VISCR602 Perceptions

The contemporary primacy of the visual and the virtual, with its multiple effects not only on our everyday life but also in our larger ability to understand the world we live in and the one that is emerging, invites us to a serious meditation on how this came to be so. The seminar would be an effort to engage in some historical, cultural, religious, political, philosophical, aesthetic, cognitive and scientific excavations that may guide us through the survival labyrinths first explored by the old technicians of the body-soul dichotomy. Like it or not, this dualism is the footnote, the windmill, we have been jousting with for a few millennia now. We would argue that it largely mimics our cultural evolution form cave dwellers and shamanic hunters and painters, to Stanley Kubrick, Animatrix and the Flintstones. Is the world real or is it an illusion, is there a there there? Do animals or humans and plants perceive alike? Balinese, Americans, Kenyans or Chinese? Are we Zhuangzis butterfly going through the rabbit hole, or mere quanta in the latest cosmic Brane? Is Sarah Palin's Russia more real because she can "see" it and we cant? What about the pipe of Magritte, the Swoosh or the swaps and the Wall Street Bailout? There seems to be more than ever a profound social and psychological need to cut through the fog which clouds our hold on life and our grounding in the world, leaving us estranged from each other and the planet, increasingly fragmented, packaged and sold. We seem to inhabit simultaneously inside and outside, alienated and sensuous, in the realms of desire, being and becoming, a result of our biology and neurophysiology but also of our cultural, political and environmental histories. The "Doors of Perception," variously understood or felt as the conduits that would bring us, literally and figuratively, to our senses, that would invite an opening to our common senses as organs of awareness, erotic joy, and active aesthetic and political engagement, have been used to navigate this quandary, time and again. In this vein, thus, the seminar will examine contrasting ideas of "perception," and will attempt to mine a few of the aesthetic possibilities embedded in the nature-nurture mesh formed by our plastic brains and plastic arts. It will propose extending the purely visual and virtual experiences of our commodified iron cage, to a more empirical and phenomenological, critical and ecological, sensitive and sensuous embodiment of our lives.