Alexander Wilson is an artist and theorist whose work intersects cultural studies, philosophy and aesthetics. In particular, his research investigates the relationship between aesthetics and science, through its implicit links with the study of emergence and complexity, computation, meta-mathematics, systems theory and cybernetics, chaos theory, contemporary cosmology, evolutionary theory and 20th century philosophies of process. He has published on various connected topics, including the philosophies of Stiegler, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Whitehead, Bergson, Leibniz, among others, as well as on speculative realism. His broadly interdisciplinary art practice deals with related concepts in videos and media installations. As co-founder of Parabolik Guerilla Theatre, he has also directed several experimental multimedia works for the stage. As a musician and composer he has been involved with the live-electronics trio K.A.N.T.N.A.G.A.N.O., among other electroacoustic and electronic projects. He has held an appointment as assistant professor in Intermedia/Cyber-Arts at Concordia University in Montreal.
GENERAL RESEARCH AREA
My general research area is that of “expanded aesthetics” which aims to move the field of aesthetics beyond its traditional focus on human judgement. I look at how scientific and philosophical accounts of the mechanisms of emergence in nature, which I liken to ‘natural creative processes’, overlap with those of art practice and visual culture.
MOTIVATION
In this age of looming environmental and human crisis, what is now being called the anthropocene, we are faced with the urgent question of how to produce sustainable interdependencies with our greater ecological context. While the techno-scientific effort to deal with the impending global crises continues to focus on producing better, faster, more efficient technologies, the question of aesthetics (sensation, perception, experience) has been traditionally belittled and labelled as useless, trivial pageantry. We forget however, that this general preference for the efficiency and utility of technè is precisely what disrupted the human-nature ecological balance in the first place. I argue that aesthesis is an indispensible complement to prosthesis, and promote its rehabilitation as a productive and necessary aspect of human culture.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD
My main contribution to the study of aesthetic culture regards my disentangling of the concepts of aesthesis, mathesis and prosthesis. Notably, these concepts are respectively correlated to the human domains of art, science and technology. These considerations stem from my extrapolation of Gilbert Simondon’s obscure theory of aesthetics, which, as I have shown in my dissertation, allows for a radical rethinking of the relationship between human individuals, their cultural contexts, and their mnemotechnical assemblages, within the context of emergence and complexity in nature. I propose a consistent framework for relating and distinguishing these creative processes, in the belief that they may offer the key to fostering the long-range interdependencies required by sustainable human-nature ecological integrations.
It is an exciting time to be working on non-human aesthetics, given the recent flurry of activity in the field of transhumanism, the speculative realist movement’s rekindling of arguments for the mind-independent ontological status of objects (Meillassoux, Harman), as well as a renewed interest in panpsychist theories of consciousness, as epitomized in Tononi’s theory of Consciousness as Integrated Information, and Tegmark’s recent theory of Consciousness as a State of Matter. Accordingly, I believe, the notion of aesthesis must be expanded and treated in a realist fashion. If aesthetics is relevant to the world as such, beyond the human, then time is long overdue for a Copernican decentring of the human subject as the focus of aesthetic inquiry.
RESEARCH TRAJECTORY:
Art in the Chaosmos: Individuation, Emergence, Aesthetics (book)
Book based on my doctoral thesis.
In the book, I consider an unorthodox conception of philosophical aesthetics that wrests the discipline away from human judgement, following Deleuze’s claim that judgement is anaesthetic. I argue for a Copernican decentring of the human subject as the focus of aesthetic investigation. Revealing the philosophical difficulties faced by ‘adaptationist’ and neuro-centric views of aesthetics, I contend that, if suitably extrapolated, Gilbert Simondon’s obscure ‘aesthetics of reticulation’ offers a way beyond such reductive views. I test his theory of aesthesis within a speculative framework that draws from Leibniz, Whitehead, Bergson, James, Varela, Guattari, second-order cybernetics, information theory, complexity theory, chaos theory, quantum mechanics and meta-mathematics (axiological incompleteness). Finally, I correlate my findings with the theory of mnemotechnical individuation developed by Stiegler, and offer a provisional ontological infrastructure for relating and distinguishing aesthesis, mathesis, and prosthesis.
