Espes. The Slovak Journal of Aesthetics is an international interdisciplinary peer-reviewed open-access journal of aesthetics.
Non-Human Perception of Aesthetics and the Phenomenonof Overview Effect in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital
Samantha Harvey’s Orbital stages a representation of aesthetic perception under posthuman, postterrestrial, and post-anthropocentric conditions of outer space. The experiences represented in Orbital are read alongside the cognitive and non-human sensorial phenomenon known as the overview effect. By placing these experiential shifts alongside their literary representation, this paper examines how spaceflight affects and dismantles the anthropocentric perception of aesthetics. Arguing that the overview effect, as represented in Orbital represents a posthuman perception of aesthetics and that the suggested concept of the postbody conceptualises these shifting forms of subjective aesthetic experience, emerging from the convergence of shifting perception in non-human spaces.
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The book review of Diaconu, M. (2024) Aesthetics of Weather. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
A Path Not Taken: Tobias Gottfried Schröer’s Isagoge in Eruditionem Aestheticam for the First Time in Slovak Translation
The book review of Tobias Gottfried Schröer: Úvod do estetickej náuky (1842). Komentovaný preklad estetického kompendia. Edited and translated by Slávka Kopčáková and Slavka Oriňáková. Prešov: Prešovská univerzita v Prešove, 2024. ISBN 978-80-555-3366-7.
Aesthetics without Objects and Subjects: Relational Thinking for Global Challenges – A Book Review
The book review of Perullo, N. (2025) Aesthetics without Objects and Subjects: Relational Thinking for Global Challenges. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
This article introduces the aesthetics of posthumanism as a genuine trend in philosophical aesthetics that emerged in the early decades of the 21st century. Engaging with an innovative imagination of the cohabitation of various life forms, the aesthetics of posthumanism rethinks interspecies encounters across both cultural and natural environments, prompting us to consider ethically motivated images of environmental awareness and creative adaptation. Building on phenomenological, deconstructive, and schizoanalytic methodological insights, this article aims to highlight a turning point in contemporary aesthetic research that questions our anthropocentric, speciesist prejudices and presents them as obsolete in a world shaped by the global environmental crisis. To address the complexity of this topic, the article presents contributions that map various approaches to the ‘posthuman situation’ in the artistic and philosophical imagination of contemporary human identity. The first set of referred texts targets the multifaceted – environmental, social, and technological – disaster caused by the speciest, self-centred humanism of the modern era, and the subsequent rupture of posthumanist art from it. This aesthetic perspective gives rise to resistance through posthumanist engagement. The second set of references addresses various problems related to anthropocentrist aesthetics. By introducing thinkers who articulate distinct viewpoints on the politics of aesthetic imagination, this article presents two contrasting approaches to contemporary visuality: while one group welcomes the environmentally caring approach of post-anthropocentrism, the other advocates preserving the anthropocentric one.
The text creates space for mutual interpretation and reinterpretation of the aesthetics of philosopher Gernot Böhme and the phenomenal morphology of biologist Adolf Portmann. Both of these ambitious projects aim to radically reform their disciplines (aesthetics and biology) by breaking away from the subject-centric and logocentric foundations of modern anthropology. Using Böhme’s concept of atmosphere, we develop Portmann’s notion of self-manifestation and the unaddressed phenomenon of living beings. In doing so, we remove Portmann’s categories from their scientific context and limit Böhme’s dynamic model of things to living beings. Finally, based on the phenomenology of the living outlined above, we formulate an ethics of relation to living beings.
The ongoing collapse of the Earth System’s functionality is fundamentally reshaping our thinking about nature and the conditions of existence on Earth. As an era of ontological destabilisation, the Anthropocene can be described as a dark ecology that radically deforms our sensibilities, guiding multidisciplinary attempts to grasp a new naturecultural regime. Anthropocene aesthetics is an encounter with the more-than-human forces of the Earth System that goes beyond traditional art forms and aesthetic strategies. In our essay, we explore contemporary aesthetic approaches to the Anthropocene, highlighting the posthuman aspect of Anthropocene aesthetics. In our view, the defining aesthetic trends of the Anthropocene are determined by the post-anthropocentric or posthuman turn. Posthuman art is not about nonhumans creating art without us. Rather, it foregrounds the naturecultural forces that define and shape life on our planet.
