AWARENESS [fr.
conscience]
Awareness is an active state.
It is a willed state, an effort of receptivity, an intention.
In biological psychology, awareness describes a human or animal’s
perception and cognitive reaction to a condition or event.
Awareness does not necessarily imply understanding.
Awareness is just an ability to be conscious of, feel or perceive.
Awareness is a relative concept.
An animal may be partially aware, may be subconsciously aware, or may
be acutely aware of an event.
Awareness may be focused on an internal state, such as a visceral
feeling, or on external events by way of sensory perception.
Awareness provides the raw material from which animals develop qualia,
or subjective ideas about their experience.
Researchers have debated what minimal components are necessary for
animals to be aware of environmental stimuli, though all animals have
some capacity for acute reactive behavior that implies a faculty for
awareness.
Popular ideas about consciousness suggest the phenomenon describes a
condition of being aware of one’s awareness.
Efforts to describe consciousness in neurological terms have focused on
describing networks in the brain that develop awareness of the qualia
developed by other networks.
Neural systems that regulate attention serve to attenuate awareness
among complex animals, whose central and peripheral nervous system
provides more information than cognitive areas of the brain can
assimilate.
Within an attenuated system of awareness, a mind might be aware of much
more than is being contemplated in a focused extended consciousness.
When a patient goes for a surgical operation, it is desirable to
temporarily make the patient unaware.
Anaesthesiologists specialise in this.
It is also a major responsibility is to prevent awareness during an
operation.
This is achieved by giving anesthetic drugs through the veins and
through the lungs.
Awareness is also a concept used in CSCW, albeit its definition has not
yet reached a consensus in the scientific community.
In art it is maybe the capacity to be present.
Not seldom one can get the impression that artist are a profession
which is currently undergoing an operation.
By an anaethesiologist.
Could the anaesthetic used be the notion of conceptual art?
We might be wrong here.
Anyway.
To be aware is to be in contact with everything around.
The ego as well as the public.
To include the search for the oeuvre and the meteorological condition,
as well as the emotional and political context.
The awareness is a total disposition to be informed, and to integrate
everything at once.
For the artist to redistribute this awareness in an immediate art work
(which is a combination of everything which is perceived), an awareness
muscle is a good thing to have.