The Aesthetic Experience of Time, in between the Hourglass and the Self

Abstract

This article interrogates time and presents the results of an ethnographic study in a railway station in the suburbs of Paris. More in particular, it analyses the interactions of some of the passengers with ‘Texel’, an experimental artistic dispositive composed of a number of hourglasses that responds to the movements of the passengers. The study identifies several processes and conditions that explain why some passengers did interact with Texel, while others did not.  Subsequently, it explores aesthetic experiences realized during the interaction of people with the device. It focuses on the passage from “aesthetics of perception” to “aesthetics of operation”, and on interactive works of art creating such aesthetics.  It observes that this takes place in spaces in between the internal experience of the passenger and the external reality of the artistic device, and that this aesthetics is transdisciplinary as it integrates cognition, emotions and enacting. Finally, the article explores some links between aesthetic experience and transdisciplinary hermeneutics, and between intermediary spaces of experience and Nicolescu’s concept of the Third Included.