Antonio Palacios Rojo
For my birthday, I gifted myself a day of revelation and exhaustion. I chose to walk the sunbaked trails of Doñana, paths of shifting sand and scant shade, pushing my body to its limits. I began near the Laguna de la Huerta del Jaral, which, true to its habit, vanishes in the dry months—meaning nearly all year round.
I turned right and pressed my feet into the dunes, heading toward the Acantilado del Asperillo. When I reached the first ridge, I looked back. Below me, now almost from a bird’s-eye view, lay the park’s green pine forests, streaked with sandy yellow.
I took it all in to the rhythm of my labored breath—not from wonder, but from fatigue. Climbing... descending... I finally arrived to the famed viewpoint of the Acantilado del Asperillo. Before approaching it, with the blues of the sea and sky in front of me, I whispered, “Thalassa, thalassa.”
I don’t know if that’s the word the Greeks used—or still use—for the sea. But I spoke it with thirst and awe, with the first stirrings of a deep fatigue brought on by the murderous heat. Was it the same dryness those early Greeks felt as they were hunted and slaughtered without respite by the Persians? Did they feel the same relief upon seeing the sea, that promise of escape from their suffering?
I can’t even recall the plot, the title, or the author of the historical tale I’m thinking of—only its ending. As I reached the cliff’s edge and walked along the brink, I realized my adventure was not yet over. You see, I had trusted the scraps of information I’d skimmed on my phone the day before, blinded by my superstitious faith in the digital. I had believed the impossible: that an easy access to the beach awaited me from the top of that precipice, as the flawed data had suggested.
There, in the reality of sand, stone, and emptiness, I understood that I could only gaze at the sea, not plunge into it—just as one gazes at the sky without ever touching it. With this truth in mind, I sought a solution. I consulted the virtual guide of an app that assured me I could reach Playa de la Mata del Difunto after enduring three kilometers for over an hour.
I walked and walked—up slopes, over rises, along steep paths. But to my left, the abyss, crowned with the same shrubs and pines, still denied me an easy, narrow trail to the vast Atlantic waters. At the limit of my strength, I concluded that this digital promise, too, was unlikely to be fulfilled.
Then I realized I had left my sunglasses near the cliff’s edge. So, I forced myself to retrace my steps. I found more help in a tall reed, which I used as a staff to steady my pace through the shifting sands, than in the technological marvel in my pocket.
At a crossroads, I faced a choice: endure another hour of hardship to return to the cliff and retrieve my sunglasses, or continue my flight from the suffocating heat, which the pines did little to temper. I decided that recovering the dark lenses would be like rescuing someone left behind—a decision laden with the personal sacrifice that defines true heroism.
During the first stretch of this return to familiar suffering, I realized the cost of my resolve. The reed I used as a staff could barely keep me upright. Out of shame, I haven’t yet mentioned one of the greatest obstacles to my progress: the footwear I had chosen for that day’s walk—slippers without insoles, loose at the instep, which with every step became a repository for sand and pine needles. A blister was forming on my right foot, the one that always led the way. With the swelling, it felt as though a twin big toe was sprouting.
This pain faded when I saw that my sunglasses —embodied in my mind as a forsaken, rosy creature— were still where I had left them, forgotten. But I was so weak that I had to pull the towel from my backpack and curl up in it like a baby’s blanket. I chose a small dune crowned with junipers for this. To keep the sun off my feet, I had to adopt a fetal position. Then I gave thanks that this place was deserted at this time of year, so no one could see my posture.
As I rested my head on the slope, I could see the horizon sealed by a wall of sea and sky, containing countless shades of blue. My thirst was barely quenched by the sips from my meager canteen, while the murmur of the waves promised a coolness it could not deliver. There I was, near the edge of a cliff, trapped in the yellows of the dunes, trying to sate myself on the blackness cast by the green patches of shrubs.
Then came the revelation I had sought: that sea, as distant to me as the sky, was nothing but a symbol of the virtual world that beckons so promisingly and closely from our screens, yet remains remote and illusory as we sit stranded in the sands of our cubicles, our bedrooms. At last, I was granted the vision of a revealing image—the kind I try to conjure each year on my birthday through some activity intuited days before. And so, I whispered again: “Thalassa, thalassa.”
Art has traditionally relied above all on the visual, and to a lesser extent on the acoustic, as a way of appealing to the mind and to what is often called the spirit. What has made classical art compelling is the distance it establishes between the work and the spectator. Confronted with the piece, the viewer is placed in a posture of reverence, almost as if worshiping what is before them. For this reason, seeing or listening requires the artwork to remain independent and autonomous, preserving that separation.
By contrast, taste, touch, and smell create a more immediate communion in which the object dissolves. Touch breaks its autonomy; taste brings it directly into the body; smell often consumes it altogether. Think of incense: it burns, turns into smoke, and enters the one who breathes it. This is why the visual and the acoustic have been associated with sublimation, with states akin to standing before the divine, while the other senses have been regarded as low, earthly, and bodily.
