ABSTRACT
Assisted by the rapid growth of digital technology, performance is an increasingly popular area of artistic practice. This chapter contextualises this within two methodologically divergent yet complimentary intellectual tendencies. The first is the work of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who recognised that our experience of the world has an inescapably 'embodied' quality not reducible to mental accounts, which can be vicariously extended through specific instrumentation. The second is the developing field of neuroaesthetics, that is, neurological research directed towards the analysis, in brain-functional terms, of our experiences of objects and events that are culturally deemed to be of artistic significance. Neuroaesthetics tries to account for aesthetic experience, not to redefine the concept in question. It does not assume that the distinction between 'ordinary' and an 'aesthetic' experience lies in different kinds of brain function; it may lie in the same kind of function adapting, or failing to adapt, to different stimuli.
