DEFINITIONS

The visual communication designer/chorographer  works in  a landscape context but is required to negotiate the communication of place/country with stakeholders in a participatory process. To allow these experiences to become objects of study [scarr] is the tracing strategy. Fire, water and country –  are the experiences that form the case studies. Firesticks an indigenous -led project initiated by the Kuku thaypan Elders in Cape York, communication design for the Corangamite Regional Catchment Authority and Transdisicplinary engagemnts in the Hawkesbury Nepean Catchment and the creative practiuce Drawing Country(2008- 2012) that includes exhibitions, collaborative installations and a studio practice that is invisible.

The choragrapher is the researcher and works in and understands the meta – landscapes of the context of the study through scholarly reflection – in this case the relationship between the limits and possibility of sustainment, visual communication design, and aisthesis in the context of creative practice research.  It is the reflective and reflexive layer of the study. This is understood through using the tracing strategies of mimesis, transparency, overlay, rupture and transformation to make sense of the connections and differences between the experiences and to make sensible the chaos of the experiences through a commitment to a classical theory of perception – I perceive from the senses and the intellectual simultaneously.

 The chora|ographer understands landscape from the perspective of a visual communication creative practitioner – inward and experimental, but ‘not the private performance of a secluded mind operating on sense data exclusively its own’ (Straus and Griffiths 1967 pg 11),  rather a synthesis of the experiences of place|country through a critical tracing process. 

 Understanding aisthesis in chora|ographia

The framing of the trajectory of the research is firmly rooted in my experience as a practitioner and chora|ographia is an experiment in aisthesis. This word is not defined in the dictionary but has a history that I do not intend to describe but I intend focussing through the perspective of a phenomenologist . According to Harmon Chapman aisthesis is positioned as the classical theory of perception – ‘as perceivers we are not passive observers, but active participants immersed in an encounter wherein our very being is at stake.” (Straus and Griffith 1967 p11) 

I came to aisthesis through Elizabeth Grosz ‘Chaos Territory and Art, Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth’, and Deleuze’s ‘Francis Bacon Logic of Sensation’, particularly the translators introduction by Daniel Smith. This text introduced me to four elements of Kant’s aesthetics that Deleuze calls on to describe the notion of aesthetic comprehension.  Aesthetic comprehension or measurement through a connection to the body; rhythm, chaos and force or what I would call energy and Smith for Deleuze describes as intensities that lie behind sensation.  The publication of the proceedings of a conference in 1967  titled ‘Aisthesis and Aesthetics’ The Fourth Lexington Conference on Pure and Applied Phenomenology that was convened and edited by Irwin Straus and Richard M Griffiths. It is this text and in particular the presentations by Harmon Chapman and Louis Dupré that form the basis for the construction of aisthesis in my study –  the way that perception, sensation, and feelings co-exist. Chapman’s paper ‘The Fundamentals’ provides an argument for the recognition of the subjective individual aspect of perception not as a closed consciousness  but ‘open ‘ to the world as  ‘an empirical phenomenon or event, in which the mind body, medium and object, work in concert to actualise two disparate potentialities – that of perceiving and that of being perceived. In conclusion he critiques the two theories of perception – the classical theory that regards perception as the ‘dual actualising of both self (mind) and other (world)’ and modern theory which regards perception ‘as a private process of constitution which estranges the other and reduces the self to an anonymous observer of its own fabrications’. aisthesis is positioned as the classical theory of perception  ‘as perceivers we are not passive observers, but active participants immersed in an encounter wherein our very being is at stake.” Louis Dupré  “Aesthetic Perception and its relation to ordinary perception ’ where the distinctions within an imaginative response were outlined through the texts of Johannes Volkelt and Schleiermacher and for me a return to Willhelm Worringer and his work on ‘Einfuhl’ or empathy that I read in the early eighties. 

Smith acknowledges Deleuze’s debt to phenomenology  in particular thinkers such as Strauss, Merleau-Ponty, Maldiney through the  invocation of the body but it would seem to be the energetic or ‘unlivable Power’ which is the power of rhythm in its confrontation with chaos.  Deleuze poses the question of how the creative practitioner must pass through the chaos or catastrophe in order the produce the new. This is the role of what Deleuze calls the diagram – ‘the diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality’ – not as  Peirce suggests an icon of intelligible relations (Peirce)  

We will return to this idea in the next section but before we move on we needed to clarify the relation of perception to experience, the imagination, the ordinary and aesthetic and the role of feelings.