Neither is the air we breathe empty space, nor is climate change only occurring on planetary scales. Pollution, radiation, heat, and diverse particles travel in the air around our world, take on the form of gases, matter, and ice crystals, and penetrate our bodies. Atmospheres have been revealed as being part of aesthetic milieus that enact metabolic flows and show how sensory
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experience unfolds as a field with which our body actively interrelates. We share atmospheres on the scale of molecules and can experience them in multiple ways; and our self seems to arise from these experiences.
This emergent self has been explored here as a metabolic subjectivity—a sub-jectivity that is characterized through transformation and transitions, arising as a momentary composition, rather than a stable substance that would give rise to a predetermined form. I have connected this notion of the self as only one level of the ongoing process that is life to the situated modes of perception and sensory experiences enabled in the atmospheric artworks of Rahm. Necessarily challenged were the notions of identity and intentionality.
These notions can be replaced by processual ways of relating to environments, if we choose to look at being-in-the-world through the lens of metabolism as a principle of transformation, and interoception as the sense that integrates transformations in a meaningful way. Meaningful experience can, then, be understood as coming out of a resonance between divergent forces. These divergent forces in Rahm’s installations are homeostatic forces, which can be experienced through interoception. When interoception thereby replaces representation and abstraction, the notions of identity and intentionality have to be rethought so that they become thinkable as emerging from the relations between living beings and their environments, as being precisely this relation.
An aesthetic that turns to liminal, visceral processes must then be an aesthetic emerging from the biological as well as cultural engagement with the world—
an embodied aesthetic that studies the modes of experiencing of interactions that are pre-linguistic and pre-reflective, but that constitute meaning for the experiencer.
How can we describe the aesthetic experience of metabolic processes in these first examples? In Hormonorium, the climatic conditions inside the installation space differed from the external environment to such an extent that certain feelings and moods were triggered without providing any distinct source in perception. I explored, here, how the impact of climatic conditions on internal processes of bodies and, ultimately, on the feelings and actions of a subject in an environment could be perceived in an aesthetic way. In this part of the reflection, I built on the figure of the bio-cultural creature as brought forward by Frost, and developed it further along the explorations of aesthetic milieus, emphasizing how the biological dimension of this hybrid figure comes to the fore in aesthetic experience.
In Hormonorium, it is one particular characteristic of aesthetic perception that makes us shift our attention towards the biological part of being as a bio-cultural creature. That is, an object or a situation are not considered in their being-so, but in their appearing (Seel 2005, 89). Therefore, processes usually in the background of conscious awareness come to the fore as they create the context of an object or a situation in its appearing. In focusing on the shifts in
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perspective that bring processes in the background of our experience to the fore in aesthetic perception, I showed how experience can be seen as proces-sual in itself, as a way of engaging with the world that enables us to have a meaningful experience.
From a metabolic perspective, this background of perception can also be the internal, bodily processes themselves: how the body produces hormones, transforms oxygen to energy, and so on, in order to engage with the
surrounding environment. Interoception, as the sense for inner processes, can tell us something about how we feel and why—for example, by feeling that we are tired and that this might have something to do with our surroundings, such as the atmosphere, or with our own bodily states, such as a lack of sleep, and so on.
An attunement to these interrelations with our climatic surroundings sup-ported by the interoceptive sense was designated to open up to the sub-ject new possibilities for being in the world in attunement, through an acknowledgment of the involvements with the world enabled by the bio-chemical dimension of the body. In Rahm’s second installation presented here, these provoked feelings were related to daily habits: how a person was supposed to inhabit and use a space was not communicated through interior design but through the “interior weather,” fittingly the title of the piece, in which climatic conditions of an indoor space were meant to provoke a certain behavior.
The atmosphere of a space, the bio-chemical processes internal to one’s body, and the emotional-affective dimension of experience could now be seen not as separate but instead as continuous. This processuality of experience was explored both regarding the medium of experience and the perception of those processes. Air as a medium changes continuously due to meteorological processes, and thereby, at the same time, changes how we perceive and what.
The fundamental nature of metabolic processes has enabled me to fur-ther emphasize the relationships with ofur-ther organisms with which we share metabolic pathways, and the reciprocal effects of that relation. For this shift in perspective, I argued, it is necessary to bring to our awareness relations between humans and the environment, which are constantly changing depending on bio-chemical processes inside and outside the human body.
The second aspect of aesthetic perception I focused on was that, in aes-thetic perception, we relate a specific situation or object in its appearing to an individual life situation (Seel 2005, 95). We come to see how an object or situation corresponds with different contexts we are familiar with. In remembering, for example, that we have seen something similar before, or in imagining how we could engage with an object or a situation, we relate them to our own life situation. The way this comes about has been described
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in relation to the possibilities of being that we see for ourselves. I discussed this point in line with Heidegger’s notion of Being as being-possible, that is, the possibilities of one’s own becoming that are connected to the involve-ments with the world, which Heidegger’s Being finds itself in. If, in aesthetic perception, we come to understand further involvements of a situation or an object that relate this situation or object to our own life situation, what possibilities for acting we perceive might change as well. In an aesthetics of metabolism, these involvements bring into view shared metabolic pathways with others that are not necessarily human or present as such.