In her recent article Overcoming Climate Breakdown Denial and Neglect through the Aesthetics of Nature (2023), philosopher Marta Tafalla argues for the possibility that one can learn about global climate change (GCC) if one listens to animals and stories nature itself tells us. Contrary to Tafalla, I argue that her suggestion is overly optimistic. In my paper, I first demonstrate that Tafalla assumes the link between cause and consequence always corresponds to findings in environmental science, and that this assumption is unfounded. Second, I examine the strategies and narratives employed by antienvironmentalists and demonstrate that they utilise the same narrative structures as Tafalla when telling animal stories. Accordingly, I claim that one can learn about GCC from animals’ stories if and only if one already acknowledges it.
Contaminated Survivals in Inhalaciones territoriales by Ana Laura Cantera
In Inhalaciones territoriales (2022), artist Ana Laura Cantera, in collaboration with Demian Ferrari, explores the urban space of Buenos Aires (Argentine) and Bangalore (India) using a device for the collection of ambient CO2. This work can be interpreted within the context of extinction, stemming from the planetary crisis we are witnessing, involving humans and non-humans alike. In scenes of devastation, the work explores ways to inhale, walk, feel, contaminate, challenging affective repertoires tinted with pessimism, in favor of delving into new affective expressions that advocate for multispecies alliances and solidarities. Drawing on the perspectives of Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and Vinciane Despret we will delve into the sympoietic landscape of this work, aiming to establish the posthuman coordinates of coexistence and multispecies collaborations as a vigorous response to the Anthropocene.
Contemporary Regimes of Visuality: The Avatar Mountains
In recent decades, academic conceptions of landscape have been progressively shifting away from a representational definition, according to which landscapes are reduced to scopic fictions aligned with the sensitivities of beholders, towards a substantive understanding that highlights their aesthetic, ecological, and socio-political dimensions. This ongoing turn has promoted more holistic and more-than-representational approaches that emphasize the interconnections between the perceptual and the environmental layers of landscape experience. At the same time, mobility practices (especially tourism) driven by the prior circulation of digital images foster a new reduction of places to the “horizons of expectation” shaped by such imagery. Without adopting a technophobic stance, this article examines the risks implicit in modes of landscape consumption that disregard their inherent complexity. Focusing on Zhangjiajie Forest Park in China, it analyses how cinema and digital media have transformed this natural landscape, highlighting both the merits of this remediation—in terms of enhanced visibility and economic development—and its drawbacks, notably the encouragement of unsustainable practices such as overtourism and the aestheticization of natural beauty.
Posthuman Motives in China Miéville’s Fictional Worlds
Our aim in this text is to analyse Miéville’s work, both theoretical and fictional, through the perspective of posthumanist sensitivity, which involves critically reassessing the human condition and embracing perspectives that extend beyond the human and more-than-human. We regard posthumanist thought as transcending the notion of an autonomous, rational subject being the sole ethical and meaningful agent, instead positioning humans within a broader network of life that necessitates interaction and negotiation with other non-human actors and forces. This shift in perspective in Miéville’s work can be observed in relation to Lefebvre’s theme of urban reality. We consider the relationship to the city as a non-human element central to the aesthetics of Miéville’s fictional universes. The foundation for examining his fictional worlds is the assertion that Miéville’s writing stems from a catastrophe of modernity and a subsequent radical rupture with it, suggesting that his thinking emerges post-catastrophe from a broken and fragmented world. In this context, he explores a future not based on any predetermined plan but arising from ongoing struggles – failures and renewals – in the pursuit of a future. Its aim is to challenge our present – specifically, the reader’s present – who may still inhabit a world overly centred on human existence.
The paper focuses on the aesthetic frames of gardening. I propose understanding plant cultivation as an aesthetic framing of divided hospitality and hostility. Following Derrida’s critical reading of Kant’s thoughts on beautiful frames and Austin’s thoughts on performative fails, I argue that the gardener’s performativity delimits the beautiful and cultivated order of his garden from the wild and chaotic ‘outside’ he cannot govern. Progressively, by resisting the ‘outside’ through inner rituals of framing, the gardener encloses himself ‘inside’ his locally performed order of cultivation. Based on my deconstructive revision of gardening genres, I conclude that environmentally engaged aesthetics might overcome the traditional gardener’s cultivation of hostility towards otherness.
This article argues that Nazi concentration camps blurred the line between human and nonhuman by juxtaposing dehumanised prisoners with animals kept in camp zoos and the SS Angora project. Drawing on survivor testimonies, philosophical posthumanism, comic books, and the concept of the "material witness," the study argues that overcoming anthropocentrism is essential for rethinking perspectives on life, memory, and testimony. The Nazi system’s hierarchy of life – caring for rabbits while people starved – demonstrates how domination relies on rigid species boundaries. By treating nonhuman actors, such as trees, animals, and landscapes, as witnesses, the article proposes posthumanist solidarity and shared vulnerability. These challenges inherited notions of humanity and claims that perception should become an ethical act, involving both human and nonhuman agents, in the reconstruction of history.
