EXPLORING EMBODIED CONNECTION

Aesthetic experience and the prevailing impacts of the digital age

Inside an experience where images are felt before they are understood

By Alicia Pariso

Images are often encountered quickly. Explored digitally, we glance, scroll and move on. Yet some images resist this pace. They ask us to slow down, look again and to feel before we understand. This project research begins there.

Exploring Embodied Connection investigates how contemporary illustration and image-making engages with the body and mind as well as the eye. Research in Neuroaesthetics and aesthetic experience considers how texture, light and atmosphere activates our sensory-motor and emotional responses before conscious interpretation. Meaning is not immediate, it emerges through time, attention and bodily engagement.

Through the analysis of contemporary practitioners working across material, digital and spatial context this research proposes that illustration is no longer confined to a two-dimension understanding. Instead, it works within an expanded field where images are a full body experience rather than simply viewing an object.

This research brings together theory, practice and lived experience as it analyses first hand  through digital experience. Remaining grounded in illustrative practice as an industry shaped by process, authenticity and connection, these pages are not simply seen, they are felt.   

Pariso, A. (2025) 'It's all connected'

Connected Through Experience

Although working across different materials, scales and contexts, Mad Charcoal, Tom Bagshaw, David Oliveira, Paul Miller and Alicja Mrozowska share a commonality with how images are experienced rather than simply seen. Each creative practitioner asks the viewer to engage with their work, spend time adjusting and respond emotively before affording meaning.

Hernadez’s charcoal drawings emphasize gesture, pressure and emergence from the paper. Bagshaw’s digital paintings suspend atmosphere and luminescence within uncertainty. Oliveira extends drawing into space, using wire as line and absence as form inviting the viewer to participate and complete the image. Miller & Mrozowska immerse their viewers through sound, light and movement.

Together, their practices demonstrate a contemporary shift from surface to atmosphere and embodiment. This is exemplifying how illustration operates a mind-body experience shaped through sensation, movement and time.

Emergence From The Mark

Mad Charcoal’ is the working name of artist Josh Hernandez, who has gained significant online popularity via digital platforms, sharing their process of creating gestural charcoal and graphite portraiture. Their videos emphasise intense visible mark making, erasure and tonal value, which  positions Mad Charcoal between fine drawing and illustrative mark making. Therefore reflecting a broad shift within contemporary illustration towards affect-driven, material-led practices that prioritises emotional resonance and embodied viewing over explicit narrative. The connection to process is as important as the final deliverable.

In ‘A Light Beyond the Grave’ (2025), Mad Charcoal presents an image that resists immediate clarity, allowing initial visual perception to slowly identify a face from the darkness. The drawing requires the viewer to search, adjust and linger to the textural weight, pressure and negative space remaining visible. The creative act of drawing and dynamic strokes allows for the viewer to feel the artwork during and after compositional creation (Gallese, 2017).

Nalbantian’s (2008) Visual Aesthetic Experience research suggested that after the recognition of a face within an image, our mind recreates the image itself through mirrored gestural mark. Aesthetic experience is then shaped by our conscious and unconscious interpretation, giving meaning to the piece dependant on our memories, cultural identity and lived experience.

In this image, the viewer’s eye and mirrored mark navigates areas of darkness and light, simulating the act of discovery. Recognition becomes a bodily experience: tension builds as the face resolves, then softens as it recedes again into the shadow, meaning-valuation however is wholly individual to each viewer.

Light is utilised within this image as an atmospheric tool, not to explain it but to hold it and give depth to meaning. Congruent with research findings that emotional-valuation often precedes meaning-making within aesthetic experience. Before an image can be ‘read’ or ‘understood’, it is felt, is a process over time that can be built, maintained and disrupted. In this particular piece, the narrative remains ambiguous, the texture can be read in multiplicity, allowing the viewer’s own memory, cultural identity or lived experience to complete the work.

‘A Light Beyond The Grave’ in the Making

Encountering Mad Charcoal’s work through digital screen via social media platforms, whilst the textural quality is flattened, the gestural passion and interconnection between maker and viewer is intensified. Validating that embodied connection is not erased by digital mediation, but reconfigured and re-imagined.

