; it is the environmental-aesthetic bond through which past experience, present orientation, and anticipation of the future converge.
Memory plays a decisive role in this lived temporality. If memories “serve to anchor us in time and space,”[31] then changes in the sensory qualities of the environment modify the very conditions under which such anchoring becomes possible. A sky transformed by anthropogenic impacts no longer reliably mediates recognition; its altered atmospheric qualities may fail to evoke the kind of spontaneous, intimate memory that, in a Proustian sense, once connected present experience with embodied pasts. The involuntary resonance between environment and memory thereby becomes compromised.
Consequently, not only retrospective recognition but also present orientation and future projection are unsettled, since memories are essential “means by which we make sense of the continual becoming that is the essence of life.”[32] Research on place-attachment underscores the importance of continuity with the past for “emotional well-being;”[33] environmental discontinuities therefore carry existential weight.
The deep-blue sky, with its seasonally nuanced light, has long served as a catalyst for autobiographical memory, particularly in relation to childhood. Alterations of its environmental signals entail a loss that extends beyond the aesthetic domain narrowly conceived: they touch the conditions of personal history and self-relation, contributing to what has been described as “environmental identity.”[34] What once sustained a sensory and embodied continuity between season, sky, and lived experience across a lifetime now appears increasingly vulnerable under conditions of anthropogenic sensory pollution.
Environmental neuroscience further suggests that natural environments, including the sky, are processed differently from the cognitively fatiguing demands of directed attention common in modern settings.[35] Fractal patterns, self-similar forms that repeat across scales, are found in clouds and other natural phenomena and associated with positive affective and physiological responses, supporting a relaxed yet engaged state of internalized attention.[36] In clouded skies, a balance between order and complexity allows familiarity and subtle novelty to coexist.[37] The natural genesis of such patterns appears relevant to the aesthetic experience of the sky.[38] When aesthetic patterns are altered—through anthropogenic phenomena such as stripe-cloud-veil evolution—the perceptual fluency may be disrupted. Instead of fostering relaxation, the altered sky can evoke unease and aesthetic dissonance.
Under such conditions, aesthetic vulnerability becomes particularly salient, revealing the ambivalent dynamics of aesthetic plasticity. The aesthetic subject can apprehend altered perceptual environments such as the diminished deep-blue appearance of the sky when experienced in a lived, aesthetically engaged manner. Crucially, this apprehension is not merely cognitive: it embodies a form of lived understanding, a practical knowledge inseparable from the sensorial, affective-emotional, and temporal unfolding of experience itself. In this way, aesthetic sensibility integrates perception and understanding, rendering the experience both affectively vivid and epistemically meaningful.
Yet plasticity also entails the risk of recalibrated experiential baselines. As described in research on environmental generational amnesia, gradual environmental degradation may be assimilated into new experiential norms without being recognized as loss.[39] What is slowly altered may come to be accepted as given, without conscious recognition of deprivation. Thus, the same plastic capacity that enables heightened aesthetic sensibility also allows under ecologically impoverished conditions the subtle contraction of experiential depth.
Experiential continuity with the sensory sky relies on what can be described as an aesthetic bond—an affective attachment, more or less explicit, that, as previously noted, often manifests most clearly when disrupted. Environmental attachment theory conceptualizes such bonds as enduring affective relationships, structurally and functionally analogous to interpersonal attachment.[40]
From this perspective, the sky has never been merely an aesthetic object; it is also a medium of existential anchoring and belonging, affording a sense of connectedness. Disturbances in this relationship therefore exceed perceptual irritation. They affect the relational matrix through which human beings situate themselves in a sensory world.
