A research space at the intersection of art, science, and consciousness
Initiated by Daniela Zúñiga, in dialogue with artists, scientists, and theorists.
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General Presentation
Cosmologies of the Sensible starts from an epistemological as much as existential conviction: we are not rational beings who feel, we are sensible beings who rationalize. It is from this position that the project questions how different systems of knowledge produce an interpretation of reality, from what position they observe, and what changes in the very act of observing.
The group brings together artists, theorists, and scientists whose practices are crossed by the relationships between science, consciousness, and sensory experience. Not to represent science through art, nor to illustrate one by the other, but to create a space where these regimes of truth meet without reducing to one another. Two irreducible systems which, together, produce a more complete knowledge: this is in the sense that Bohr understood complementarity, and this is in the sense that CdS conceives the dialogue between art and science. What interests us are the zones where scientific measurement reaches its own limits, where gesture, ritual, and sensory experience operate as forms of embodied thought. These zones are not gaps in science: they are its sharp edges, the places where knowledge is renewed.
Conceptual axes
Science & Conscience — As science progresses in understanding the living and the cosmos, it renews our metaphysical questions rather than dissolving them. By exploring the self-referential languages of art, CdS seeks to question the very structure of systems of knowledge and those who embody them. It is an epistemological questioning: complementarily, modes of observation and representation of the world in which the observer naturally integrates into the phenomenon become, through their very practice, a questioning in themselves.
Cosmotechnics & Situated Epistemologies — Every cosmology is a technology: a device that organizes information, structures observation, and produces an interpretation of reality. But there is not a single technique; there are multiple cosmotechnics, each culture developing its own devices for connecting humans, technology, and the cosmos. CdS draws on this thinking, developed by the philosopher Yuk Hui, to reject the hierarchy between systems of knowledge: astrophysics and ancestral knowledge do not oppose each other; they complement each other, two regimes of truth irreducible to one another, which together produce a more complete knowledge.
Perception & Experience — Sensory experience is the starting point of all observation, not as an absolute condition, but as the first available reading system. The body is the first space that is both cosmological and technological, the one where the search for organizing structures begins. CdS conceives its devices as open matrices where different reading regimes, scientific, sensory, symbolic, coexist without hierarchy.
Ecology & Locality — The project is part of a relational way of thinking that goes beyond the separations inherited from Western dualism: nature/culture, reason/intuition, human/machine. This ecological thinking is not only understood as attention to the environment: it signifies a way of being in the world in which interdependence, locality, and care are fully-fledged epistemic categories. Each territory carries a unique cosmology, embedded in its geography, practices, and relationship with non-humans, and it is precisely this that technological globalization tends to erase. CdS seeks to keep this space of locality open, without essentializing it.
An open research, structured by artistic practices
Cosmologies du Sensible is conceived as an evolving research platform, articulated through collective, transdisciplinary, and situated dynamics. Artistic practices do not illustrate the research there; they are its driving force and starting point. It is the works, gestures, and sensitive intuitions that open the questions from which exchanges between disciplines can be articulated.
The platform is deployed through various formats: residencies, process-exhibitions, conferences, publications, workshops, designed as spaces of shared research rather than unilateral dissemination. CdS seeks to experiment with the very forms of this dissemination: how to share an ongoing process? How to make the presentation itself a space for thought? What circulates between these formats is a question that runs throughout the project: how do different systems of knowledge transform the act of observing, and how does this act in turn transform the observer? This research does not aim for a synthesis between art and science; it seeks to keep open the space between them, aware that it is precisely in this space that knowledge is renewed.
Forms of Action
CdS’s methodology favors work in context, residencies, fieldwork, meetings with territories and communities, as a condition for ethical, embodied, and relational research. The outputs take multiple forms: exhibitions and installations, performances and situated actions, publications and archives, conferences and round tables, workshops and mediations. Each format is designed as a space of experimentation where concepts become sensitive, and where the sensitive becomes thought.
A dynamic horizon
The Atacama-ALMA 2026 Residency is the first concrete project of the platform, the one that made its birth possible and continues to nourish its reflection. In the Atacama Desert, where millennia-old Andean cosmologies and the most advanced scientific infrastructures on the planet coexist in the same territory, CdS found its first located case: a space where the question of what it means to observe the cosmos, from which device, from which position, with which memory, arises with particular acuteness. This first project inaugurates an open trajectory. CdS is not defined by this territory nor by this observatory; it passes through them as it will pass through other places, other disciplines, other encounters. What remains constant is the question: how do different systems of knowledge complement each other without reducing one to the other, and what does this space of resonance produce for those who inhabit it ?