Technology carries this forward. Many cybernetic works also reach for the unattainable, placing the observer in submission before a device that fuses sound and image. With artificial intelligence this sense of being superior seems stronger, as though facing a new kind of divinity. In painting or music, one could at least guess the mechanisms behind the finished piece; in today’s technified arts, the processes remain hidden to most. That opacity increases the gap and reinforces the claim to autonomation and superiority.
Turning instead to the so-called “lower” senses disrupts this alienation before art, and restores the experience to something more natural and primal—a counterbalance, perhaps, to a world that grows ever more technological and seeks to set aside much of humanity in pursuit of its aims.
Sometimes you feel as though you have seen your own existence from a vantage point where all becomes clear — the whole perspective — and you realize who you are and what you have done during all that time. The problem with this may be that one speaks of having an insight. Therefore, you sense that something is wrong, but you cannot tell what it is, because you are trying to see it, even to hear it.
Sight and hearing are often privileged over the other senses by those who diminish the physical self while retreating into their personal caves. These artists and thinkers lock themselves in rooms in order to work. As a result, the embodied being grows less wise, and delirium begins to possess the mind, brought on by the excessive development of language. It is arms and legs, the skin, the tongue that should think and make art.
When the realm of the symbolic feeds on itself — as happens now with LLMs and vast computational systems — it means that entire societies have given up on living. Both intellectual and artistic creation often unfold during long periods of isolation, in which one finds oneself entangled in an obsessive whirlwind of memories and past sensations. By entrusting everything to this coded remembrance, the self becomes confined within it. This does not happen to those who, out of work or necessity, must go out and collide with the ordinary world — the dense and corporeal sphere of material existence. They are the ones that grow wise and artistic.
Chinese poetry, dense with imagery and sound, opens your senses of sight and hearing like wounds. After reading several poems, you step out into nature and listen more acutely. You hear more birdsong, more wind rustling through branches. You see more colors: that green, the frost-white. So I suppose these verses compel you to meditate. They corner you on some higher plane. They could be considered spiritual exercises—or an invitation to them. An escape from presence through what is present.
To break free from my dependence on sight and sound, I tried going without both for several hours each day. I used a cloth and earplugs. The time I once spent peering into my screen, spying on the virtual world, I now dedicated to projecting my thoughts and memories onto the bandages. Gradually, my sense of self grew stronger.
Antonio
look at the black
and feel the light—
box off.
Horses run outside.
An electric saw
tears the air.
Antonio
take my hand in thought—
once,
twice,
three times.
I follow Antonio’s footprints,
shirt held to one side.
Ears—
ears for no one.
We have ears
for no one.
Eyes—
eyes for no one.
We have eyes
for no one.
Grass.
Flavor of grass.
Grapes.
Grapes from your home.
White plate.
On a white plate.
Just smell.
Just taste.
Above all.
In this new reality, my dwelling, my first nation, was my body. It didn’t matter where I was or where I would be, nor what situation I was in or would face. By simply closing off my eyes and ears, I found myself at home.
Why travel to distant paradises? Why seek a substitute for life in a technological universe of metal? Why crave a grand house when your residence is within your own flesh? You only need to feel inward, never outward
“Many
philosophies refer to sight; few to hearing; even fewer place their
trust in touch, let alone smell. Abstraction carves up the sensing
body, discards taste, smell, and touch, keeping only sight and
hearing—intuition and understanding. To abstract is less to leave
the body than to tear it apart: analysis.”.
Michel
Serres
In a fire, smoke reduces all to touch. Touching, the last resource. A victim trapped inside a burning building must decide: burn or leap into the abyss. Many choose to jump—facing the inevitable… falling… somehow everything would be fine. Or perhaps the fire’s heat sears their skin first, and, forced by pain, they skydive into the unknown. This era is in survival mode. You and I must face the pain from this techno-universe’s molten metals eating through our environment. So we touch our screens, our pads, seeking a way out in the vapor of virtual images and sounds.
The body, split by mechanical devices, begins to wonder: Who am I? To survive, it starts reclaiming the real, fleeing the mental audiovisual plane, the metal mirror before its eyes.
When you and I enter the collective space of the screen, we feel the vertigo of peering over a virtual cliff where the true concept of the ego dissolves. Those who dive into the electronic world harbor a strong death wish. They seek to terminate the body, its limitations—just as the mystics, in abasement, long to exterminate the sensuous animal-self, deeming it lower than the spirit.
The hand reclaims objects, yearns to extend its senses, fears its natural vulnerability: the naked animalistic fragility that humans label as inferior. That is why you and I marvel when an ape uses a branch to reach for food—it proves they are almost us.
Blocking the noise of language—visual, literary, musical—is a way of returning to ourselves.
Plants, flowers—these are the perfect works of art. You must touch them to nurture them, smell them to fully appreciate their beauty. You can even taste them; many are curative.