Attention Restoration Theory (ART) offers further insight into this dimension. Qualities such as spatial extent and the experience of “being away,” paradigmatically afforded by the open sky, are associated with restorative potential.[41] The presence of an undisturbed deep-blue sky, embodying openness and expansiveness, has become less reliable under anthropogenic atmospheric alteration, thereby weakening this restorative dimension. The experiential potential of an open, boundless expanse is not yet fully understood in its mechanisms, yet its phenomenological effects are palpable: affective and emotional opening, imaginative widening, and cognitive expansion. Contemporary research such as the Broaden-and-Build Theory supports the view that positive emotions broaden individuals’ momentary thought-action repertoires and contribute to health and psychological resilience.[42]
With respect to the aesthetic experience of the deep-blue sky, however, such expansion is not treated as a subsequent psychological effect but as an integrated aesthetic process in which affective-emotional, bodily, and cognitive dimensions can simultaneously emerge.
In such encounters, interoceptive awareness and proprioceptive orientation may expand together, allowing inner and outer spatiality to correspond; aesthetic sensitivity and cultivated sensibility converge. Poetic and artistic traditions have long articulated analogous correspondences;[43] yet the specific experiential significance of atmospheric spaciousness as a constitutive dimension of aesthetic existence remains insufficiently examined. The present analysis suggests that this openness is not merely symbolic but structurally formative of experiential depth.
Research on the emotion of awe offers an additional perspective. Keltner and Haidt identify two essential components: “perceived vastness” and a “need for accommodation.”[44] The natural sky, especially in its deep-blue presence, has long afforded experiences of magnitude, openness, and reflective distance. Neurophysiological studies further substantiate awe’s embodied character, documenting changes in skin conductance, heart rate, and pupil dilation.[45] Yet as anthropogenic stripe-cloud-veil evolution destabilizes the deep-blue ground of expansive perception, one of awe’s most enduring atmospheric affordances becomes fragile.
Complementary to awe’s intensity is the aspect of “soft fascination,” in which attention is gently held without strain.[46] In contexts of increasingly challenged attentional capacities, this aesthetic mode in relation with the sky environment may support reflection, self-knowledge, and, as we have already seen, identity formation. The existential significance of the sensory sky thus lies not in isolated emotional effects but in its contribution to enduring structures of orientation and experiential depth. The preservation of such atmospheric openness is therefore not solely an environmental concern but an aesthetic-existential one. Anthropogenic sensory pollution affects not only what is sensed but the qualities and capacities of aesthetic experience, its patterns of attention, attunement, and meaning, thereby reshaping how human beings are situated and related within the horizon of their own experience.
5. Future research on aesthetic experience under sensory-environmental change
Human sensory-bodily openness, our inherent exposure to the environment, constitutes a fundamental condition of multidimensional aesthetic experience. The present analysis is necessarily selective and cannot do justice to all dimensions implicated in aesthetic vulnerability under sensory-environmental change. Future research should therefore examine how anthropogenic sky pollution disrupts further dimensions of aesthetic experience, affecting both experiential qualities and the capacities on which experience depends (for example, attention, affective-emotional resonance, temporal depth), including the possibility and freedom of perceptual access itself, felt as a deprivation of access to an anthropogenically undisturbed deep-blue sky. From the perspective of aesthetics, this also requires closer analysis of how such changes reshape, and may impoverish, relational experience and aesthetic responsiveness.
A second task is to investigate aesthetic vulnerability across other sensory domains and contexts, and to better understand the ambivalence of aesthetic plasticity: when does re-attunement support orientation and when does it enable shifting experiential baselines and the normalization of impoverished experience? This includes specifying conditions under which heightened exposure can support aesthetic agency rather than habituation.
A third task concerns the cultivation of aesthetic sensitivity and sensibility. Further work is needed to clarify how sensibility can be strengthened so that altered conditions are registered as altered and sensory environments are evaluated in terms of quality (openness, depth, distance) rather than mere quantity (availability, efficiency). This directly bears on debates about what a viable sensory future ought to sustain.
Finally, methodological work should develop ways of integrating lived knowledge more systematically into established environmental assessment practices used to inform environmental governance and future decision making. Rather than replacing technoscientific sensing, aesthetic-phenomenological observation and experiential notation can function as a complementary evidential layer, registering shifts in atmospheric and environmental quality, meaning, and orientation, including losses of perceptual access, that may remain underdetermined in quantitative monitoring.
