New phenomenologies of pain and the re-conceptualization of health in the digital arts

Abstract

This article explores the involvement of interoception in the multisensorial experience “Seeing is believing” by Australian artist Eugenie Lee. At the center of this piece is the experience of pain in the absence of tissue damage. Through cognitive manipulation, immersive experience, and elucidation, the piece involves the physical, mental, and social levels of experience and dissolves a strict separation between them. The new phenomenologies of pain enabled here, I will argue, challenge our common conceptions of health and well-being through the experience of sensorial processes and processes of sense-making that we are usually unaware of and that do not fit the ideals of healthy bodies as whole, intentional, and secluded from the environment. I will use research from cognitive science on interoception as a lens to understand how “Seeing is believing” offers a counter-conception to the flexible, productive, and medicated body of liberal capitalism. And I will think this alternative further with Gilbert Simondon’s concept of the metastable equilibrium to connect my study to the philosophical and media-theoretical discourse about individuation, our becoming of subjects.