The proliferation of digital technology has fundamentally transformed human sensory experience, raising critical philosophical questions about the nature of aesthetic interaction and technological mediation. I would like, with this article, to address the possibility of an aesthetic experience, or better an ‘authentic’ interaction, between humans and machines through improvisation. To restore the authentic human-machine interaction envisioned by both Dewey and Montani, I will focus on artistic installations that involve the audience in a performative interaction with a technological component of the installation. This is because, as we will see, Montani identifies art as the starting point and safe space for experimentation and reorganization of the aesthetic relationship between human aesthesis and technology.
John Dewey’s seminal work (1934) on aesthetic experience, particularly his distinction between aesthetic experiences and anaesthetic experiences, provides a crucial framework for understanding this transformation. While the former represent active, highly receptive and responsive interactions with the environment, the latter emerge when human aesthesis becomes constrained by repetitive, mechanical and meaningless patterns of engagement. What iss interesting about Dewey is that he addresses the anesthetic as a necessary counterpart of the aesthetic: anesthetic experiences (Smuts 2005) protect our aesthesis from its openness, thus avoiding its overexposure to environmental stimuli. This is achieved by contracting and tightening our forms of interaction into repetitive patterns.
Building on Dewey’s insights, contemporary philosopher Pietro Montani (2014b) has further articulated the dangers of excessive technical delegation. He argues that our aesthesis — our sensory apparatus — increasingly risks atrophy through pervasive technological systems that standardize and predetermine our interpretative possibilities. While our aesthesis has a natural disposition to extend in prosthetic and technical artifacts, interacting with the environment through them, this prosthetic nature might take dangerous turns.
Montani conceptualizes our contemporary environment as a medial environment (or milieu associè following Simondon 1958), a complex interplay between natural and artificial domains «in which the human lives transforming this habitat through technical innovations» (Montani, 2014b). This environment is not immediately at hand but is characterized by resistance, unpredictability, and contingency. The third element of the aesthetic experience is imagination, to which Montani devotes a significant part of his theory. Building on Kant’s account, Montani describes imagination as what allows our aesthesis to externalize information in different possible meanings. Our imagination is highly receptive and, for this reason, reacts to environmental unpredictability by offering the intellect different possible understandings of what is perceived. This imaginative capacity operates in a ludic manner but is never completely free, just as neither our unpredictability nor that of the environment are ever absolute.
The critical challenge emerges when technological delegation becomes excessively pervasive. In such contexts, three fundamental dimensions of human experience become compromised. First, the technical apparatus — originally a natural extension of sensory experience — begins to atrophy our sensory capabilities. Second, the environment loses its inherent unpredictability and resistance, as interactions are constrained by pre established patterns, transforming spontaneous and improvised reactions to contingency into mechanical executions. The environment becomes self-referential in that all plastic relations are replaced by repetitive practices which do not allow for an authentic interactivity. Third, imagination is reduced, with technological devices providing pre-imagined, standardized modes of processing sensible data (Pezzini, 2017). This happens because in self-referential environments we are not called upon to activate spontaneous interpretative activities, but we are simply delivered a content requiring less and less cognitive effort – what Montani calls the sleep of imagination (Montani, 2014, 2015).
We are certainly not moving in the direction Dewey was hoping for, a positive enhancing of our aesthesis’ possibilities and capacities: on the contrary, it seems like we are taking the opposite direction of an impoverishment and atrophy of our experience, as Montani warns us. However, the author, like Dewey, does not attribute an inherent negativity to the technical apparatus; after all, it is the natural correlate of our sensitivity. His aim is, in fact, to warn us about the risks of an excessive and thus unnatural imbalance toward technology, since «what is at stake in this epochal change is the character of openness that makes the world specifically human» (Montani, Cecchi, Feyles, 2018). Montani’s hope is not to eliminate the technical aspect but to rediscover its creativity and aesthetic value through Art, which represents a creative space of reorganization of the relationship between the natural and artificial sides.
Although Montani never explicitly mentions improvisation, it remains not only a fundamental part of our aesthetic experience but, as we will see, is closely tied in his work to the imaginative capacity to which Montani devotes considerable attention. Focusing on improvisation, particularly emphasizing its agency, can be a way to counteract the anesthetic drift that our aesthesis is undergoing.
