Aesthetic Education and the Third Domain: Synaesthetics.

The author states that art and the aesthetic have historically become inseparable. For art education this raises the question: is the role of art in education functioning in the same capacity as art in society? It is conceivable that overreliance on past orientation, or even that any reference whatever to that limited vision of the art-aesthetic, has significantly diminished our capacity to comprehend the real-aesthetic of human experience. The aesthetic side of man is essentially an experience of encounter with the world of discovery, and ultimately of self-awareness. This encounter is initially funded through all the senses which is a complex multidimensional compendium of phenomena. The author, however, attempts to explicate a partial taxonomy to account for the sensuous. The aesthetic becomes the media of art where through sensation and conceptualizing, one is able to synthesize a perception which has a self-referent. In the information processing culture, the aesthetic will be the knowing, interactionary relationship between ourselves and our cybernetic environment. It is proposed that the new aesthetics be pursued as the humanistic ways of knowing, wherein multiple aesthetic modes are viewed as parts of the whole human phenomenon. This synaesthesia is the activity of coming to the self's real-actualization and knowing of the future culture, as well as an awareness of existence within the space-time continuum. (Author/SBE)