Digital Kinesthesia: Kinesthetic modes of media aesthetics in digital art

Abstract

By the example of 15 interactive, responsive, immersive, augmented, and dynamic digital art installations which have been produced in the course of the transdisciplinary, arts-based research project „Digital Synesthesia“ I will show how kinesthetic features in the media aesthetics of digital artworks allow for cross- and multimodal sensory experiences in the user/spectator.

I claim, that (artistic) digital media like e.g. video, image or sound not only provide sensory experiences within their primary sensory modality but each consist of multimodal sensory features which are „integrated“ by the kinesthetic sensory domain. This is true no matter if we observe dynamic or static artifacts. This assumption is supported by a number of neuroscience findings which say that perception per se is basically built on the physical and mental ability to move.

Moreover, the kinesthetic sense not only integrates the other senses, but it also incorporates semantic concepts like time and space, as well as what has been called the “sense of empathy”. This has been shown in recent research on synesthetic perception and will be an important part of my presentation.

I claim that the cross- and multimodal integration through the kinesthetic sense happens by means of the media aesthetics of, for instance, an artwork. The digital technologies here play a fundamental role, due to their binary code constitution. The focus of my talk will be put on the question, how the cross-modal transfer of kinesthetic features from one sensory domain to another (e.g. vision to audio, audio to smell, taste to kinesthetics etc.) takes place in 15 above mentioned digital artworks.