Held In Suspension

Tom Bagshaw is a contemporary illustrator who has developed a highly rendered digital fine art painting style. Known for their use of darkness, restrained colour palettes and layered textures, their illustrations circulate within publishing, music and gallery contexts, reflecting symbolism and an immersive visual experience.

In ‘Unbound’ (2025) texture, light and composition work synonymously with symbolic objects in the dense and atmospheric envelopment, creating a sense of containment rather than immediate revelation. The juxtaposition of affective symbology held in light evoking first perceptive response.

The ambiguous field of darkness and light created  by Bagshaw’s digital style of painting pulls the viewer into the frame and the sensory-motor system is initially displaced challenging the viewer’s distinction between digital, analogue and natural style (Petricini, 2025).

As such, the viewer is forced to engage at an affective and bodily level before meaning is consciously constructed and this ambiguity is crucial to the work’s embodied impact.

In ‘Unbound’ , the viewer does not immediately interpret what is happening, instead they feel it, the held breath within a suspended posture, the pressure of surrounding darkness and moment of tension with the hands and crown of thorns in suspension and the glowing luminosity being pulled into the background activates a visceral response of tension, anticipation and unease prior to any meaning-making.

‘Unbound’ exemplifies the post digital condition,  harmoniously synthesising analogue techniques within a digital medium and showcased both in digital and analogous formats (Stalder 2017). The piece extends embodied connection beyond materiality into atmospheric space encouraging the viewer’s eye to move through gradients of tone and depth of field simulating a sense of immersion.

The body still reacts to tactile qualities of texture which are mediated through both screen and printed materials and the image’s affective force is interactive to light, suspension and spatial uncertainty.

Bagshaw’s work shows that through spatial suggestion and perceptual depth, even with a single static image, embodied connection can be achieved. It operates as a bridge between material based drawing practices, digital mediation and immersive environment experiences.

Authenticity, Process and Embodied Engagement Online

The emergence of social media in day-to-day life is having a dynamic impact on decision making within the sensory-motor system. This, in turn has an affective influence on the emotion-valuation system.

Ausat (2023) states that opinions, perceptions, reviews and social communication engagement has an increasing significance to economic process development. By connecting with the intended target audience authentically, creative social media can evoke emotions and influence engagement or purchasing decisions.

Bagshaw shows example of this by showcasing his work in progress (2024, WIP) images to connect with his audience, and absolve resolution to the initial displacement between digital, analogue and natural style. This makes the embodied connection more significant between maker and viewer, utilising social platforms as a strategic marketing communication tool to emphasize authenticity in their innovative process and credibility.

Embodied Space

Miller and Mrozowska’s ‘The Wave’ (2025) and ‘Now you see me’ by Oliveira (2019) shift aesthetic experience from 2D surface, to spatial encounter, inviting physical presence to complete the aesthetic experience and embodiment.

Oliveira brings to life sketches in the form of three dimensional sculptures, connecting with the viewer’s emotion-valuation system upon first conception. They invite the participating viewer to negotiate light, form and negative space as a part of the meaning-making process, intensifying emotion-valuation in person. Similarly, ‘The Wave’ (2025) invites audience participation to complete meaning-making by immersing the active viewer into a full body light, sound and performative event. In this exhibition, the participant is invited to physically engage their motor-system primarily to influence the responses of the piece through light, frequency and movement, displacing meaning-making, increasing curiosity and awe within the emotion-valuation system and sensory engagement overall.

When viewed through a digital screen, the physical embodied experience of these pieces cannot be appreciated however the aesthetic experience is transformed.

‘Now you see me’, can be appreciated from the viewing point of a photographer, shadows captured adding a new layer of depth, narrative and viewpoint that may not have been otherwise captured at a different time of day with surrounding crowds and light.

‘The Wave’ can be seen in HD slow motion filmed by videographers and heard with the soundscape without distraction, which would not have been otherwise possible. If attending in person, only select few may have had chance to participate or see the exhibition up close, digitally you can fully appreciate each element and have a full relational encounter.

This pairing highlights how embodied connection extends beyond two-dimensional illustration and into spatial perception. Images and structures become environments that the body lives through before the mind interprets.

Whether walking around a sculpture,  navigating light and sound in a closed space, or engaging with immersive interactions digitally, the viewer’s sensory-motor system is engaged and meaning is co-constructed. These works remind us that space, light and form remain a powerful driver of aesthetic experience and embodied connection.

