Aesthetic perception is an embodied experience

For at least the past century, philosophers have proposed a role for the human body in aesthetic perception. Scholars from experimental psychology, empirical aesthetics and human neuroscience joined in this endeavour in earnest at the start of the 21st century, following on from the establishment of neuroaesthetics as a formal scientific discipline as well as neuroscientific discoveries advancing our understanding of action-perception coupling in the human brain. The expansion of embodied accounts of aesthetic perception was most pronounced following the proliferation of research working directly with the performing arts (specifically dance), as such studies focus on the body as both subject and object, performer and observer. This piece charts the short history of scholarly thinking on aesthetic perception as an embodied experience and speculates on what the future of this line of inquiry might hold, especially given the increased involvement of disembodied AI tools in artistic practices and aesthetic experiences.