Intersections between Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Gilbert Simondon: imagistic experience in the associated milieu

ABSTRACT This article proposes intersections between the Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila and French philosopher Gilbert Simondon and puts forward a complex approach to experience relative to specific behavioral ecologies/environments (umwelt) in terms of the concepts of image and associated milieu. Conceiving imagistic experience as embodied experience, I go beyond the image as visual or pictorial or issues of interpretation and representation based on discursive language. The image is linked to biological, psychic and collective processes of individuation which conjugate individuals and milieus within techno-aesthetic experience. The viewer and the image are agent in imagistic experience, given that the individual and his associated milieu co-exist in a reciprocal relation which involves aspects of interiority and exteriority of the image. Containing aspects of interiority and exteriority, the image appears in the interaction between the human and world. On the one hand, images inhabit us and we create our worlds with them; on the other, images as quasi-organisms have their own life and signification. There is a recursive causality between the image’s interiority and exteriority. Both philosopher and artist investigate the ways we see, perceive, feel, and assign meanings to the techno-aesthetic artifacts we produce and the associated milieus in which we find ourselves. Thus, based on the images that Gilbert Simondon reveals to us and those that Eija-Liisa Ahtila presents to us, I propose to problematize imagistic process as a process of individuation in which viewer, milieu and image co-emerge simultaneously as imagistic experience.