This paper examines contemporary artistic critiques of anthropocentrism by focusing on two claims: (1) that aesthetic experience can temporarily displace human perceptual frameworks, and (2) that such displacement carries ethical value. I draw on a selection of Czech, Slovak, and international artworks that seek a nonhuman standpoint. I situate these practices within a longer debate about the limits and significance of entering into alien perspectives – ranging from David Hume’s remarks on ancient artworks that espouse moral outlooks radically different from our own to Thomas Nagel’s scepticism about the very possibility to adopt nonhuman points of view. I argue that, although aesthetic experience may prompt a departure from the human perspective, we should neither pursue nor valorise that departure. The connection between more-than-human ethics and more-than-human aesthetics, I suggest, does not proceed via empathy into a nonhuman perspective.
This article analyses the fourth volume of Love, Death and Robots (2025) to explore how animality can be explored through posthuman aesthetics. Animals have always been historical beings, and their histories are inextricably tied to human activities. By not privileging humans over non-human animals, we can aim for a networked environment with companion species devoid of any binaries. By engaging with Donna Haraway’s theories of companion species, Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of becoming animals, Mitchell and Krause’s concepts of animal consciousness and Skonieczny’s concept of the animal turn, this paper focuses on the connections between different aesthetics, ethics, and politics of different animals. This article thus demonstrates that posthuman aesthetics represented through the animals in Love, Death and Robots challenges traditional humanist aesthetics and evokes an alliance of different realms and ecologies.
Interweaving Ecohorror and Symbiotic Associations
Sundarbans portray a world that is non-anthropocentrically hybridised with frequent human-wild engagements as part of daily survival. Amitav Ghosh aptly highlights the (multi-layered) dual character of Sundarbans, surfacing the perilous yet intimate bond between the human and the natural world, evoking ecological horror as well as awareness among the anthropocentric realm. The paper focuses on the islander’s struggle to survive in the complexities of such landscapes in the backdrop of region’s rich socio-cultural history as depicted in his ecological texts – The Hungry Tide, Gun Island and Jungle Nama that simultaneously overlap ecohorror with symbiotic interfaces. Using posthumanist ecohorror as a theoretical framework for study, the paper argues how Ghosh’s illustrations of different environmental catastrophes and conflicts in the frame of region’s cultural belief systems form a posthuman aesthetic that enables to live symbiotically despite oppressive political establishment and precarious circumstances.
This paper explores the aesthetic experience of landscape through the conceptual triad of space, territory, and Earth. It argues that territory is the semiotic structuration of space, while landscape remains unassimilated, operating as a site of desubjectification and spatial openness. The study examines how deterritorialization and landscapification disrupt dominant spatial regimes, allowing new forms of spatial relation to emerge. The paper contends that access to landscape is essential for the possibility of otherness and spatial transformation, particularly for marginalized groups, and that the experience of landscape grounds the potential for rethinking spatiality beyond institutional constraints.
Art is for the mind, not for the retina of the eye
Book review of Dytrtová, K. (2024) Galerijní animace, tělo a prostor. Ústí nad Labem: Fakulta umění a designu Univerzity Jana Evangelisty Purkyně. ISBN 978-80-7561-468-1. ISBN 978-80-7561-444-5.
Towards a critical reading aesthetic texts: A new textbook for students of aesthetics at the University of Prešov
Book review of Makky, L. (2024) Kritické čítanie estetických textov. Autor, text, čitateľ. Prešov: Vydavateľstvo Prešovskej univerzity. 164 s. ISBN 978-80-555-3360-5.
Reconfiguring Realities: On the Intra-active Liminality of Bridges
Bridges, traditionally conceived as architectural structures, are examined in this study as complex aesthetic phenomena with distinct and significant ontological and epistemological dimensions. Drawing from Karen Barad’s intra–active realism and the rhizomatic ontology of Deleuze and Guattari, the research deconstructs the subject–object dichotomy and conceptualizes bridges as liminal entities with the capacity to form new relationships and meanings. Analyses of Kafka’s short story The Bridge and multimedia interventions by Svetlana Volic posit the bridge as a performative space that transcends its original utilitarian function to emerge as a dynamic platform for posthumanist inquiry. The study offers an alternative perspective on understanding space, subjectivity and the relationships between human and non–human actors.
