Embodied Aesthetics: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind, 26th - 28th August 2013 [1 ed.] 9789004281516, 9789004281509

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Embodied Aesthetics

Philosophy of History and Culture Edited by Michael Krausz (Bryn Mawr College) Advisory Board Annette Baier (University of Pittsburgh) Purushottama Bilimoria (Deakin University, Australia) Cora Diamond (University of Virginia) William Dray (University of Ottawa) Nancy Fraser (New School for Social Research) Clifford Geertz† (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) Peter Hacker (St. John’s College, Oxford) Rom Harré (Linacre College, Oxford) Bernard Harrison (University of Sussex) Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago) Leon Pompa (University of Birmingham) Joseph Raz (Balliol College, Oxford) Amélie Rorty (Harvard University)

VOLUME 34

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/phc

John T. Haworth. Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind. This picture is the result of a workshop (28/8/2013) that took place at the 1st international conference on Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind. Individuals were asked to draw around their hand on an A4 sheet of paper and write their answers to six questions on their well-being by writing the number of the question and their answer to the question, coded 1, 2, or 3, on the hand drawing. They could then do further drawings on the paper if they wished, and fold it or not. The picture, photographed by John T. Haworth, is the photo of the collected hands, including an indication of the group subjective well-being.

Embodied Aesthetics Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind, 26th–28th August 2013 Edited by

Alfonsina Scarinzi

LEIDEN | BOSTON

International Conference on Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind (1st : 2013 : Delmenhorst, Germany)  Embodied aesthetics : proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind, 26th–28th August 2013 / edited by Alfonsina Scarinzi.   pages cm. — (Philosophy of history and culture, ISSN 0922-6001 ; 34)  Includes index.  ISBN 978-90-04-28150-9 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-28151-6 (e-book) 1. Aesthetics— Congresses. 2. Human body (Philosophy)—Congresses. I. Scarinzi, Alfonsina. II. Title.  BH39.I565 2014  111’.85—dc23 2014030880

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual ‘Brill’ typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0922-6001 isbn 978-90-04-28150-9 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-28151-6 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents The Contributors  vi Introduction  1 Alfonsina Scarinzi 1 The Evolutionary Roots of Aesthetics: An Approach-Avoidance Look at Curvature Preference  3 Enric Munar, Gerardo Gómez-Puerto, Antoni Gomila 2 A Neuro-Evolutionary Mechanism for Aesthetic Phenomenology  18 Joshua Fost 3 Interaction of Perception and Imagination in Pictorial Space Experience  38 Joanna Ganczarek, Vezio Ruggieri, Daniele Nardi, Marta Olivetti Belardinelli 4 Effortless Bodies and Beyond  59 Barbara Gail Montero 5 The Dancing Body and the Revelation of Prepersonal Existence through Art  73 Xavier Escribano 6 How to Perceive Oneself Perceiving? Gardens, Movement and the Semiotics of Embodiment  91 Katarzyna Kaczmarczyk 7 From Film Studies to Interaction Design—An Emergent Aesthetics View  114 Xin Xia, Nimish Biloria and Bernhard Hommel 8 Spinoza, the Philosopher Craftsman: Understanding the World through Painting and Process  129 Paul Uhlmann Index  149

The Contributors Xavier Escribano Xavier Escribano is the Director of the Research Project (2012–2014) “Interdisciplinary Studies in Embodied Subjectivity” at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya. He is a lecturer in philosophy. Joanna Ganczarek Joanna Ganczarek is a PhD student in Cognitive Psychology, Psychophysiology and Personality at Sapienza University in Rome. Katarzyna Kaczmarczyk Katarzyna is working on her doctoral thesis in the field of semiotics and narrative of gardens under the supervision of dr. hab. Wincenty Grajewski (University of Warsaw). Enric Munar Enric Munar is a Teacher and Researcher within the Human Evolution & Cognition Group (www.evocog.org/en.html) at the Faculty of Psychology, University of the Balearic Islands (Spain). Alfonsina Scarinzi Alfonsina Scarinzi holds a PhD from Georg-August Universität Göttingen (Germany) in Cognitive Literary Studies and German. She is a member of the European Network eu Cog iii and was the organizer of the international conference Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind in 2013. Xin Xia Xin Xia is a PhD candidate in Cognitive Psychology at Leiden University. Her PhD topic is Emergent Aesthetics and Interactive Space Design. She holds a ba in art and design from the Nanjing Arts Institute, Nanjing, China and an ma in Film and Television Studies from the Amsterdam University. Joshua Fost Joshua holds a PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience from Princeton University. He is Assistant Professor at Portland State University and publishes on Design and Society, on sociocultural and sustainability topics connected with architecture.

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Paul Uhlmann Paul is Coordinator of Visual Arts and Lecturer in Visual Arts and Coordinator at the Printmaking Studio, at the Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia. He holds a Diploma of art from the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Art, Holland.

