Complexity as experience: aesthetics towards cultures of sustainability

If 'art as experience' characterizes aesthetics as an intense and rich relationship with the world (John Dewey), I suggest that 'complexity as experience' characterizes aesthetics of sustainability as a tense and complex relationship with the evolutionary challenge of resilience - prospects for human communities embedded in natureculture's future, in the age of the
Anthropocene.
As I did in the book Art and Sustainability: Connecting patterns for a culture of complexity (2011), I will propose an understanding of aesthetics of sustainability that, acknowledging previous developments in 'ecological aesthetics' and in ecofeminism, roots itself in a Deweyian tradition, and brings together the insights from (a) Gregory Bateson's perspective on aesthetics as the sensibility to “the pattern that connects”, (b) David Abram's animistic take on phenomenology, (c) Edgar Morin's paradigm of complexity, and (d) Basarab Nicolescu's transdisciplinarity. These combined insights inform an articulation of aesthetics which sustains close connections to ethics, science, art, the 'lifeworld' of experience and the noosphere of cultures.
The experience of complexity is in tune with the ambivalences stemming from simultaneously holistic, complementary, competing and antagonistic inter-
relations between multiple logics at play in sustainability problems. Complex aesthetic experience guards us against mistaking this complexity with a set of multiple relationships forming merely 'complicated' networks of relationships under single non-complex, unified principles. It also guards us against the simplifications stemming from merely holistic or dualistic discourses.
A first concrete illustration will be drawn with the example of walking, as an embodied, ecological and transversal element for participatory action research. I will shortly introduce my understanding of walking as serendipedestrian' aesthetic practice.
A second concrete illustration will come from a discussion of ecological art. The question of the relevance of “ecological art” practices for the development of aesthetics of sustainability will be raised. In so doing, I will further characterize these practices as typical of an integration of artistic practices within wider transdisciplinary frameworks nurturing serendipity, embodied learning, and a creatively evolutionary capability for resilience at the level of social systems. This is about art as a verb, and eco-art as a potentially transformative process that fosters subversive imaginations while embedding itself in living communities. Some communities are already engaged, in many places around the world, in the search for lived cultures of sustainability, working towards cultural transformations affecting our ways of knowing, learning, valuing and acting together.

Plenary session