Abstract
The concept of self has long been a subject of philosophical, scientific, and artistic inquiry (Nagel 1974; Barad 2003; Seth et al. 2012; Sehgal 2012; Cardiff 2004; Zhang 2024). Our project, Poetics of Inquiry: Agential Self, combines a mixed methodological approach integrating contemporary art and molecular engineering to explore notions of the self during its interaction with controlled environments. Inspired by molecular self-assembly, the artistic experiment creates conditions in which a human participant’s sense of self is questioned by momentarily overriding, stimulating, or reconfiguring their agential capacities which by extension invites inquiry into the boundaries of the self beyond the human.
In this work we use a multi-layered interactive audio journey in which participants embody different scenarios. Each participant is faced with choices that seem agential but are often primed and triggered through immersive sound cues. As the experience progresses, they are cued to pay close attention to how the immersive environment of the audioscape regulates and modulates their autonomic responses to specific triggers (Blumenthal 1996; Soon et al. 2008). The project uses aesthetic experience to explore the fascinating world of molecular self-assembly from an embodied perspective, and by doing so it also invites participants to imagine selfhood from a non-human perspective. Using such guided and immersive techniques, artists and scientists can invite subjectivity into research that is usually far removed from human experience.
Supplementary materials
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Figure 1
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Guided experience project documentation from Poetics of Inquiry: How to Stay With Trouble
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Figure 2
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Imaginary self-assembly formation serving as a reference for an animated sequence.
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Supplementary weblinks
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Author website
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Reference to past work and additional context for the research presented in this abstract
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