This course explores how we may engage with the relations between artworks and their shifting environments across times and spaces. Rather than adopting the biographical approach that enlarges on the settings or milieus of artworks, this course regards artistic creations as lively and independent organisms that seek to reach out and to survive changing conditions of viewing and interpreting. To achieve such a daring revision of our ways of seeing, this course combines notions of agency, mood or atmosphere, and distant viewing, theorized in such various fields as philosophical pragmatism, social anthropology, aesthetics, and art history respectively. It seeks to promote viewers’ constant yet controlled shifting of positions between or around artworks with a view to achieving genuine harmonization of viewers’ inner world and seemingly daunting pieces of art. In addition, as curious viewers and interpreters today, we seek to carry on the potential process of thinking and imagining that artists already included in their works, and manage to bring alive the agency of certain artistic forms that were underestimated or disparaged in art history. All in all, this course boosts the organismic approach to the arts for an increase in our chance of surviving the world of opinions in the arts and humanities.