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.
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—perhaps because they are as if before a lion, 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.
“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)
“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)
"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)
"Camouflage Culture is off-the-grid, private, secretive, quiet and exclusive. Here ideas, aesthetics and movements can finally fester, illegible to the dashboard. Camouflage is encrypted, niche, and resistant to capture. Invisible to brands, metrics and algorithmic capture. It’s the borderlands, home of cultural fugitives. It’s cultural production under the conditions of utter surveillance".
(Dashboard Culture vs. Camouflage Culture, Zine, Matt Klein and Remi Carlioz)