Introduction Alfonsina Scarinzi The present collection of works puts together the contributions presentend in the group work sessions at the 1st international conference on aesthetics and the embodied mind, which took place from 26th to 28th August 2013. The conference was supported by the European Network of Excellence EUCog III and by the German Fritz Thyssen Foundation. The group work sessions aimed at discussing from different points of view the role of embodiment in the reevaluation of aesthetics. Mark Johnson (2007) in his book The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding remarks that aesthetics has been relegated to a secondary and devaluated status in philosophy and science. The main aim of the conference was to present aesthetics as a field of inquiry of bodily mediated meaning-making by putting into focus the continuity of aesthetic experience with normal processes of living, of embodied cognition and perception, of embodied meaning generation in the relation of co-determination between the perceiving subject and the environment he/ she interacts with. Moreover, the conference supported the view that in the reevaluation of aesthetics the dialogue between science and humanities—the two cultures—is fundamental. The cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary works presented in the group work sessions can be considered to be a contribution to considering the two cultures as two sides of the same coin and to overcoming the academic divide. One of the aims of the group work sessions was to contribute to the dialogue between the “two polar groups” C.P. Snow in his Rede Lecture in 1959 talks about. Snow was convinced that they have a curious distorted image of each other: “Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground. Non-scientists tend to think of scientists as brash and boastful.” [Snow, 1959]. With the purpose of contributing to overcoming the “two cultures divide” and to boosting the dialogue between different disciplines this collection includes the following fields: psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, education, interaction design. In this collection of works embodiment as well as embodied are used in a broad sense. The works do not tend to focus on embodiment or embodied mind as mere rejection of the Cartesian-Mind Body Dualism only. In this respect the works presented in these proceedings can not be directly linked to the current

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debates on the radical rejection of the Mind-Body dualism in the field of enactivism, neurophenomenology, autopoietic artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, for example.1 Embodiment and embodied in this collection of works refer to the more general involvement of the body and its structures in the processes of the mind or in cognitive-emotional activities in perception and in the interaction with the environment and its objects: 1) the bodily basis of aesthetic appreciation from an evolutionary point of view; 2) the bodily physical structures such as the brain involved in perception, aesthetic experience and appreciation; 3) the role of physiological responses in experiencing the objects of the enviroment aesthetically; 4) the role of body movement in the space, of action and gestures; 5) the role of one’s own body in motion in the engagement with the environment; 6) somatic responses and the experience of meaning; 7) pre-reflective experience of the body; 8) the role of the interplay of different types of physical and sensory activities in the process of education to art appreciation. These proceedings can be considered to be a multi-disciplinary state of the art in fields where aesthetics is an important topic of cutting-edge research and which take both the body as the basis for experience and its interplay with cognitive-emotional processes into account, but are not at the stage where the role of the body in human cognition and experience can be radicalized like in the enactive and anti-dualistic approaches2 to human cognition and experience.

1  Such a radical rejection can be found in the works by Daniel Hutto, Mark Johnson, Francisco Varela, Anthony Chemero, Evan Thompson, for example. 2  See for example Varela, F. & Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1991) The Embodied Mind, mit Press

CHAPTER 1

The Evolutionary Roots of Aesthetics: An ApproachAvoidance Look at Curvature Preference Enric Munar, Gerardo Gómez-Puerto, Antoni Gomila 1

The Evolution of Aesthetics

From an evolutionary point of view, aesthetics can be regarded as one of the functional—as opposed to anatomical—apomorphies that characterise our species. However, this does not mean that the capacity of aesthetics is unique to Homo sapiens. There is no a priori reason to consider that perhaps other members of the Hominin tribe didn’t possess this trait. It is still an open question how such a capacity evolved. Unfortunately, it is not an easy task to understand the evolutionary process that gave rise to aesthetics, both in terms of the reconstruction of the milestones in said process, and in terms of the selective pressures that may have provided functional value to such a capacity. As regards the reconstruction of the process, we need to rely on the archaeological and fossil evidence, but they are both incomplete and partial, given that at most they provide evidence of the results, not of the psychological capacities. Thus, marks in lithic tools or different materials may reveal the effect of anthropic actions with no apparent utility, or uncertain symbolic meaning; while the anatomical correlates of a particular functional trait are to be determined before they can be found in the fossil record. In the case of aesthetics, this becomes especially problematic, as there is no particular anatomical trait to be considered, beyond specific aspects of brain organization. To make things more complicated, aesthetic appreciation seems not to be a single psychological function, but the outcome of a mosaic evolutionary process (Nadal et al. 2009) that involved the assemblage of different, emotional and cognitive, components. Research about such different components is gaining momentum, giving us some insight about (1) which brain areas are involved in the capacity of aesthetics (Cela-Conde et al. 2004; CelaConde et al. 2009; Kawabata and Zeki 2004; Vartanian and Goel 2004; Munar et al. 2012a); and (2) how do these areas work together in different aesthetic tasks (Munar et al. 2012b; Cela-Conde et al. 2013). From this standpoint, it makes sense to start small: looking for the roots of aesthetics in the most simple and