Thinking Through The Body

What this research has changed

Throughout this research I have been reading across Neuroaesthetics, aesthetic experience and postdigital theory whilst simultaneously analysing images through visual aesthetics and culture study.

What became clear as my knowledge grew is that aesthetic experience is not something that happens after perception, but during it. This was not an assumption I had before.  I had previously thought of meaning as something constructed primarily through interpretation, however I now understand that it is shaped by bodily sensation, emotion and attention.

Looking closely at the work of Mad Charcoal, Tom Bagshaw, David Oliveira, Paul Miller and Alicja Mrozowska shifted how I think about the creative industry itself. Illustration is so intertwined and connected interdisciplinary when you de-construct it to mark,  texture, atmosphere and spatial ambiguity; I had not previously considered that they can operate as cognitive tools rather than simply stylistic choices. These artists do not instruct the viewer on what to feel, they have created conditions in which the feeling then occurs. This has in turn challenged my earlier assumptions about narrative, resolution and control within image making. Do these creative practitioners make these stylistic cognitive choices with intention, intuition or both?

I hadn’t expected to change so significantly how I understand my own creative practice. I now recognise that my attraction to texture, light and ambiguity in creative making is not purely aesthetic but is perceptual, whether that be by conscious stylistic choices, subconscious experiential and/or natural intuition.

Understanding this has allowed me to see my work less as image production and more as the construction of experimentation. Allowing myself to surrender to emotion-valuation prior to meaning-making through my motor-responses and fully activating embodied simulation, inviting this as a new developmental creative process.

Moving forward, I would like to explore how visual perception and aesthetic experience engage with embodied sensation and conscious decision-making. Perception, pattern recognition and affect may work together more fluidly than I have previously assumed and how the conscious mind organises sensory information might reshape my research understanding and creative practice altogether.

Pariso, A. (2026) 'Held in mind'

References

Ausat, A. M. A. (2023). The Role of Social Media in Shaping Public Opinion and Its Influence on Economic Decisions. Technology and Society Perspectives (TACIT), 1(1), 35–44. https://doi.org/10.61100/tacit.v1i1.37

Gallese, V. (2017). Visions of the body. Embodied simulation and aesthetic experience. Aisthesis (Italy), 10(1), 41–50. https://doi.org/10.13128/Aisthesis-20902

Nalbantian, S. (2008). Neuroaesthetics:   neuroscientific theory and illustration from the arts. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 33(4), 357–368. https://doi.org/10.1179/174327908X392906

Petricini, T. (2025). Media Ecology in the Postdigital Condition. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-025-00578-5

Stalder, Felix., & Pakis, V. A. . (2018). The digital condition (V. A. . Pakis, Trans.; English). Polity Press.

Image References

Bagshaw, T. (2025) ‘Unbound’, Digital Painting,  Bath, England. Accessed 21/12/2025 online via: https://www.mostlywanted.com/gallery-one/unbound.html

Bagshaw, T. (2024) ‘WIP’, Digital Painting,  Bath, England. Accessed 21/12/2025 online via: https://www.instagram.com/p/DBOhu7ztBIS/

Hernandez, J. (2025). ‘A Light Beyond The Grave’, Chalk on paper, Faith Series, Arizona.  Accessed online 20/12/2025 via: https://madcharcoal.com/products/a-light-beyond-the-grave-original-drawing

Hernandez, J. (2025). ‘A Light Beyond The Grave’, Chalk on paper, Faith Series, Arizona.  Accessed online 20/12/2025 via: https://www.facebook.com/madcharcoalart/reels/

Miller, P. & Mrozowska, A. (2025). ‘The Wave’, Are you playing out light and soundscape installation, Bolton. Accessed online 11/12/2025 via: https://octagonbolton.co.uk/put-big-light-on-2025

Oliveira, D. (2019). ‘Now you see me’, Wire sculpture. Accessed online via: 22/12/2025 https://www.instagram.com/p/BxP7VSEjw2o/?hl=en

Pariso, A. (2025) 'Its all connected', Exploring embodied connection

Pariso, A. (2026) 'Held in mind', Exploring embodied connection

More Research