Brit Kolditz
brit.kolditz@mun.ca
Dr. Brit Kolditz holds an interdisciplinary PhD from Memorial University of Newfoundland, with research spanning philosophy, environmental research, and aesthetics. Beyond the paper, Sky Observation extends this work on Aesthetic
Ecologies through ongoing observation, experiential documentation, and critical reflection.
Published on March 24, 2026.
Cite this article: Brit Kolditz, “Aesthetic Vulnerability: An Experiential Category for Anthropogenic Sensory Pollution,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 24 (2026), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] The term ‘polycrisis’ denotes a web of interlinked crises that are not merely simultaneous but structurally interconnected such that they reinforce one another and produce systemic instability. The concept implies that crises cannot be effectively understood or addressed in isolation but require integrated, holistic approaches that account for complex feedback dynamics across ecological, social, economic, and political systems, and also, more fundamentally, the human being itself in its experiential and embodied ways of relating to, acting in, and making sense of the world. E.g., Michael Lawrence et al., “Global Polycrisis: The Causal Mechanisms of Crisis Entanglement,” Global Sustainability 7 (2024): Article 1.
[2] Karina Mary de Paiva et al.,“Noise Pollution and Annoyance: An Urban Soundscape Study,” Noise & Health 17:76 (2015): 125-133, Julia Charles, “Environmental Odors and Public Nuisance Law: A Research Anthology,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, (2015).
[3] Katya Mandoki, “Bio-aesthetics: The Evolution of Sensibility through Nature,” Contemporary Aesthetics 15 (2017), abstract; Katya Mandoki, The Indispensable Excess of the Aesthetic: Evolution of Sensibility in Nature (Lexington Books, 2015), 120-21.
[4] Davide M. Dominoni et al., “Why Conservation Biology Can Benefit from Sensory Ecology,” Nature Ecology & Evolution, Vol 4 (2020): 502-11; Wouter Halfwerk and Hans Slabbekoorn, “Pollution Going Multimodal: The Complex Impact of the Human-Altered Sensory Environment on Animal Perception and Performance,” Biology Letters 11, no. 4 (2015): 20141051.
[5] Christopher Otter, “The Sensory Anthropocene,” Environmental Humanities (2025): 1.
[6] Kara C. Hoover, “Sensory Disruption in Modern Living and the Emergence of Sensory Inequities,” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 91 (2018): 53-62.
[7] David Howes and Constance Classen, Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (Routledge, 2014).
[8] The aesthetic-environmental monitoring experiment is outlined on the Aesthetic Ecologies website under “Method,” where its conceptual and methodological orientation, including its experiential and observational framework, is described in greater detail: https://aesthetic-ecologies.com/method/.
[9] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (Routledge, 2012), 330.
[10] J. Brendan Ritchie and Peter Carruthers, “The Bodily Senses,” in The Bodily Senses (Oxford University Press, 2015), 353-354. Chiara Parma et al., “An Overview of the Bodily Awareness Representation and Interoception: Insights and Progress in the Field of Neurorehabilitation Research,” Brain Sciences 14 (2024).
[11] Gernot Böhme original German: “Was wir das Umweltproblem nennen, ist primär ein Problem der menschlichen Leiblichkeit,” (translated by the author), 14.
[12] Gernot Böhme, “Die Frage nach einem neuen Naturverständnis,” in Soziale Naturwissenschaft. Wege zu einer Erweiterung der Ökologie, eds. Gernot Böhme and Engelbert Schramm (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 126.
[13] Marc G. Berman et al., “An Environmental Neuroscience Perspective on the Benefits of Nature,” in Nature and Psychology, 2021: 61-88.
[14] Michel Pastoureau, Blue, the History of a Color (Princeton University Press, 2018).
[15] The following interesting link is acknowledged with thanks to an anonymous reviewer: https://blog.betterimagesofai.org/nel-blu-dipinto-di-blu-or-the-anaesthetics-of-stock-images-of-ai/ accessed February 14, 2026.
[16] Brit Kolditz, “The Loss of Sky-Blue: Changes in the Sky-Environment,” ESPES. The Slovak Journal of Aesthetics 12, no. 2 (2023): 75-87.
