Sensible Life

Embedded Creativity: Structural Interconnections Between Materiality, Visuality, and Agency in Everyday Perceptual Settings

“…The first of them is presented in Giuliana Bruno's recent book (2014) on the surface as the main interface of the current cultural experience, as a kind of "textural materiality" and "surface tension" that comprises in itself all the relevant possibilities for production and circulation of images in the "digital age". The second, concisely couched in the compact book by Emanuele Coccia (2016), is geared towards emanative conception of image understood as a holistic space of the primary presence of the world within human experience.…”

“…Deeply appreciating their promising overthrow of the traditional, subject-matter-oriented approach to the images, embodied in an innovative stress on the emanative (Coccia, 2016) and "sartorial" (Bruno, 2014) aspects of image experience, I should nevertheless point out the still missing explanation for the sources of these aspects and potentials of visually perceived materials -an explanation that would be grounded in the materiality itself. To indicate such sources is in so far important as this -and only this -gives rise to the more balanced view on the meaning-making potential of material settings that would be socially and culturally consequential and, at the same time, not psychologized.…”