Improvisation represents more than a spontaneous act; it is a complex epistemological mode of engagement with the world. Davide Sparti’s assertion that «reflection on improvisation has become even more urgent in a techno-administered world» underscores the theoretical urgency of this approach (Sparti, 2019). Improvisation shares fundamental characteristics with imagination, particularly in its abductive mode of operation (Bertinetto, 2013). Unlike predetermined processes, improvisation operates through a dynamic, real-time generation and evaluation of meaning. The same happens with imagination providing potential understandings by reacting to environmental unpredictability. For example, the artist engaged in improvisation continuously imagines possible directions for the performance, with imagined rules emerging and transforming during the act itself. Nothing was already there before the performance, but the artist’s thinking is confirmed or rejected only retrospectively by the unpredictable development of the performance itself. This process is characterized by a constant feedback loop between imagination and action, where potential meanings are simultaneously conceived and tested through choices improvised while performing.
The second point is that improvisational performance sets both performers and audience imagination in motion. As we said, improvisation means in a sense performing imagination, and this means that improvising nurtures our ability to envision a rich variety of possibilities. The performative nature of improvisation extends beyond individual creativity. It actively engages both performers and audiences in a generative process of meaning-making. By forcing participants to respond to unexpected circumstances, improvisation becomes a training ground for critical thinking and imaginative capacity. Performers must simultaneously deploy technical expertise and responsive creativity, while audiences are compelled to actively interpret and engage with the unfolding experience.
Finally, the third aspect that underscores the fundamental role of the concept of improvisation is the type of agency involved in this practice. This last point is the most important one for establishing the authentic interactivity Montani talks about. Although improvisation is sometimes labelled as a random action, it is actually strictly linked to intentionality and sense-making (Bertinetto, 2015). The spontaneity involved in decision-making can be seen as a personal mark on our experience, which disappears under that excessive technical delegation operating through standardized patterns. Improvisation, in this sense, can preserve and train also a personal and unique style of aesthetic experience.
So far, I have suggested that through improvisation in digital artistic installations, it might be possible to preserve authenticity in human-machine interaction. However, we first need to understand what we mean by interactivity. Following the definition offered by Aaron Smuts, «Something is interactive if and only if it (1) is responsive, (2) does not completely control, (3) is not completely controlled, and (4) does not respond in a completely random fashion» (2009). The next thing to see is if a machine, and therefore the technological apparatus present in artistic installations, can display this kind of interactivity. According to Christopher Dobrian this is not possible: «Interactivity is a term too often employed to describe any use of a computer in live performance or installation. A computer might act independently or might react to human actions, but this is not interactivity. The prefix inter- implies that both human and computer can act independently and react responsively to the actions of the other. Thus, true interactivity must involve mutual influence and cannot be all deterministically programmed» (Dobrian, 2003).
Although the inherent predetermination of the machine cannot be denied, as Dobrian suggests, I believe this does not exclude the possibility that interaction with human agency can create a space for unpredictability. However, it is fundamental to not project nor seek human characteristics such as our freedom and spontaneity onto machines, what we need to imagine is a relative unpredictability proper of machines. According to Candy and Edmunds: «A component of unpredictability can be introduced in the general scheme of action and reaction of the computer programme» (2011). We can achieve it by turning our attention to improvisational characteristics in technical devices.
As Simon Penny states: «Machines come to have the characteristics we are ascribing to improvisatory practice» (2013). Machines can be understood as potentially possessing improvisational characteristics when they operate according to parameters that change in real-time. The determinism of technological systems is not absolute but exists on a spectrum, offering spaces of interaction when sensor-derived data introduces elements of unpredictability. Improvising, as I suggested before, never implies absolute freedom but, on the contrary, relies on domains and norms that are confirmed or rejected during the practice (Bertinetto, 2021). «So even if the machine will act in accordance with the constraints and directive of the code, its behavior will nonetheless be unpredictable to the extent that the data derived from the sensors will be unpredictable» (Penny, 2013). The data unpredictability is a consequence of the users’ agency interacting with the device. The user’s role thus becomes paramount in activating this interactive potential and in creating the possibility for the machine to respond adaptively to the input.
Here I choose a few examples of definitions that conceptualize this relative unpredictable form of interaction between a user and a machine. The first one is the behavioral tendency proposed by Ascott (2002). Ascott claims that it is possible to introduce a behavioral tendency in deterministic systems, such as technological devices, when the machine requires as its mode of existence activation by user’s intervention from time to time. The artwork transforms from a fixed object to an “open-ended process” suspended in perpetual transition, with its ultimate resolution dependent on the observer’s engagement, «its evolution in any specific sense is unpredictable and dependent on the total involvement of the spectator» which is all the more decisive the greater the degree of variability provided by the technical system (Ascott 2002). The second example is the concreativity presented by Smuts (2009). According to Smuts, in interactive artworks, the machine acquires “concreative” potential if it is ‘shaped’ by both the artist and the audience. This concreativity means that the computer based interactive art is able to answer to an extensive set of audience behavior.
