2/5/2025 | 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM | Grand Peninsula B

On the aesthetic experience

Author(s)

Christopher Tyler | Smith-Kettlewell Institute

Abstract

Aesthetics is currently on the ascendant as a key factor in the design of consumable products across the globe.  They have value not just in the optimal capability to perform their intended function, but in the aesthetic quality that they express in doing so. There is a particular experience that may be identified as "the aesthetic experience", distinguishable from the merely pleasurable:  the deliciousness of food, the beauty of a sunset, the flush of sex, etc.  The aesthetic experience takes things out of their everyday context to imbue them with the extra significance of the aesthetic context. Before going to an art museum, for example, everything around signifies its affordances through the everyday functionality of its immediate use - streets, trees, cellphone, etc. Within the museum, I encounter many things that challenge this viewpoint, and push my interpretative system to probe non-quotidian functionality and the nature of things in themselves at many fundamental and societal levels. Math equations do something similar for mathematical initiates, but the meaningfulness is in the domain of conceptual/geometrical abstraction into is in the immense range of possibilities of expression of its simple laws, as illustrated by the proliferations of outcomes of fractal equations.