NEUROSCIENCE &
NEUROAESTHETICS
- Antonio Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens, 1999)
Proposes that bodily states and emotional processes are central to decision-making and the experience of consciousness. His somatic marker hypothesis supports an embodied understanding of aesthetic experience as sensorimotor agency.
- Semir Zeki (Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, 1999)
Founder of neuroaesthetics, Zeki explored how specific brain areas process beauty and visual stimuli. His work informs this project as both a foundation and a critical limit to reductive neural models.
THEORETICAL GROUNDING
FRAMEWORKS
Philosophy &
Aesthetic Theory
- Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgment, 1790)
Introduced the concept of aesthetic judgment as disinterested pleasure based on reflective judgment. While influential, his model is expanded here toward an embodied and dynamic aesthetic consciousness.
- Theodor W. Adorno (Aesthetic Theory, posthumously published 1970)
Reframed art as a space of critical resistance and negative dialectics. His thought resonates with the project’s concern for aesthetics beyond representation and cultural commodification.
Complex Systems &
Aesthetic Theory
- Francisco Varela & Humberto Maturana (The Tree of Knowledge, 1987)
Developed the theory of autopoiesis—living systems as self-organizing, self-producing networks. This concept grounds the idea of consciousness as an emergent and recursive process.
- Edgar Morin (Introduction to Complex Thought, 1990)
Advocates for non-reductionist, transdisciplinary approaches that embrace contradiction, uncertainty, and emergence. His framework legitimizes complex methodologies in aesthetic research.
- Stuart Kauffman (At Home in the Universe, 1995)
Explores how order and complexity spontaneously emerge in biological systems. His insights into self-organization support the metaphor of fractals in aesthetic emergence.
Fractals, Affective
Aesthetics &
Non-representational Art
- Benoît Mandelbrot (The Fractal Geometry of Nature, 1982)
Introduced fractals as mathematical patterns that replicate across scales in nature. His legacy inspires the use of fractal forms to model recursive, adaptive structures in aesthetic consciousness.
- Brian Massumi (Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, 2002)
Emphasizes the pre-cognitive and affective dimensions of experience, where art acts through intensity and movement rather than signification. Resonates with this project’s attention to sensation and pattern.
- Roy Ascott (Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, 2003)
Pioneer of cybernetic and interactive art, Ascott envisioned art as a system of consciousness expansion. His thinking informs the use of neuro-responsive and immersive technologies.
Research - Creation &
Transdisciplinary
Methodologies
- Erika Fischer-Lichte (The Transformative Power of Performance, 2008)
Theorizes the aesthetic as a performative and embodied event that reconfigures the subject. Her ideas support a non-representational understanding of the aesthetic as transformation.
- Christine Madoeuf / Claudia Giannetti / Jorge La Ferla (Multiple essays on art, science, and media)
These theorists have contributed significantly to Latin American and European discourse on transdisciplinary practices. Their work validates hybrid artistic research grounded in critical and scientific inquiry