Thus, the relative unpredictability does not emerge from the machine’s inherent capabilities, but from the creative interaction between user and technological system. The user’s agency becomes a crucial catalyst, transforming potentially mechanical interactions into meaningful, improvisational experiences. As Penny (2013) holds, in digital performances the call for action to the audience from and towards the machine is made explicit: this direct involvement, the subject’s agency putting in motion the machine’s improvisational traits, becomes a tool of self-conscience for the user, thus awakening one’s imagination and critical thinking from their sleep induced by excessive technical delegation.
There are several case studies (Mazali, 2015) that exemplify this kind of interactivity between subject’s agency and machine’s behavioral tendency, here I present two of them. The first one is Voice of Nature, an interactive installation designed by Dutch artist Thijs Biersteker which uses a tree as an interface between environment, viewer, and work. Exhibited in 2018 in Cheng du, one of the most polluted cities in China, the installation involves equipping the roots, branches, and leaves with sensors that track environmental conditions based on various parameters: carbon dioxide levels, temperature, soil and air humidity, photosynthetically active radiation, and fine dust concentration. The gathered data are processed through an algorithm, which generates digital rings displayed on a circular screen behind the tree every second, rather than annually (as a tree usually does). This approach allows even minor irregularities in the ring’s profile to reflect, in real time, the environmental impact on the plant’s health. The rings are in fact influenced by several factors involving spectators’ agency: the digital rings change if the room is full or empty, if one smokes inside, if one tears a leaf from the tree or touches the tree’s roots. This installation thus replicates on a smaller scale what happens globally to our planet based on the decisions of each individual, group or nation. Here we can see the relative unpredictability level for a technological device which does not deliver a prepackaged datum but connects us again with a possible multiplicity. By using environmental sensors to generate dynamic visual representations, the work transforms data into an “inexhaustible source of the possible” (Macrì, 2022).
The second case study I want to present is the Very Nervous System (VNS) created by David Rokeby in 1988 representing an early example of digitally implemented embodied improvisatory art. The machine reacts to changes in light induced by the movements of humans interacting with the VNS. VNS uses basic machine vision, specifically camera tracking, to generate real-time acoustic accompaniment from pre-recorded samples. While the system didn’t exhibit significant generative behavior, such as composing melodies, the interaction of users was collaborative, exploratory, and improvisational as they adapted their movements to the sensitivities of VNS. In many interactive installations, the most captivating aspect of the work often becomes the users’ rapid adaptability and creative engagement (Penny, 2013). Unlike much interactive art that focuses on visual spectacle, a certain type of interactive art shifts the attention of both users and onlookers toward their own actions and behavior, restoring their critical thinking and self-conscience as Penny suggests.
In conclusion, the contemporary technological landscape presents a profound challenge to human aesthetic experience. As digital systems become increasingly pervasive, they risk transforming our interactions into mechanistic, predetermined exchanges that diminish our capacity for imaginative engagement. However, this study proposes improvisation and user agency as transformative strategies for reestablish authentic technological interaction.
Agency emerges as the critical mechanism for restoring meaningful human-technology relationships. Unlike passive consumption of technological interfaces providing us with pre-imagined understandings, improvisational agency demands active, creative intervention and a rich horizon of possibilities when it comes to our personal grasp of the world. This approach reframes technological interaction from a predetermined script to a dynamic dialogue where human creativity becomes the generative force in creating space for relative unpredictability. The user is no longer a mere recipient of technological outputs but an active co-creator of experience (Jégo, Meneghini, 2020). Both sides, the subject and the technical apparatus remain true to themselves without anesthetizing their nature; on the contrary, their own creativity emerges only because the interaction is made authentically.
Improvisation offers a philosophical and practical model for this renewed interaction. It provides a framework for engagement that embraces contingency and celebrates the emergent possibilities inherent in human-technological encounters. By introducing elements of unpredictability and personal interpretation, improvisation challenges the reductive tendencies of technological systems. Through this perspective it is possible to rediscover a technical creativity not by seeking in the machine inherently human characteristics, but by exploring potential machine aesthetic values activated in interaction with humans, a relationship which only reflects the natural prosthetic intercoupling our aesthesis has with the technical components of our environment.
Very Nervous System
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Francesca-Camilla Mattioli, 24 years old, is a Philosophy graduate (MA) from Birkbeck College in London. She did her BA in Philosophy at Università degli Studi di Milano, and since then developed an interest in the field of Aesthetics. At the moment her research interest lies in the relationship between agency and aesthetic experiences, with a focus on topics such as improvisation, artistic installations and taste.