The Aestetic Interaction: Between Simulation, Engagement and Performance. Part I

The investigation on aesthetic experience that is carried out today in the light of the most recent research in the field of cognitive sciences, neurosciences and evolutionary studies, increasingly employs notions that emphasize aesthetic experience’s interactional nature. However, these formulas are different from each other, if not even incompatible. "Embodied simulation", "material engagement", "performance", "correspondence" or even "collusion" are some of these notions, whose implications outline various and different concepts of the aesthetic. Goal of this issue is to explore well-established and very distinctive fields in the light of the radical transformations of the experiential mode of Homo sapiens in its current environment as a whole, i.e. in an ecological niche by now deeply marked by the diffusion of the aesthetic, which not by chance is the cornerstone of the so-called globalization which we are immersed in.