Process and Procedure in Art: Simondon, Deleuze, and Aesthetic Time (article and conferences)
Currently in drafting stage, this paper concerns the status of temporal artworks, objects, and cultural artefacts, investigating the junction between time-based media (film, video), process art (ie: environmental art, monumental entropy) and procedural art (ie: Fluxus ‘event-scores’, algorithmic architecture), and the notions of ephemerality and transience, alongside a close reading of Simondon’s theory of individuation and Deleuze’s theory of temporal synthesis. These are correlated to the temporal mechanisms behind the emergence of integrated structures in nature, which, according to complexity theory, cannot be analysed through the lens of ‘algorithmic information content’. It is argued that aesthetics corresponds more closely to the intercessions implied by the emergence of such integrated structures, and therefore, that aesthetic time differs from the ‘arrow of time’ characteristic of the second law of thermodynamics, which to high entropy (and to more algorithmic information). These ideas are discussed through the works and writings of Robert Smithson, Andy Goldsworthy, William Basinski, George Brecht, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Rudolf Arnheim.
An intro the philosophical underpinnings of this research has already been published in French, in La Deleuziana, July 2014: Réticulation et Césure: Le temporalité de la création
Aesthesis, not Prosthesis: Media Ecology and “Long-Range” Correlations (article and conferences)
I plan to enter the debate on ‘media ecology’, a notion with roots in McLuhan, and which has been revived in recent years by M. Fuller, J. Benet, J. Parikka, E. Hörl, and others, often influenced by Guattari’s thought. Here I argue that to foster the ‘long-range’ dependencies, ‘bio-resonance’ (G. Longo), or ‘long circuits of transindividuation’ (Stiegler) needed for sustainable human-nature integrations, prosthetic supersession must be properly correlated to aesthetic intercession (Simondon).
Art and Perceptronium: Aesthesis as a State of Matter
(article and conferences)
I will be exploring the recent work in the physics of consciousness, Integrated information theory of consciousness and the related theory of consciousness as a state of matter, and attempting to recontextualize aesthetics within the paradigmatic shift they represent. If consciousness is a state of matter, along with solid, liquid, gas, and plasma, could this also pave the way toward a physical theory of aesthetics?
Reticulation and Dissensus in Art and Nature
(article and conferences)
This paper attempts to confront Gilbert Simondon’s aesthetics of reticulation with Jacques Rancière’s concept of aesthetic ‘dissensus’, through the analysis of emergent behaviour in nature. The question is: how can reticulation lead to dissensus and variety? Biology abounds with examples of integration and synchronization that leads to stable emergent holistic behaviour. But we often overlook the fact that much of this stability has to do with bootstrapping random variation order to produce genetic variety: randomness affords stability. I propose to read the relation between aesthetic reticulation and dissensus along these same lines.
Of Randomness and Infinity (film, installation, and publication)
Of Randomness and Infinity, is at once a film essay, an installation and a publication, that investigates the algorithmic dimension of culture, from divination practices (Bamana, I-Ching) to the oracular origins of computing (Leibniz), from gambling to chance processes in the arts (Fluxus), and from biology’s autocatalytic precursors (the bioinformatics of abiogenesis) to the future-prediction ‘algos’ of high frequency securities trading.
1/f Noise and Aesthetic Reticulation
(empirical aesthetic experiments)
I am interested in how my research on aesthesis and prosthesis can be linked to recent research in the realm of empirical aesthetics. In particular I am interested in the prospect that aesthetic reticulation might be registered in empirical data. The most promising place to start looking for such a registration is in the random time-series generated in human-human or human-technology interactions. It has already been noted for example, that 1/f noise seems to be related to the observation of long-range correlations in time series, such as in those of self-organized critical systems: i.e. sand piles, earthquakes, avalanches (see Per Bak, 1996).
I am currently in the beginning stages of a collaboration with Dr. Eric Lewis, director of McGill University’s Center for the Critical Study of Improvisation. We plan to conduct experiments in controlled laboratory conditions with free-jazz improvisers, to compare time-series data from their bodies, instruments and the audio produced. The goal is to see whether we can correlate our quantitative observations with the “qualitative” evaluations of listeners. The underlying hypothesis is that if an improv session ‘gells’ according to the listeners, there should be some noticeable registration of this emergent synergistic behaviour in the time series data, and 1/f-like noise should be exhibited. Whereas if an improv session does not ‘come together’, the time series might register a less correlated white-noise-like time series. I am interested in mapping and describing how these long-range correlations emerge in both nature and artistic practices, to attempt to understand the circumstances under which “long-range “or “scale invariant” behaviours are exhibited.