ABSTRACT
Nature and beauty can be experienced in most places—cities and wilderness alike. Beauty has an ancient history, recognized as a transcendent, intrinsic quality and partner to poetic expression. From the Enlightenment forward, most philosophers were preoccupied not with the transcendent nature of beauty, but with questions of where beauty lies—with the person, in the object, somewhere between, or in the exchange of the experience. Aesthetics on the other hand, codified during the Enlightenment era when beauty suffered the inability to be analyzed, provides a way to speak about beauty's objective qualities. To live in a reality that is only understood in terms of about is to live in a reality in which poetry is seldom made or experienced. Remote Studio's pedagogical experiment provides the opportunity to counter the overreliance on abstraction and disconnection, and encourages connected life practices and living of the world to experience all its roughness and refinement.
