How do we feel? Embodied simulation, attention, and the pursuit of transcendence in Jeremy Shaw’s Phase Shifting Index

This essay examines Jeremy Shaw’s Phase Shifting Index, a seven-channel video and sound installation that stages immersive encounters with expanded body-mind states of transcendence. Drawing on theories of embodied cognition and neuroaesthetics, it argues that Shaw’s work does not merely represent altered states but actively performs them through multisensory orchestration. By combining hypnotic audiovisual effects, disjunctive temporality, and choreographed corporeal intensity, the installation invites viewers into an experiential interplay of affect and analysis. Situating Phase Shifting Index within late-capitalist attention economies and immersive media aesthetics, the essay explores how Shaw leverages perceptual overload to foreground the pre-cognitive conditions of spectatorship—where automatic, bodily responses and attentional autonomy are always in tension. Ultimately, the work proposes a model of transcendence as a relational, embodied process of spectatorship rather than a mystical escape, illuminating the entangled nature of feeling, perception, and technology in our digital age.