The chapter offers preliminary notes towards an analysis of the forms of sensing and making sense that emerge at the interface of the organic and the technological� I argue that these forms have the capacity to productively challenge and expand our understanding of the key notions of aesthetics – aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment – and with that, to rethink the pre- vailing anthropocentrism of aesthetic tradition, shifting attention to the phenomenon that was at the roots of the aesthetic project, namely aisthesis, or sense-perception� One useful context for such an inquiry is a media ecological approach, with its emphasis on relations between different agencies and the shifted role of subjectivity� The questions then include: How can the aesthetic perspective complement the existing theories of forms of cognition within biolog- ical and technical systems? What are the best terms for the analysis of the qualitative aspects latent within the interpretative procedures that happen in living and nonliving matter? And vice versa, how can the “microperformances” and sensorial acts at the cellular and molecular levels affect how we conceive of human perception? Looking at the operations of relating at either human or nonhuman levels through the prism of a medium that underlies them helps to ground this discussion in a particular way� The chapter features particularly the aesthetic strategies exercised by a number of contemporary artists that bring to the fore the mediatic operations as sensory events and exemplify ways of engaging with the broader ecology of media sensorium, still to be discovered and cognized�
Keywords: media ecology, sense act, sensing, aesthesis, microperformativity, performative epistemology, art
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