Within the awareness of the underlying complexity of the world of lived experience, there is an opportunity to draw focus upon the primary moments of sensory immersion as the beginning of a form of questioning. Specifically, this research trajectory seeks to clarify how the presentism of an individual body can act as a recording instrument, absorbing the world porously through the array of sensory perception. With attention, we can seek the knowledge of the world as knowledge of the relationships of dynamic interacting processes. These we can conceptualize as ecologies, multiple ecologies and prismatic ecologies.
As designers and artists, we accumulate sensation and movement as conditions of immersive experiences in the tumult of the given world, tracing how the body acts as a stabilizing and de-stabilizing force forming the fugitive spaces of encounter in future design and artistic work. The sense of a space, the sense of the body, and the sense of the work of art form interconnected systems, a possibility of an emergent world, a latent ecology of dense layers of processes. As researchers we seek wisdom and effect, but to do this we work through the bodily sensorium which bundles together this sense-data and acts simultaneously as an unseen instrument of perception and discerning of the layers of visibility and layers of invisibility, sensing and consuming fleeting hidden attunements with knowledge of the passive patterns in existence since the origin of the world. The world is not just a text to be decoded, but an inexhaustible source for clever insight and (future) transformation.
A sense of wonder, at the tangency of the body and the world, is proposed as a type of research for creative work. Wonder is the foundation for the rethinking of design intelligence itself, informed by Gardner’s theories of multiple intelligences (natural intelligence foremost). Amongst all the possible figures of sensitive subjectivity we can hold (the artist, scholar, scientist, lover), lies the origin of a search for an expanded intelligence, a individuated superintelligence, that demands the activation of multiple intelligences for future creative work. With multiple intelligences will come new forms of creativity, and these pose the need for a more precise catalogue of sensation, learning to experience the world spatially, intensely.
The work of Living Midnight is to translate these forms of knowledge and new sensations into interdisciplinary provocations for speculative world-building, as unexpected sense-making and the genesis of strange beauty.