Hyperaesthetics: Making Sense of Our Technomediated World

Abstract

An exploration of the ways that technology increasingly alters our understanding of self and the world in which we live points to the unfolding of what computer theorist Peter Lunenfeld (2000) calls a hyperaesthetics. In this article, the author correlates theories of art and artmaking with a burgeoning hyperaesthetics through theoretical comparison and interpretational modes of critical inquiry. In an attempt to provide a theoretical and methodical study of hyperaesthetics, the author presents the ways that traditional artistic strategies such as perspective, multiple representations, and media transparency reveal connections with—and reveal ways of understanding—such contemporary technological conditions as transparent hypermediacy, multiplicity, erasure, and networked identity. The author describes a technology-inspired art appreciation class experience to illustrate the ways that such connections between artistic strategies and technological issues may inform contemporary art education practices. This experience provides evidence as well as inspiration for an exciting new direction in art education theory and practice in this technomediated world—the quest for a theory of hyperaesthetics.