Ambix, cucurbit and retort of Zosimos from man. Paris, Grec 2327 fol. 83v.

Do we always have to proof our findings?
First-person experiences are not mere noisy artefacts.
Imagination is a legitimate instrument of inquiry.

The statements above are often vulnerable to being dismissed as merely “poetic” or “artistic,” rather than being taken seriously as rigorous forms of inquiry. This dismissal typically rests on the assumption that subjective approaches lack structure, reproducibility, or functional value. However, the experiments presented here argue the opposite: subjective experiments can possess strong disciplinary qualities precisely because they attend to how, when, and under what conditions phenomena appear.
Rather than treating subjectivity as taboo, these experiments explicitly embrace the situated nature of perception, aesthetics and experience into their intent. They register not only outcomes, but also the temporal, contextual, and messy sensorial dimensions through which those outcomes might emerge. In this sense, subjective experiments do not abandon rigour; they relocate it.
These subjective or romantic experiments operate across aesthetic, sensitive, and functional dimensions of experience. Aesthetic qualities shape how phenomena are perceived and interpreted. Sensitive qualities account for affective and embodied responses. Functional qualities describe how these experiences interact with systems, tools, or practices. Together, these dimensions form a coherent framework for evaluating subjective findings—not as arbitrary impressions, but as structured observations grounded in experiential conditions.
Contemporary science often treats proof and objectivity as moral imperatives, as if phenomena only exist once purified of observers, context, and history. Whatever does pop up during so called “objective” experiments that is unproven or erroneous, is deemed to be labelled as a dreaded artefact. Scientists distinguish artefacts from genuine findings to ensure the validity and accuracy of their results, preventing wasted time chasing false findings. This is a valuable method, for sure. However, in doing so, a lot of useful cultural, personal, aesthetic and scientific information is often disregarded or even ignored. Therefore the path to find and experience things, narrows.

Faraday apparatus for ideomotor effect on table turning.

“Science” was not always like this. Natural philosophy felt it belonged to the world. Today’s predominant stance that intelligence is something exclusively human was alien to them. Its methods were observational, speculative, and materially twined. Romantic knowledge arose not from isolation of nature, but from prolonged attention, repetition, and experiment within living systems. Natural philosophers tuned themselves to rhythms and anomalies—weather, growth, decay, resonance—treating plants, soils, fluids, and atmospheres as collaborators rather than inert objects. In this sense, their practice aligns with these experiments. Sensing infrastructures become instruments of listening rather than functional control. Data streams behave like ecological signals rather than abstractions. Computation operates as a form of extended perception allowing senses to meld or interface through coupling machine learning, signal analysis, and generative systems to plants, fungi, viscous fluids, and sound. Natural philosophers did not so much ask what intelligence was, but where and how it appeared, how it drifted, and how it might be sensed when nature is the sole measure.

Von Humboldt, Geographie der Phlanzen in den Tropen-Ländern.

Romantic science tried to remember this. It tried to recall older ways of experimentation that had been eclipsed by the drive toward reduction, measurement, and mastery. Where Enlightenment science increasingly isolated variables and stripped phenomena into parts, Romantic science turned back toward wholeness, correspondence, and lived encounter. Figures working in this mode treated nature not as a mechanism to be dismantled, but as a dynamic, self-organising field whose forces could only be understood through participation, intuition, and aesthetic sensitivity. Observation was inseparable from affect. Imagination became a legitimate instrument of inquiry. This shift resonates with these experiments, where signals are not reduced to noise-free utilities but allowed to remain ambiguous, expressive, and relational. By working with biological data, environmental fluctuations, and generative systems as co-evolving processes, the experiments echo Romantic science’s refusal to sever feeling from knowing, and its insistence that understanding emerges not from trying to control nature, but from attunement to its unfolding patterns.

From this perspective, the experiments presented here are a critique of contemporary culture and science’s blind faith in proof, functionality and objectivity. Proof assumes repeatability without history, observation without consequence, and systems that can be reset. Yet the experiments demonstrate that some phenomena only exist through duration, noise, asymmetry, and participation. What they show and produce are not falsifiable claims or artefacts but situated knowledges. The goal is to allow an understanding of how matter, observer, and machine co-evolve through feedback.
Not all truths arrive as proofs. Some arrive as sustained encounters, where coherence replaces certainty, and engagement reveals more than detachment ever could.

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