This is Diego speaking again. I stumbled across what seems like a really readable commentary to Dewey's ideas on on Hyperallergic.com by Alexis Clements. You might want to read first before you do Activity 2.4, which talks about John Dewey's philosophy of art as experience. Think of this as a learning scaffold of sorts: Clements' article will help you identify important points that you should be looking for when reading about Dewey's philosophy in Activity 2.4.

Along with computing science, I studied contemporary dance when I was an undergraduate student. I spent many hours creating choreographic pieces, putting together performances, rehearsing in the studio with other dancers, watching other choreographer's works. That was years ago. I don't perform on stage or choreograph for the stage any more. But it doesn't mean I've stopped dancing. Because over the years I've come to realize that what the very essence of dance is about isn't the visual experience of watching a dancer move. It isn't about choreographies and routines. It's about how dance makes me feel and think inside. It's feeling how incredible it is to be alive, to be able to move through time and space, to sense how my skin and my bones and my muscles and my other tissues relate with the floor, with the clothes that I wear, with gravity. And even when I watch other people dance, I do it because inside me, I get a sense of how they must be feeling inside when they leap into the air, achieving that moment of suspension.

And this is the same reason why I feel that all movement that I make can be dance. The rising and the falling of my chest as I breathe... if I pay attention to it, then to me even that seemingly simple move is as wondrous and elaborate as any dance move. Finding that perfect position in the chair as I sit, where I feel my weight just balanced on top of my sit bones, the slight aching my back diminishing as I find how to organize my spine so that I use fewer muscles... even that to me is dance. The Butoh master Kazuo Ohno is said to have turned the act of opening his hand into a work of art, because within that simple gesture of unfurling his fingers was embedded a lifetime of experiences. Think about how many times you yourself have opened your hand--to receive something special, to cradle someone's head, to slam a door behind you. All of these experiences are embedded and even relived to an extent if you pay attention to this. The movement is art, but the experience is the aesthetic component.

If you're a BAMS student, keep Dewey in the back of your mind, because his philosophy of experience really influenced how people think about designing multimedia. When I was studying computing science, I took a course on User Interface (UI) Design. Now, people often talk about UI/UX: User Interface and User Experience design. Because using Dewey's perspective on art as experience, you might want to think not of creating a particular product, but creating a particular experience of that product.

If you haven't gotten a chance to watch the film Pina by Wim Wenders, try to see it, and try to see it in 3D if you can. I've included a clip of it below.

Activity S2.1: The Live Creature

Allot 1 hour

In Activity 2.4, you read an edited, excerpted version of Dewey's book, Art as Experience. It can be quite different experience reading how an author originally set out their ideas. Download and read Chapter 1 of Dewey's book, and revisit two questions from Activity 2.4: Do you agree with Dewey that our everyday should be an aesthetic experience? With such continuity, what will make art unique?