Internationalism Hits the Opera Stage: Nixon (and Dewey) in China
John Adams’s Nixon in China (1987) is one of the most iconic operatic works of the end of the 20th century. It is also an interesting case to study the relationship between aesthetics and politics. In this paper, I offer a reading of the political and aesthetic sides of the work in light of John Dewey’s philosophy. Central to my account is to examine the effect that Dewey’s own trip to China had on his political philosophy. I argue that Nixon is not just a series of anecdotes related to Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, as has been claimed by some critics, but that the Deweyan perspective I take particularly on Nixon‘s third act shows that the opera has genuine political substance, which is also tied to the work’s aesthetic features.
Just Like Home: Photo Album on the Edge of the Everyday
In the last few decades, we have observed an increased interest in photography as an object of study of the everyday, as well as of the formation of everyday habits and aesthetics. It is no longer understood strictly as an artistic entity, a document, or a personal commodity, but – under the impression of a material turn – it is experiencing a substantial renaissance as a complex tool for learning about the socio-cultural parameters of a given community or space-time with a specific aesthetics. The photographic history, rather than the history of photography, involves a series of tools and methodological procedures that make the photographic image not only a source of banal information but is understood as a saturated structure. Institutional practice becomes one of the key themes, with the archive establishing itself alongside collections. Or rather, and this is what the text focuses on, the photo album – is a complex tool on the borderline between active and passive perception, personal and shared experience, image, and text. How does this medium work in the context of contemporary art practice? What means does it have at its disposal when the author turns his attention to the problem of “everyday”? And can we truly talk about specific aesthetic attributes?
In-determinism in Susanne Langer’s Philosophical Concept of Feeling and Eastern Thinking Tradition
Western centre-periphery concepts of experiencing art within current (neuro)aesthetics show the way Susanne K. Langer’s philosophy of art intersects with the non-Western mode of thinking. To find what is conceptualised as undetermined in Langer’s philosophical concept of feeling and, more generally, art, this paper offers a shortened review of her position explained in several neuroscientific studies. Additionally, it looks at how Western neuroscientific categories would possibly lead a dialogue with the conceptualisation of creation and art in the Eastern thinking tradition. The submitted study aims to open a possible untraditional vista for comprehension of, first and foremost, a communicative function of art employing non-reductive comprehension of its nature. In the way of such a constituting, it will present overlaps of the neuroscientific line, Langer’s work, and Eastern (Japanese) thinking tradition. Thus, to also be onto the importance of the unacknowledged significance of Susanne Langer’s work, bridging will appear at the centre of attention.
Polyaesthetic Education in Slovakia after 1990 – Resources, Concepts, and Prominent Figures (Juraj Hatrík)
The present study chronologically surveys innovative processes in aesthetic education and the impact of music educators who, after the political and cultural changes in Slovakia in 1989, embarked on the path of developing the concept of polyaesthetic education in line with the ideas of its founder, Wolfgang Roscher, and those of the Salzburg School (Mozarteum), Austria. The aim of the study is to clarify how the ideas of 1990s’ polyaesthetic education were applied to the aesthetic education subjects, primarily music education. Theoretical foundations, their adaptation to the Slovak educational environment, and analytical insights into Juraj Hatrík’s (1941–2021) creative work advancing the theory and practice of polyaesthetic education are presented in the section on his projects and music workshops. Hatrík’s projects, due to their originality and authentic affinity to a child’s spiritual world, managed to abandon the space of integrative music pedagogy and consistently followed the principles of polyaesthesis.
Breaking Aesthetic Boundaries: Arthur Danto, Yuriko Saito, and the Challenge to Western Aesthetic Thought
This article examines how Arthur C. Danto and Yuriko Saito sought to expand the boundaries of aesthetics and art, challenging the inherited concepts of Western modernity. While Danto redefines art as an intellectual rather than a purely visual phenomenon, ultimately declaring the end of art to justify a pluralistic and self-reflective artistic landscape, Saito reclaims everyday life as a legitimate subject of aesthetic inquiry. Her approach challenges the separation between aesthetics and practice, demonstrating that aesthetic choices shape our surroundings, social relationships, and ethical commitments. By comparing these two perspectives, this article highlights the limitations of modern aesthetic paradigms, including Danto’s. Furthermore, by examining the reductions imposed by modern aesthetic history, it argues that Saito’s Everyday Aesthetics offers an alternative, transformative, and generative aesthetic framework—one capable of dismantling previous aesthetic barriers and opening new, underexplored paths for the discipline. More importantly, her approach possesses a profound transformative power, allowing individuals to engage with aesthetics in ways that shape both their perception of the world and their everyday lives.
