Paper short abstract:

Scientific instruments translate processes of non-human appearing into human terms. Staging of this relationship and researching it is research of the techniques of appearing, artistic research. The presentation focuses on the question of the unit of measurement as an empirico-aesthetic entity.

Paper long abstract:

Scientific instruments translate processes of non-human appearing into human terms. But they do not abolish the relative phenomenological independence of those processes. Continuing the recent argument by Jean-Luc Nancy, "in-struments" could be conceived as our means to deal with the "struction", the original "accumulation" of things. (Nancy 2014) Staging of this relationship and researching it is research of the techniques of appearing, artistic research.

In this lecture-demonstration I attempt to indicate how research in performing arts can be conceived as research of the techniques of appearing. The basic instrument of my research is the performing body and its techniques. According to my hypothesis, the "unit of measurement" is an example of the empirico-aesthetic entity. This statement is clarified by a series of demonstrations, which tend to show how our understanding of any entity is empirico-aesthetic as well; how "object" and "body" constitute the two sides of every entity. Things can become measurable only by means of this structural familiarity. Therefore, it does not suffice that we sustain phenomenologically that measuring is originally an "embodied" operation, since our understanding of corporality (when and where there is a "body") is dependent on the scale of observation as well as well as on the relation between the dimension of the observer and that of the observed entity. As I argue, an object-body is constituted as a hostage of this kind of dimensional interplay, which, on the other hand, provides conditions for its measurability.