You and I should be like soothsayers reading nature, the skies, drawing conclusions—not practicing the violent art of documents, codes, death sentences. Just decoding the environment and acting accordingly.
Tasting is the ultimate escape from the machine. It would be nearly impossible to imitate the exact taste of wine or olives with chemicals alone. And even if you could, you’d have to replicate every variant of every olive, every bottle—an enormous, futile task.
The art of tasting is inherently human, not meant for machines. Even most of animals just devour. A piece of art meant to be tasted would be the supreme humanistic ideal, linked to the world itself, not to language.
Smell, too, eludes the machine, though many animals possess far superior olfactory capacities. The work of art would be a mixed material to be tasted, smelled—like a meal of plants and flowers.
The fragrance of a rose will always surpass binary communication. Smell this word: "rose". You cannot fully translate taste, odor, through any code.
Let our lower senses, not symbols, lead us home—back to the world itself through a new form of art.
The colonization of the future, like any empire, feeds on a curated past—one that is preferred, elevated, even glorified.
So how could we break free? Basal art—work that rejects the eye and ear, leaning instead on smell, taste, touch. Experiences that can’t be archived or repackaged. No energy wasted, no data extracted. This refusal to record, to consume—might is the only way out. We have to get imaginative to respond to a new dawn of the human.
“Non
solum voces, sed res significativae sunt (Not only words, but things
also have meaning)”
Medieval
Saying
Materialikonologie:
art theory exploring how materials themselves communicate meaning,
transforming physical substances from passive supports into active
agents of artistic expression. It argues that an artwork's materials
carry cultural, emotional, and conceptual significance beyond their
visual appearance.
“The
project of autonomy obviously meant different things to these
different parties. For anti-authoritarian movements, it represented
the freedom of self-determination and a means to constitute new
institutions and alternative forms of life. For the cyberneticians,
it was the technological utopia of full automation and enlightened
societal control: a military and industrial fantasy which also
included the project of AI. That even the military – that most
traditionally hierarchical structure – also had a vested interest
in forms of distributed communication and self-organising networks is
a sign of deeper transformations”.
(The
Eye of the Master. A Social History of Artificial Intelligence,
Matteo Pasquinelli)
“An
Object of Art, however, shall be contemplated in its autonomous and
self-sufficient objective Presence—which is, without doubt, there
for the perceiving Mind, yet solely as an Appeal to Soul and
Intelligence—not in some active Relation, and with no whatsoever
Reference to Appetites or Volition (…) Smell, Taste, and Touch have
to do with Matter as such and its immediately sensible Qualities:
Smell with material Volatility in Air, Taste with material
Liquefaction of Objects, Touch with Warmth, Cold, and Smoothness.
Precisely for this Reason, these Senses cannot enter into Relation
with artistic Objects”.
(Hegel)
“So
brilliant was the flash from the explosion [of the First Atomic Bomb
Test] that Miss Georgia Green of Socorro, blind University of New
Mexico student, said "What's that?””.
("Explosives
Blast Jolts Wide Area." The Albuquerque Journal, Tuesday, July
17)
"The
relief shaped is not of art, but of nature".
(Bronzino)
"As
the industrial revolution concludes in bigger and better bombs, an
intellectual revolution opens with bigger and better robots".
(Hixon
symposium, Warren McCulloch)
“In
speech recognition, there was an early competition, sponsored by
DARPA {Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency}, in the 1970s.
Entrants included a host of special methods that took advantage of
human knowledge---knowledge of words, of phonemes, of the human vocal
tract, etc. On the other side were newer methods that were more
statistical in nature and did much more computation, based on hidden
Markov models (HMMs). Again, the statistical methods won out over the
human-knowledge-based methods. This led to a major change in all of
natural language processing, gradually over decades, where statistics
and computation came to dominate the field. The recent rise of deep
learning in speech recognition is the most recent step in this
consistent direction. Deep learning methods rely even less on human
knowledge, and use even more computation, together with learning on
huge training sets, to produce dramatically better speech recognition
systems”.
(The
Bitter Lesson, Rich Sutton)
“Numerous
nets, embodied in special nervous structures, serve to classify
information according to useful common characters. In vision they
detect the equivalence of apparitions related by similarity and
congruence, like those of a single physical thing seen from various
places. In audition, they recognize timbre and chord, regardless of
pitch. (...) We seek general methods for designing nervous nets which
recognize figures in such a way as to produce the same output for
every input belonging to the figure. We endeavor particularly to find
those which fit the histology and physiology of the actual
structure”.
(How
We Know Universals. The Perception of Auditory and Visual Forms, W.
Pitts and W.S. McCulloch)
“But
when human existence and the recognition of others is identified
solely with the visual point of view, not only is the child’s
feeling of itself secondary to its representation of self; more
important, the child never obtains a sense of self in relation to
touch, smell, and taste, the elements of felt existence”.
(Feminist
Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Dorothea Olkowski and Gail
Weiss)