The Point of Being

Current digital processes of production, reproduction and distribution of information affect the perception of time, space, matter, senses and identity. This book explores the research question: what are the psycho-physiological dimensions of the ways people experience their presence in the world and the world’s presence in them? Because they deal principally with issues of perception and sentience, with a particular emphasis on art, there is in all chapters an invitation to experience a shift of perception. An embodied sensation of the world and a re-sensorialization of the environment are described to complement the visually-biased perspective with a renewed sense of humans’ relationship to their spatial and material surrounding. As such, this book presents the topological reunion of sensation and cognition, of sense and sensibility and of body, self and world. The perception of the “Point of Being”, to which the various chapters of this book invite the reader, proposes an alternative to the “Point of View” inherited from the Renaissance; it offers a way to situate the sense of self through the physical, digital and electronic domains that shape physical, social, cultural, economic and spiritual conditions at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Nine authors explore different ways in which the paradigm of the Point of Being can bridge the interval, the discontinuity, between subjects and objects that began with the diffusion of the phonetic alphabet. The Point of Being is a signpost on that journey.