Alva Noë is an American philosopher whose work focuses on consciousness, perception, art and neuroscience. In his book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, Noë argues that human life can be understood as the structuring and organization of activities. Experiences and consciousness are enacted, which means that they require an active involvement with one’s surroundings. This understanding of how we structure our lives plays an important role in our relationship to tools, technology and art.
Tools lead to re-organizational practices which loop back and change first-order activities. Technology and art are both considered as different types of tools with different ends. Noë argues that technology usually serves an end, while art tends to question those ends, and reorganizes our perception of it.
Noë’s work is inspiring and relevant to me and also in light of this course because it engages with the way the use of different tools shapes and re-organizes our perception on the world. He addresses the ways in which tools transform our engagement with the world and help us see structures, patterns, details that we there all along but that we were not able to recognize before. Art is one of these tools: “Art demands that we look differently and try to see what we don’t quite know how to see” – Alva Noë, Strange Tools