Phenomenal Museum is a series of teachings and ritual engagements led by Jessica Kung to recover the museum as a site of spiritual and creative activation. In these happenings, participants engage with objects of art and culture in the museum using practices of attention, breathing, and energy work drawn from Yogic and Buddhist traditions, as well as forms of collective creative engagement designed to bring one’s own experience, imagination, and sense of play to the work. These rituals hold space for the collective practice of what we’ve come to call a practical phenomenology.

The term “phenomenal” emerges from the word “phenomenology,” which names a tradition a tradition in Western thought that makes a study of the way things appear to us in lived experience—as opposed, say, to the study of things as they might appear from some more objective or impersonal perspective. This tradition breaks away from another lineage of thought, descending from René Descartes, that focuses attention on that which can be known objectively and with certainty through empirical methods of research. For thinkers in the phenomenological tradition, it is important to describe the world not according to what it is “objectively” but according to how it acts on and appears to us.

Practical phenomenology is our name for an ensemble of techniques we use for making ourselves more porous to the spirit and influence of art than we tend to be as passive or distracted spectators. These techniques work against the buffering of the self that our modern epistemologies have made the norm of experience—a buffering that “flattens” experience, reducing art to objects for disengaged thought and perception—and help us return to an intimate, inspirited relation with the art object. This intimate relation is more akin to the one the ancient Greeks had with their art: for them, a statue of a god was a point of direct access to that god, and a mouseion was a place for communing with the muse.