This article seeks to show that we cannot accept an opposition between aesthetics and logic on the basis of the distinction between aesthetic emotion and cognition. This false distinction is founded on another ill-founded one between private states of mind and public languages. Echoing works by R. de Sousa, we can talk about the rationality of emotions. Following N. Goodman and I. Scheffler, we are conducted to the notion of cognitive emotions. If there are aesthetic emotions, they are likely cognitive.

The author considers systems capable of growth within the framework of the aesthetics of kinetic art and George Rickey's morphology of movement. He explains fundamental growth types as the kinetic aspects of a class of structurally coupled autonomous systems. Two paradigms are treated with examples: the settling of clans competing for space and the concurrent sprouting of up to three plants. The author uses and explains his method of morphography, which generally requires of the artistically inclined scientist the design and usage of computer-generated figures called morphograms.

The three-way relationship between nature, technology and the human subject has been a problematic and shifting one in the history of Western art and thought. In this article, the author begins by summarizing this history, pointing to the inadequacy of most theoretical accounts in the face of the growing interpenetration of the “natural” by the “technological” resulting from such developments as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence.

This article introduces the concept of Experimental Visual Experience Devices (EVEDs), which the author defines as artistic inventions that alter the participant's visual perceptions of the external real world. The aim of EVEDs is to place the participant in a slightly altered visual reality in order to cause him or her to see real things anew. The article describes several works of participation art that can be seen as historical precedents to EVEDs.

Early twentieth-century art, including the works of Duchamp and the Cubists, attempted to portray aspects of a reality that were beyond sensory perception, such as multiple perspectives, the fourth dimension and curved space. Virtual reality (VR) now offers artists a soft medium for creating artificial experiences of space, time and energy through mathematical models.