Aesthetics is what we can sense and how we sense. Aesthetics is our most “basic” way of being alive. It involves both how and what we sense – and how we come to “comport” ourselves. It is the way we describe and understand our historical forms of sense-making.
In any historical mode of sense-making, there are profoundly felt moments of discomfort, disruption, and absurdity – and there are also sensations of how we practice in our everyday lives pulling difference back towards existing norms – our normative comportment.
In creative experimentation – negative sensations are potential cues to novel pathways worth exploring. Blocking is a negative act that is experienced negatively. And this experience of perplexity, horror, wonder, disgust, frustration, stupidity, and boredom – are the critical sense-making cues that need to be actively and experimentally explored in ways that are enabling and generative of qualitative differences.
Further reading: Innovation: Sense Making and Aesthetics
