Experience of the "lower” senses – the artist's multisensory aisthesis

Abstract

The ability to translate sensory experience into artistic language (the language of litera­ture, art, theater, and film) offers room for consideration of how artists think. A teaching experi­ment – a student sensory walk – became a starting point for reflecting on the artistic view of mul­tisensory experience. Students could express their observations in the form of an essay, but often they also wrote poetic, or prose forms close to literature, sometimes resembling a report. Such a multisensory "stroll" may refer not only to the sphere of everyday life, but also exist in art; hence we can talk about an architectural walk, a museum-gallery walk, a theatrical walk, or a literary walk. The term "walk" may also be used in science, as proven by G. Bataille or R. Shu­sterman. In the humanities, it is present in many disciplines, so examples from literature, theater, visual and performing arts will be discussed here. Of particular interest are artistic activities, which are an expression of the creative search for an appropriate language, form and discourse for rendering perception, especially of the so-called "lower" senses. The question arises as to how to express sensory experience in words and what theoretical categories, both generalizable and common at the level of scientific and critical discourse, should be used. Many authors make such attempts, and indeed, some of the descriptions created in literature affect our senses so strongly that we can almost feel the taste, smell or texture of the depicted things, phenomena, or people