Abstract

This Collision uses an encounter with Cathy Choi’s B1206 , coupled with theories of aesthetic empathy, to articulate how hijacking as an aesthetic concept might work. The aesthetic faculty of empathy conceives of the aesthetic experience as “feeling into” a given work. This concept furnishes a useful framework for thinking about aesthetic hijacking, as “feeling into” something implies the displacement of the work or its viewer. Hijacking, then, could foreground that displacement by emphasizing spatial uncertainty. Furthermore, hijacking could be an inversion of the process of “feeling into” a given work, indicating a process whereby the work forces its way into the viewer and the space s/he inhabits