Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 AI & SOCIETY https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-018-0801-4 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Enactive–performative perspectives on cognition and the arts Simon Penny 1 Received: 21 May 2017 / Accepted: 4 January 2018 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract The practices of the arts—plastic and performing—deal in direct sensorial engagement with the body, with materiality, with artifacts and tools, with spaces, and with other people. The arts are centrally concerned with intelligent doing. Conventional explanations of the cognitive dimensions of arts practices have been unsatisfying because internalist paradigms provides few useful tools to discuss embodied dimensions of cognition. Keywords Embodied cognition · Enactive cognition · Distributed cognition · Internalism · Cartesian dualism · Artifcial intelligence 1 Introduction Conventional internalist conceptions of cognition can say little which is useful about the kinds of sensorimotor inte- gration which are fundamental to action in the world, and practices of the arts epitomize and refne these sensorimotor intelligences to a high degree. In doing so, arts practices implicitly refute the paradigmatic separation of matter and information, of mind and body. Thus, internalist paradigms only confuse attempts to discuss creative intelligent practice. This explanatory crisis has hobbled useful discussion of cog- nition and the arts for much of the last century. Happily, concepts arising from the post-cognitivist para- digms which have emerged over the past 30 years provide leverage on the qualities of intelligent action in the world— which is what artists do. Here I will explore how we might deploy concepts arising in situated, enactive, embodied and distributed paradigms (SEED) and explain how these felds can provide the basis for a new discourse on arts practices which in the words of Maxine Sheets Johnstone, gives the body its due. Or rather, begins by refuting mind–body dual- ism, acknowledges the performative, the processual and the relational dimensions of practice. 2 Preface Making art with materials and dynamics not traditionally used for artmaking is hardly a new thing. From the invention of photography through the development of cinema, radio and recorded music, adaptations of emerging technologies to art is a central trait of modernism. And indeed, the role of the artist/inventor has been central to such developments. 1 My own path into this has been through interdiscipli- nary practice at the intersection of art and computer sci- ence, designing and building custom interactive machinery for embodied interaction. Like many of my colleagues in the art and technology movement, I built new technologi- cal systems and tried to make the technology do things it had not been designed for. In the 1980s, as an artist explor- ing electronic and digital technologies, and their associated rhetorics, I struggled with challenges, and often assumed my problems were largely technical, a result of—rather pre- sumptuously—thinking I could operate within this realm without an engineering degree. Throughout the 1990s, I had the enormous good fortune, as professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon, to work with world leaders in artifcial intelligence, robotics and related aspects of computer science. It was in this context that I realized that my attempts to utilize these emerging technolo- gies to create immediate interactive sensorial esthetic experi- ence were at odds with the intentions of my colleagues who understood such efects merely as pointers to abstract ideas. * Simon Penny penny@uci.edu 1 Studio Art, University of California, Irvine, USA 1 Penny (2008)