In the past, people tended to classify media into fixed categories such as painting, sculpture, photography, and video, using these categories to chart the evolution of style and form. From the second half of the twentieth century onward, this framework has steadily broken down, with the media and materials employed in artistic practice no longer serving an ideal of medium-specific purity but pointing instead to a more fundamental question: how do media structure perception and experience? With technological development, media are no longer simply carriers, materials, or tools of artistic expression but themselves constitute the process through which we experience all being in the world.

Today, however, even as media extend perception into ever broader dimensions, we continue to measure the world by standards of our own: only what the eye can see is deemed to exist, only what the ear can hear counts as sound, and only what the hand can touch is regarded as real. Yet much of the world operates beyond this scale: rocks record the folding of the earth’s crust over millions of years; mycelia weave underground networks older than the internet; algorithms make decisions in milliseconds that remain forever invisible to us. When media are no longer merely channels for transmitting information but fields in which perception is constituted, they offer us the possibility of re-examining this human scale.

As philosopher Graham Harman points out, things themselves possess an aspect that remains beyond our reach: the “thing-in-itself” remains forever in a state of withdrawal. Although we cannot come into direct contact with things, we may experience a “contact without contact,” and it is precisely here that art finds its place: artists do not claim full authority to speak for silent things but act as recorders of perception. Sensitive to the boundary between the withdrawal and manifestation of things, artists construct, through media transformations and aesthetic processes, a mode of “contact” that exceeds everyday experience. The twelve artists and collectives in this exhibition work precisely at this boundary: rather than attempting to “represent” the nonhuman world, they create a theater in which viewers can enter into “contact without contact” with things that remain withdrawn.

This exhibition unfolds in three sections, each corresponding to one of three dimensions of perception in which we need to immerse ourselves anew: Forms of Time (perceiving nonhuman timescales), Whisper of the Other (perceiving forms of nonhuman expression), and Digital Traces (perceiving the material traces of algorithms and data). The exhibition, as the latest presentation in the Tsinghua University Art Museum’s Media Art Series, invites visitors to undertake an exercise in perception: to put aside, for a moment, the human perceptual scale and attend to how strata remember, fungi communicate, and algorithms make decisions. Featuring works in diverse media by twelve artists and collectives from nine countries, it focuses on how we perceive life, matter, and processes that are nonhuman or exceed the human scale. Here, artists do not offer answers; rather, they create moments in which viewers recognize that their own perceptual capacities may not be enough. Rather than presenting a definitive outcome, they allow us to sense a faint “fissure” in the subtlest detail. In such moments, you become an open perceiver—attuned to worlds that have been overlooked by, or remain beyond the reach of, the human senses.