The starting point for my MA thesis is researching animistic thinking as a way to face an artwork - art object. My interest in animistic thinking was born through spontaneous creative research during MA studies and was reflected in animating and personifying art objects as well as developing empathy towards them. Animistic thinking and empathic experience of an art object is at the centre of my own aesthetic experience and creative process. I start from the premise that humans as social beings are spontaneously oriented towards animistic thinking, which helps them understand the world and expands the dynamics of human relations further to include the relations towards the so-called inanimate objects and phenomena. As I can identify a clear tendency towards animistic thinking while experiencing it as a collectively concealed dimension of human intelligence, I decided to investigate the origins of animistic thinking and to define it within the experience of an art object. At the level of aesthetic experience, animistic thinking helps the spectator to arrange the complexity of simultaneous stimuli into an entirety of a unique experience, while on a broader scale it binds the spectator as an individual in the world into a network of semantic meaningful associations as well as meaningful relationships that give sense to the individual.
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