Ontologies, Art,
and the Shape
of Intent

A hand hesitates over a surface. A dancer shifts their weight. Someone in rehearsal hears an accidental interval and asks to hear it again. The work changes because a person has noticed something. Another person answers. What began as a private impulse acquires a shared life.

This is the experience I want to build toward: embodied human beings discovering what becomes possible through one another. A human-crafted neurosymbolic structure can, I propose, become a pinnacle of art when it gives that possibility an enduring, expressive form. Its achievement lies in the depth of human intention it carries, the encounters it makes possible, and the freedom with which others can inhabit and transform it.

My starting proposition is that art brings human intent into relation with human perception through material construction. That proposition lets me approach every process artistically. A sentence, a stage, an instrument, a game mechanic, a way of convening people: each gives an intention a form through which someone else may encounter it. The encounter may move them, confuse them, disappoint them, or open something neither of us anticipated. Intention begins the invitation; experience determines what happens next.

John Dewey gives this account a vital foundation. In Art as Experience, making and perceiving belong to a continuous movement of doing and undergoing. The artist acts, experiences the consequences, and acts again. The whole living person participates. A finished object carries the history of that exchange, while its encounter with another person begins a further experience.¹

This makes room for the physicality, mistakes, conversations, and detours that artists rightly cherish. They are where judgment develops. A tool belongs in that process when it helps a person attend more closely, attempt more freely, or carry a discovery further. Speed matters according to what it makes room for. Sometimes the valuable thing is an afternoon spent slowly learning what the material will permit.

Susanne Langer deepens the relation between form and feeling. In Feeling and Form, she understands art through expressive forms that articulate the character of felt life. Music can give perceptible shape to tension, movement, suspension, and release without translating those experiences into a series of propositions. Symbolic form can make an experience available to understanding while preserving its complexity.²

My extension of that thought is that relationships themselves can become expressive material. The arrangement of possibilities can carry a sensibility: how much room a participant receives, where a pause is permitted, which differences remain visible, how a contribution meets an answer. An architecture can embody a philosophy of encounter.

An ontology makes commitments about what exists and how things relate. In knowledge engineering, it gives a domain an explicit vocabulary of concepts, relationships, and constraints; Thomas Gruber’s influential account describes this as specifying a conceptualization.³ The artistic question begins with the choices inside that specification. What deserves a name? Which distinctions matter? What belongs together? From whose position does the arrangement become intelligible?

These decisions are compositions of attention.

A representation that recognizes a person principally through a job title encourages one kind of encounter. A representation that can also hold their passions, practices, relationships, changing circumstances, and self-description creates other possibilities. Their privacy and authority over those descriptions become part of the composition. The person must retain room to exceed the representation.

This is what I mean by human above ontology. The structure remains answerable to the life it serves. A category can be revised. A relation can be reconsidered. Several names can illuminate different aspects of the same person without requiring that person to become several disconnected lives.

The handcraft is present in these choices. Decades of attention to color, space, language, movement, and human difference can be worked into a formal structure. A relation is added because experience has made its absence painful. A distinction is preserved because collapsing it destroys something meaningful. An arrangement is changed because it feels wrong, and investigation reveals why.

Sol LeWitt’s conceptual practice offers one precedent for locating art in a generative structure. His 1967 “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” treats the organizing idea and its instructions as artistically consequential. His preference for predetermined execution also clarifies where my own emphasis differs: I want the structure to remain responsive to the people who bring it into experience. The score carries intention; its performance can teach the composer.⁴

In a neurosymbolic system, neural learning is integrated with explicit symbolic representation and reasoning.⁵ That technical description identifies a family of methods. The artistic authorship resides in the particular composition: which relationships are made explicit, how suggestions are interpreted, what participants may change, and how experience informs revision.

A symbolic ontology can be authored directly from a person’s philosophy and accumulated practice. Neural components have their own training histories. In the work I am describing, those contributions need to remain distinguishable. That distinction lets us locate the craft accurately and ask what each component contributes to the encounter.

I want intuition and explicit structure to remain in conversation. A model may suggest a connection. A person may recognize its significance, reject it, or discover that the available vocabulary cannot yet express what matters. The next act of authorship may be a change to the vocabulary itself.

Embodied enaction gives this movement a deeper account. Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch describe cognition through the activity of embodied beings whose engagement brings forth a meaningful world. Knowing takes shape through the capacities and histories of a living body in its environment.⁶

For my purposes, this makes bodily experience the ground to which a formal system must continually return. A notation can preserve a movement’s relations. The dancer encounters balance, gravity, fatigue, anticipation, and another person’s weight. Each changes what the notation can mean in practice.

There is a productive tension here. An ontology stabilizes selected distinctions; an enactive account emphasizes meaning arising through living activity. I bring them together by treating the ontology as a revisable instrument within that activity. The people using it remain capable of discovering something its categories did not anticipate.

David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese’s work on embodied simulation offers a related proposal about aesthetic response: engagement with an artwork can involve bodily capacities associated with action, emotion, and sensation. Their account gives bodily participation a place in the explanation of aesthetic experience. It remains a theoretical contribution, rather than a complete explanation of art or a recipe for producing empathy.⁷

An artwork may invite us to feel the gesture that made it. A shared creative practice can let us answer with a gesture of our own.

Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo call attention to participatory sense-making: meaning develops through the interplay between individuals and the interaction they sustain. An encounter can acquire a dynamic that changes what becomes intelligible or possible for its participants.⁸

This matters because collective creation changes intent itself. A collaborator arrives with a possibility I could not have specified. Their response alters my understanding of the work. The developing work alters what both of us attempt. Authorship becomes a relationship with a history.

The score–performance relationship is central to my own method. A score makes an intention available for encounter. Performance supplies evidence about what that intention becomes under actual conditions. The difference may disclose misunderstanding, a weak assumption, an overlooked constraint, or a discovery worth keeping.

A pause can transform a sentence. A slightly delayed entrance can make a musical phrase breathe. A performer can reveal that the apparent center of a scene belongs somewhere else. The useful question is what the difference teaches us. Some discoveries belong in a revised score; others belong to the singularity of that performance.

The return carries something with it. We approach the same marks with a changed body, a changed relationship, a changed sense of what they can do.

Entrainment names one dimension of this shared activity. Research on musical entrainment examines how distinct rhythmic processes coordinate through interaction. Coordination can involve intricate relationships among different rhythms, including loose alignment and variation, as well as close synchronization.⁹

My artistic interest is in the possibilities of counterpoint, syncopation, call and response, polyrhythm, and rubato. Distinct voices can sustain a recognizable whole while retaining their own movement. Togetherness can have intervals. A participant can step back, listen differently, return later, or contribute through another sensory route.

For this practice, coordination must preserve agency. Agreement, belonging, and ethical care require their own attention; rhythmic alignment alone cannot establish them. A shared rhythm becomes artistically valuable through what people can express and discover within it.

Pauline Oliveros offers a particularly generous model. Her Deep Listening practice includes bodywork, sonic meditation, environmental attention, and collective improvisation. It cultivates an expanding capacity to listen, with room for sounds that were unintended or previously overlooked. Her practice developed through sustained collaboration, including work with IONE and movement artist Heloise Gold.¹⁰

I take from this an architectural question: how can a system help people become more available to what is happening? It might preserve an unfinished thought, make a neglected contribution perceptible, or leave a silence in which someone finds their own entrance.

Imagine a composer, dancer, visual artist, and engineer developing an experience together. The composer describes a suspended cadence. The dancer recognizes a bodily hesitation. The visual artist explores how a color relationship holds attention. The engineer proposes a change in timing that lets participants feel the transition.

A shared ontology could preserve their distinct accounts and the proposed relationships among them. It could record which connections are analogies, which are design decisions, and which have been tested in rehearsal. The group could try a realization, attend to the response, and revise both the work and its description.

The connection between color and cadence would remain an artistic proposition to explore. Its value would emerge through the participants’ judgment and the experience they make. The infrastructure would help the discovery remain available after the conversation ends.

This is why craft matters at the level of method. When an artist notices that the hierarchy is wrong, a transition is too abrupt, or a technically successful result feels empty, that observation deserves to be retained. Sometimes it becomes a reusable principle. Sometimes its importance is inseparable from the particular work. A capable method must preserve that difference too.

And the people shaping the method must remain open to challenge. Claire Bishop’s critique of relational aesthetics presses on the assumption that bringing people together is inherently democratic or artistically sufficient. The character of the relationships, their exclusions, and the possibility of disagreement matter.¹¹

For the art I am proposing, that means participants must have meaningful influence over the conditions of participation. They need room to question a category, refuse an interpretation, protect a contribution, change direction, and leave. Co-creation asks the initiating artist to allow other people’s intentions to become consequential.

My commitment to Ubuntu belongs here as an obligation to make relationship operational. Another person’s presence must be able to change what we do. My name for the larger purpose is BioBlossoming: life developing through agency, relationship, creativity, adaptation, and coevolution. A beautiful afternoon, a friendship, a dance, or a period of rest already belongs within that purpose.

This also explains the relationship between Enterprise Arts and Untool. Enterprise Arts carries the human delivery relationship through expert services, engineering, creative practice, and stakeholder experience. Untool provides the formal knowledge and computational platform supporting that work. The artistic ambition concerns how those capabilities help people make something worth experiencing, and carry forward what they learn.

I call a human-crafted neurosymbolic structure a possible pinnacle of art because of the artistic responsibility it concentrates. Its maker composes a form that can support further acts of composition. Its success includes the moment someone else discovers a possibility the maker could not foresee.

Such a work must carry intention with enough precision to be dependable and enough openness to welcome another life. Its beauty may be felt in a connection becoming possible, in an artist recovering time for the difficult part, in a person finding that an apparently private passion has somewhere to go.

I want to make structures worthy of those moments.

The first shape carries the memory of the hands that made it. Other hands find its edges, open it, turn it, discover a direction that had been hidden in the flatness. The earlier creases remain. They become part of what the next movement can do.

Then the room changes. Someone who arrived with their arms folded reaches toward someone else. A possibility passes between them. The work acquires a life beyond its first intention.

And there is lift.