Soft thought (in architecture and choreography)

Abstract

This article is an introduction to and exploration of the concept of ‘soft thought’. What we want to propose through the definition of this concept is an aesthetic of digital code that does not necessarily presuppose a relation with the generative aspects of coding, nor with its sensorial perception and evaluation. Numbers do not have to produce something, and do not need to be transduced into colours and sounds, in order to be considered as aesthetic objects. Starting from this assumption, our main aim will be to reconnect the numerical aesthetic of code with a more ‘abstract’ kind of feeling, the feeling of numbers indirectly felt as conceptual contagions’, that are ‘conceptually felt but not directly sensed. The following pages will be dedicated to the explication and exemplification of this particular mode of feeling, and to its possible definition as ‘soft thought’