In this paper, I shall examine the aesthetic experience afforded by stones – in particular the kind of smoothly rounded enchanting pebbles that invite us to handle and collect them – and argue that it is not simply an experience of natural objects, but that their appeal is related to their being comparable to artefacts, although the workmanship was enacted not by a human but by superhuman forces. Such stones have, as it were, an ontological position between natural aesthetic phenomena and artefacts and summons us to connect with our earthly origins. Finding a stone that is not only pleasing to the eye but more importantly to the hand can bring one into contact with the planet’s deep past. I explore the affinities between stones and Korsmeyer’s (2019) “Real Things” – rare, old or singular artefacts, characterised by genuineness and a distinct aura, that invite us to come closer to and touch them.
Symposium. Art, Aesthetics, and the Sense of Touch
To Touch or Not to Touch: Taxidermy and the Museum
Recently I attended a class in which a conservation specialist instructed the students to practice caution when treating an old piece of taxidermy. She directed them to wear masks and don protective gloves. Treating the taxidermy with naked hands was strictly forbidden. Upon hearing the instructor’s cautionary words, I wondered why taxidermy, once considered beautiful and desirable, had now become a toxic site. What had occasioned the change? And what does this alteration have to say about the nature of our contemporary relationship to our surroundings. And what does it have to say about the nature of touch? This essay is divided into four parts. The first considers former opportunities to reach out and actually touch taxidermy. This section discusses the nature of touch, particularly its affirmation of reality. The second section attends to the necessity of protecting taxidermy from insect infestations, a concern that until the 1980s, involved using large doses of arsenic and mercuric chloride. The third section discusses how the application of these toxics has recently alarmed museum directors. No longer is one allowed to touch the displayed taxidermy. Part Four addresses this alteration. The shift from welcoming touch to banning it participates in a society in which touch is often feared or deemed unnecessary. Touching the genuine article has been replaced by virtual realities or mediated so that a skin to skin encounter is now not as available. This alteration has compromised the experience of touch and our relationship to the world.
Delectable Knowledge-How the Sense of Touch illuminates the Ontological Status of AI-Recipes
The ongoing digital transformation has significantly altered our access to cooking recipes, introducing AI-generated outputs from Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper examines the ontological status of such AI-generated recipes, arguing that neither recipe Platonism nor Constructivism can fully account for them, as both rely on the existence of a prepared dish as a condition for validation. Yet, some AI-generated recipes are treated as successful, suggesting that their acceptance is not purely abstract, but rooted in embodied culinary knowledge. Drawing on Andrea Borghini’s concept of apprenticeship, I argue that recognising a recipe involves both abstract cognition within a type-token framework and sensory engagement through cooking and tasting. This analysis is supported by insights from Alva Noë and Matthew Ratcliffe, who conceptualise perception not as passive reception, but as a skilled and bodily situated mode of interaction with the world. Perceiving, in this sense, becomes a form of doing and touch and taste play a crucial role in how we validate recipes through practice. By shifting the focus from what is a recipe? to how do we recognise a recipe?, I propose a broader account that accommodates both human and AI contributions. Ultimately, recipe validity is not merely a matter of cognitive classification, but an experiential process grounded in sensory interaction, highlighting cooking as a vital mode of understanding recipe ontology.
Both food and the sense of touch mainly were ignored throughout the history of Western philosophy. Times have changed, and finally, research is done on touch and on food even in Ango-American aesthetics. This paper brings the topics together by looking into the importance of touch in our aesthetic experiences of and around food. Once one turns away from the exalted realm of art and other exceptional experiences, it is evident that cooking and eating can provide important aesthetic pleasures in our everyday lives. I will argue that touch plays a fundamental role in three different, aesthetically important dimensions around eating. The first one is sensory and concerns the pleasures of the mouthfeel of food. The second is cognitive and relates to touch being a source of information about what is eaten. The third is the role of touch in the actions of cooking and having a meal.
Original Vinyl Only! Records, Touch, Auras, and the Past
Touch has recently gained attention in aesthetics. Carolyn Korsmeyer argues that touchable artefacts offer valuable aesthetic encounters with genuineness, rarity, and connection to the past. She employs Walter Benjamin’s argument that a unique work has an authenticity and aura that copies cannot have. Yet Benjamin undermines his own argument in another essay on the aesthetic value of collecting books, surely products of mechanical reproduction. This reintroduces questions concerning whether copies can have auras and if they involve a sense of touch relevant to aesthetic appreciation. I argue that vinyl records are copies that can have auras and better demonstrate the aesthetic value of touch because they require it, unlike Korsmeyer’s examples. Records can have auras in three senses: collections can be unique, they can have cult value, and records in play have a ‘surrounding glow’. The aesthetic value of touch, aura, and connection to the past is revealed by situating records within a practice of collecting and the material relationship between collector and collection.