ENACTIVISM AND PERFORMANCE ART: PUTTING ON DISPLAY OUR PERCEPTION
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philosophia October 30, 2021 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.24193/subbphil.2021.2s.08
Summary
The enactive approach holds that seeing is an action, not a brain-bound process. Drawing on performance art, the author argues that perception is a shared, collective doing. Performance art's autopoietic feedback loop, spectator-performer exchange, and oscillation of the subject-object dichotomy model perception as inherently relational, participatory, and transformative.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Perception is constitutively relational, participative, and transformative, as modeled by the dynamics of performance art. |
Abstract
Seeing, according to the enactive approach, is not something that happens inside our brain, rather it is something we do, but, as I will argue thanks to the performance art, it is something we do together. The performing arts, with their characteristics – autopoietic feed-back loop, spectator/performer exchange, oscillation of the dichotomous subject-object pair - constitute a model through which to investigate the nature of our perception, which is constitutively relational, participative, and transformative.