Aesthetics of Adumbration, excerpt from Work In Progress
March 10, 2014
The adumbrated aesthetic helps to capture the experience of the unperceivable, which extends the media beyond a human scale, and so flips the media from hot to cold. (McLuhan)
Something can be unperceivable because of the vectors of scale: things like size, age, density, decibels. Something can be so small that only with highly sophisticated instruments can we capture hints of it's existence. Or so large that the structure exceed concepts of infinity. What about something so loud that the skin feels like an eardrum? Or so quiet that it is absolutely unhearable?
Unhearable is different from unheard. Unperceivable is different from unperceived. Something can be unperceivable because of the medium in which it resides: we do not have ears that register radio waves, neither eyes that see ultraviolet.
I like to use the word Adumbration to refer to gestures that exist beyond the range of human senses. We know that there is a structure, because it can be referenced, perhaps etched in a mathematics equation. But if we also know that this gesture is beautiful or otherwise compelling, then we are torn from the minimizing filters of the nervous system, jettisoned towards a frontal engagement with the binding state of mortality.
This is a specific and desirable experience. It is an immediate response to the being-ness of an aesthetic gesture. Perhaps a better way to say it is that this is a specific and desirable response that indicates the presence of an aesthetic gesture.