8/28/08
Dear V.S. Ramachandran,
In "The Science of Art" you express the hope that your paper will "stimulate a dialog between artists, visual physiologists and evolutionary biologists". I am taking you at your word. I am a painter with a great interest in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
I found your suggestion, that through early vision/limbic connections the earliest stages of visual process...
A painting, a piece of music, a dance are complex perceptual events.
These events, stabilized as works of art, can be experienced repeatedly enabling us to assimilate complexities we could not master in a single exposure.
Intelligence may in part be defined as the ability to assimilate complex events. Assimilating complex perceptual events though largely a non-conscious process is beneficial and so ...
Art is semantically equivocal. Meaning is attributed to art by individuals and cultures. It is not inherent in the work. The genres of still life and landscape were invented by painters to avoid meaning. The first still life and the first landscape without narrative or historical figures were radical paintings.
These paintings are about perception; the artists perception of the subject matter and t...
The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why - Jelaluddin Rumi
Every work of art is both what it means and what it is. In arts language, it has both content and form.
Form is very specific. It is exactly what it is. Meaning or content, on the other hand, is often ambiguous. The same form can mean different, often contradictory, things to different people. And one person may find multiple...
An Artist's Inquiry into the Cognitive, Emotional, and Evolutionary Basis for Art
Summary:
A painting, a piece of music, a dance, are complex perceptual events. These events, stabilized as works of art, can be experienced repeatedly, enabling us to assimilate complexities we could not master in a single exposure. Intelligence may in part be defined as the ability to assimilate complex events, and as...
Draft Edited 3/31/12
Abstract
A twofold response to the arts is proposed: a conscious engagement with art’s content, what it means or represents, and an automatic engagement with its actual perceptual complexity. Automatic denotes any of our thinking or behavior that we are unaware of. We engage most phenomena just long enough to identify them, but with artwork we look and listen longer. All art f...
“The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because, naturally, it is alien to our experience, but it is true: you know far less about yourself than you feel you do. ...your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your(conscious mind) tells itself about what is going on”
-Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow
We are unaware of ...