The Phenomenologist, 2020

 Phenomenological records of scientific inquiries.

Series 1: If Only, 2019 to date

Work In Progress

According to Noam Chomsky, Language is at the core of the human cognitive system as a mode of constructing thoughts and expressing them. At the Experiential Cognition Lab, we like to explore how poetry and art can help us quantify everyday lived experiences or 'Qualia' for academic research in consciousness.

‘If Only’ is a body of work expressing experiences of the quantified self, recorded every day in a mere three words as a linguistic trace of desires of ‘Being’ in the phenomenological sense. This 10-year-long exercise in self-logging is a record of how things would have turned out to be ‘If only’ something else had happened on that particular day (starting Jan 1, 2019), a subjective record of lived cognitive experience limited to one sensible sentence each day, with the use of only three words of the English language. 

Playing with Nouns and Verbs, the three-word sentences seen here are a record of linguistic traces of embodied relationships between varying nuances of verbs as a poetic bridge between time and the desires of a thought. ‘If only’ is a collection of 365 sentences one for every day of that year, each made up of three words recording the subjective experience of what that particular day could have been (‘If only’) as a measure of observed linguistic empiricism. 

This oeuvre is an extension of my work at Experiential Cognition (XPC) Lab that aims to be an arts research practice in bridging the gaps between ‘everyday lived Experiences’ and ‘Cognitive Science’ that still exist today which was famously pointed out in the book ‘The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience’ back in 1992. 

- Shashank Satish

Medium: Text and images on Social media.

 Series 2: Art Journal by Shashank Satish.

Medium: Ink on paper: Illustrations of hands selected from a personal journal sketchbook I call the "Hand Book", 2019 - 2020.

Scanned images of hand movements examining the long-term relationship between mind, body, and behavior through illustrations of hands as a subject, observed by the artist in first-, second-, and third-person phenomenological relationships to artistically journal and objectify subjective emotions.

This art series is part of the principal Investigation at the Experiential Cognition Lab's long term projects exploring the role of embodiment in understanding consciousness through producing empirical data for phenomenological research in accounting for a subjectivity enabled by cognizing art practices.