© 2025 Michiyo Kurosawa
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MILES IN THE GLOBE
‘Artistic beauty presents the harmony between a formal ordering of nature as intelligible to us and our cognitive faculties.’[1]The digital images are carefully manipulated to create a painterly landscape. They combined with multiple photographs from America, Egypt, Japan, Norway and United Kingdom. They exaggerate beauty and terror to push the cognitive and imaginative sense further to extend the horizon beyond what is known thus, it created a new way of seeing.
The work is significantly inspired by Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. He corrected the meaning of art and the theories became one of the most important works for contemporary artist to create and judge fine art. He analysed aesthetic is a sensational subject. Making a work of nature needs to have logical sense to understand natural phenomenon and cognition. This sense needs to receive from experiencing nature in order to understand how cognition or logic works in the mind. The project follows this sensibility and began to focus on the philosophical analysis of cognition, knowledge and experience to understand the difference between nature and rational being.
Kurosawa follows the philosophical analysis of logic to capture nature and keep its meaning and purpose for the sense of appreciation and understanding. Ancient philosophers Socrates and Plato discussed about the real knowledge that, it needs logic to understand originality in order to extend the new idea; Kant uses nature for the meaning of the originality to reflect logical understanding in aesthetic. Yet rational beings have the ability to extend cognitive understanding and renew the idea than mirroring the reality alone. Although Kant suggested human being has limited imagination to observe the infinite nature, ‘he would not need to have infinite acute sense or be able to perform infinitely many acts in a finite time... he would have to be able to increase the acuteness of the sense beyond any limit... The form of our sensibility leads us to represent “appearance” as having the structure and relation which…experience would reveal them to have’.[2] It has led Kurosawa to question if our own intelligence could obscure us to observe different understanding and knowledge from logical sense. She decided to examine aesthetic and moral through visual art to extend the finite being of vision, sense and imagination.
The structure of work is inspired by the idea of map that allows the explorer to travel the world beyond the visual horizon within 24,901.55 Miles in the Globe. She travelled and captured natural scenery to study natural phenomena and structure. In this sense, she can reflect this understanding to manipulate photographic work as the representation of fictional nature with a sense of reality.
The images reflect the original meaning of life in nature and the idea of logic; nature symbolises an original world that existed long before human beings. Kurosawa leaves the recreated horizon at the edge of the frame. It implicates the sense of imagination has boundary: the boundary of conception, space and the unavoidable rational ability limitation. Although we cannot create infinity from a designed space, she believes encouragement improves knowledge and will continue to extend to the infinity. It goes beyond political notion because life itself does not recognise the borders of nations. If we leave our separated culture behind, human can transcend reason to admire this beautiful world.
[1] Crawford, W D (1974), Aesthetic and the Supersensible. In: Kant’s Aesthetic Theory. London: The University of Wisconsin Press. p. 134
[2] Charles D P. (1968). Infinity and Kant on Experience. In: Wolff, P R Modern Studies in Philosophy, Kant, A Collection of Critical Essay. Great Britain: Macmillan and Co Ltd. p 49.