[17] Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik (Suhrkamp, 2013).
[18] T. Netland, “The Lived, Living, and Behavioral Sense of Perception,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 23 (2024): 117-141.
[19] Arnold Berleant, Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World (Imprint Academic, 2010), 201.
[20] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2022, 12.
[21] Mandoki, “Bio-aesthetics”; Mandoki, Indispensable Excess of the Aesthetic, 120-21.
[22] Barbara B. Brown and Douglas D. Perkins, “Disruptions in Place Attachments,” in Place Attachment, eds. Irwin Altman and Setha M. Low (Springer, 1992), 291.
[23] Selected materials from this documentation process, including visual documentation and phenomenological notes related to anthropogenic sky alteration and the stripe-cloud-veil evolution phenomenon, are available through the Sky Observation project on the Aesthetic Ecologies website: https://aesthetic-ecologies.com/sky-observation/.
[24] Michel Pastoureau, Blue, the History of a Color.
[25] Ibid.
[26] World Meteorological Organization, “International Cloud Atlas: Manual on the Observation of Clouds and Other Meteors,” 2017, WMO-No. 407. “Genus Cirrus includes aircraft condensation trails, defined as trails that persist for at least ten minutes.”
[27] Ongoing documentation of anthropogenic sky alteration and its effects on the sky’s deep-blue visibility, including visual materials and observational notes from the Sky Observation project, is available on the Aesthetic Ecologies website under “Sky Observation:” https://aesthetic-ecologies.com/sky-observation/.
[28] IPCC, 2022: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
[29] Roni Horn, “You are the Weather.”
[30] Barbara B. Brown and Douglas D. Perkins, “Disruptions in Place Attachments,” 283.
[31] Clare Cooper Marcus, “Environmental Memories,” in Place Attachment, eds. Irwin Altman and Setha M. Low (Springer, 1992), 88.
[32] Marcus, 109.
[33] Marcus, 109.
[34] Luciana Paola Pagano et al., “A systematic review of environmental identity: Definitions, measurement tools, and future directions,” Journal of Environmental Psychology (2025): 105.
[35] Marc G. Berman et al., “An Environmental Neuroscience Perspective on the Benefits of Nature.”
[36] Benoit B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (W.H. Freeman and Company, 1982). Richard P. Taylor et al., “Perceptual and Physiological Responses to the Visual Complexity of Fractal Patterns,” Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences 9, no. 1 (2005): 89-114.
[37] K. N. Rees, T. J. Garrett et al., “A global analysis of the fractal properties of clouds revealing anisotropy of turbulence across scales,” Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics 31 (2014): 497-513.
[38] Apart from “natural fractals,” for differentiating families of fractals, such as exact or statistical, and for distinctions between “perceived” and “physical” complexity, see A. J. Bies et al., “Aesthetic Responses to Exact Fractals Driven by Physical Complexity,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 10 (2016): 210.
[39] Peter H. Kahn, Jr. “Children’s Affiliations with Nature: Structure, Development, and the Problem of Environmental Generational Amnesia” in Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations, eds. Peter H. Kahn Jr. and Stephen R. Kellert (MIT Press, 2002): 93-116.
[40] Susan Clayton, “Environmental Identity: A Conceptual and an Operational Definition” in Identity and the Natural Environment: The Psychological Significance of Nature, eds. Susan Clayton and Susan Opotow (MIT Press, 2003), 45-65.
[41] Stephen Kaplan, “The Restorative Benefits of Nature. Toward an Integrative Framework,” Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15 (1995): 169-182.
[42] Barbara L. Fredrickson, “The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 359 (2001): 1367-77.
[43] Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondances,” in Die Blumen des Bösen (Steidl Verlag, 1994), 12.
[44] Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion,” Cognition & Emotion 17, no. 2 (2003): 302-05.
[45] Yusuke Takano et al., “Physiological Correlates of Awe: Evidence from Pupillometry and Skin Conductance,” Frontiers in Psychology 14 (2023).
[46] Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan, The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 192.