non/phenomenalities
Site: 120710
Jul 26 – Aug 30, 2025
Curators: Karin Denson, Shane Denson and Brett Amory
Description: The title of this exhibition plays on the multiple senses of the “phenomenal.” On the one
hand, the phenomenal is equated with spectacle and the spectacular, the exceptional
appearance that dazzles its audience, like a pop phenomenon. On the other hand,
phenomenality refers to the way anything whatsoever appears to our embodied senses;
this less extravagant sense of the word “phenomenon” is at the heart of phenomenology
and Kantian philosophy (where it is opposed to the noumenal, which can never appear to
sensation).
Both senses of the phenomenal are contested and reconfigured in the contemporary
networks of computational media and machine-learning algorithms. For example, AI
produces a steady stream of spectacles, each more spectacular than the last, but the
underlying operations are immune to human perception. In this interplay, not only the
objects of perception but also the very conditions of experience are up for grabs. The
phenomenal itself is conditioned by a new realm of nonphenomenality, which poses a
special challenge for artists working with these new technologies.
As a way of approaching this new situation, we look to works that stage multiple aesthetic
inversions of the phenomenal, ranging from the subtle or understated to the invisible. What
comes to the fore when vision encounters computation’s resistance to consciousness, its
“discorrelation” from the phenomenology of embodied experience? How can we perceive
what artist Trevor Paglen has dubbed the “invisible images” that populate our world? And
how can these inversions connect with or be illuminated by other traditions of the non/
phenomenal—for example Buddhist ideas of appearance as illusion, the Lacanian notion of
the unperceived Real, or neuroscientific theories of consciousness as a nonsubstantial
epiphenomenon?
Looking beyond the spectacles of contemporary technology, Non/phenomenalities asks us
to imagine an aesthetics of the subtle, the muted, the “barely perceptible difference,”
maybe even the boring.
