PERCEPTIVE ONTOLOGIES

​

This practice was developed as a model for inquiry into the nature of human, sensory perceptions; examining their fluidity and relationality from a phenomenological position. Perceptions are addressed primarily through their apparition to an individual as qualia (term defined below). Methodologies for attending to, conceiving of and qualitatively shifting sensory experience(s) are explored, enquiring into the conditions they are contingent upon.

​

The practice is driven by questions for which experiential, and at large ineffable, answers may be produced. What is my ‘default’ organisation and conception of my sensory modalities? How else can they exist? What are my perceptions contingent upon? Through what methods can I cause my experience of a particular stimuli to qualitatively shift? How can I expand the range of my qualia/perceptive capacities?

​

​

Through ongoing practice, one may develop an embodied ontology of ones sensory perceptions and perceptual processes. This phenomenological ontology is proposed as a subject’s study of what their perception contains, the features or qualities that make content distinct and the interrelations of these contents. Although this study does not directly address propositional attitudes, it is interesting to also consider how it will inherently shift - or provide new reference for - one’s conceptions surrounding truth.

​

Perceptive Ontologies exists through intersections, mediations and coalescings between the fields of dance, perceptive science, phenomenology, artistic research, choreography, somatic practice and ontology. It exists within all of these fields, believing the boundaries are flexible, permeable and may be traversed without transgression or trespass.

​

—

​

Qualia (plural of quale): the private, subjective qualities of conscious experience, the properties of sensory perceptions and how they appear to an individual. Qualia are our experience of consciousness; our experience of sensation; our experience of phenomena; the basis for our rendering and conception of ourselves and the world. They are solely the experiential - what it is like - part of a perception and not the biological processes that are facilitative. Meaning they can only be encountered through direct experience and can not be accessed through memory, imagination or as a common understanding between individuals.