Through daily lived experience, we relate to the world around us — and one another — in capacities that have both conscious and unconscious determinants. Among those determinants which are unconscious, much of this experience is mediated by relational filters -- buffers and catalysts -- that modulate our interactions and frame our encounters. Such relational filters may be technological, artistic, or expressive (camera, musical instrument, language, etc): each is a tool that augments while reflexively constraining some understanding of the world. However, we may not always be aware of how these filters fully mediate our experience, of either their outputs (e.g., a photograph) or the way we use them to encounter the world (e.g., to frame that which is worthy of attention). As a result of this mediation, we may unintentionally shift our expectations in how we relate to that which is being mediated. This includes, by extension, shifts in expectations we have about how to relate to one another as human beings.

 

Because of the pervasiveness and ubiquity of relational filters, we argue, creativity involves the cultivation of sensitivity — a variety of awareness that is distributed, rather than localized — is paramount. Embodied creativity seeks to map, interrogate, and deconstruct how sensitivity shapes the ways we think about, exist in, and relate to the world. We seek to map the terrain of sensitivity across several dimensions, including sensitivity to artistic form, bodily or sensorial literacies, and granularity through attentiveness to symbols and meanings. We believe that artistic practice and pedagogy shaped through sensitivity, as well as the ability to recognize how our sensitivity is mediated, strengthens our commitment to social ethics.

 

In this project, we consider the following assumptions:

Sensitivity is dispositionally predicated. Sensitivity is informed by situational characteristics and articulated through bodily, societal, psychological, or other contexts. Sensitivity is always in relation to something and may be scaled or graded, sometimes non-uniformly, to different degrees of refinement across modalities.

 

Sensitivity is developmental. Sensitivity is related to stages of development and may change over time, across changes related to age, psychology, or circumstance.

 

Sensitivity is cued to reasons and beliefs that may be unconsciously formed. Sensitivity is distributed across habituated axes, which do not necessarily presuppose conscious, causal, or constitutive origins.

 

In this time when epistemic responsibility is often wrested away through technologies of convenience, we seek to reclaim space for the arts to return our attention to the importance of agentive sensitivity to form and granular literacies.