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basic processes which already exhibits the marks of aesthetic a­ ppreciation. Basic perceptual preferences constitute, in our view, such a minimal stage of aesthetics. Preferences also seem the right place to look when considering the functional dimension of the evolutionary process that gave rise to aesthetics, as they relate to the ecological background and primal behaviours underlying it. It is possible to investigate whether they are universal, and whether they are exclusively human, or also present in our closest relatives. While this might result in just so stories depicting dubious adaptive scenarios, an empirically sound evolutionary approach would be invaluable when attempting to make sense of our aesthetic capacity. In this chapter, after reviewing some of the most well known preferences, we will focus our attention on the case of the visual preference for curvature. This preference has been hypothesised to result from a primitive perception of sharp transitions in contour as conveying a sense of threat. We introduce a new approach-avoidance paradigm, inspired by the embodied mind framework, as a better suited method to study such preferences while presenting some of the most important results obtained in our comparative and cross-cultural studies so far. 2

Basic Perceptual Preferences

A general feature of our perceptive systems is that they are not neutral, but preferentially oriented. That is, some stimuli are preferred over others, and this can be seen as a basic form of aesthetic preference. This preference seems to be sustained at the neuronal level by the reward system, among others, which makes some stimuli more appealing, or positively arousing; while driving us to avoid or dislike others—even if the liking judgment may result from a longer, more cognitive, process (Cela-Conde et al. 2013). Although it is perfectly possible that some of these preferences are the outcome of an individual process of reinforcement learning, such possibility is still dependent on the existence of intrinsic preferences and unconditioned stimuli, which can be expected to be universal and innate. Therefore, we propose a research programme that identifies these basic preferences, testing whether they are, in effect, innate—and not the result of an idiosyncratic reinforcement story, or culture-specific preference depending on its cognitive acquisition. This programme also addresses the question of the evolution of such preferences: how did our species come to acquire such preferences? Was there any kind of evolutionary advantage in having them?

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In other words, were they selected at some point? Which functional advantages did they provide? And, in particular, are they human specific, or do we share these preferences with our primate relatives? Several examples of perceptual preferences, which can be viewed as the possible building blocks of human aesthetics, have already been singled out in the literature. In the last decades several features have been proposed as universal determinants of visual aesthetic preference, such as vertical symmetry, regularity, colour, brightness, or complexity. We are not trying to create an allencompassing endless list that would include every single element that may constitute our aesthetic capacity, but to simply illustrate the sort of approach that we have in mind. Accordingly, we focus only on symmetry and colour preferences, in order to place the preference for curvature in a broader context. 2.1 Symmetry It has been stated from different sources that humans prefer more symmetrical patterns than non-symmetrical ones (Bornstein, Ferdinandsen, and Gross 1981; Enquist and Arak 1994). While most empirical evidence comes from experiments with faces (Rhodes et al. 1998), we can find studies focusing on bodies (Tovée, Tasker, and Benson 2000) and other kinds of stimuli such as drawings (Humphrey 1997) and meaningless patterns (Bertamini, Makin, and Pecchinenda 2013). Moreover, it could be argued that bifaces—with Acheulean handaxes dating up to 500,000 years ago—might be one of the first manifestations in the human lineage towards the preference for a lateral symmetry (Hodgson 2011). Magnus Enquist and Anthony Arak suggested that the preference for symmetry could result from the need to recognise objects regardless of its position and orientation in the visual field. Thus, symmetry would be preferred for facilitating mental transformations needed in order to recognise specific objects. A later proposal by Rolf Reber (2002), while still relating preference and ease of cognition, switched the emphasis to perceptual fluency. Yet, on a different note, several authors coming from a more evolutionary perspective have proposed that sexual selection—in particular, the signalling of mate health as indicated by developmental stability—could be the explanation of the preference for symmetry (Møller and Thornhill 1998; Tovée, Tasker, and Benson 2000; Jones et al. 2001). 2.2 Colour Preference Among all the colours, blue is the most preferred by men and women (Winch 1909; McManus, Jones, and Cottrell 1981; Hurlbert and Ling 2007). However, when focusing on the red-green mechanism, it has been found that females

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show a greater preference for reddish hues than males (Bimler, Kirkland, and Jameson 2004; Hurlbert and Ling 2007). Anya Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling suggested that this sex difference arose from sex-specific functional specializations in the evolutionary division of labour. With trichromacy and the redgreen opponent channel being modern adaptations in primate evolution that facilitate the identification of edible ripe red fruits embedded in green foliage; female preference for red would be explained by the fact that they, as gatherers, would have required a higher degree of awareness of colour information than males did as hunters. 3

The Preference for Curvature

During the last century, different sources have been slowly providing a sparse but ever growing amount of evidence that seems to point to a generalised innate preference for curvature in human beings. As early as 1924, A.T. Poffenberger and B.E. Barrows reported a tendency to relate sharp angled lines with feelings of agitation and violence, while rounded angled lines were related with feelings of quietness; results that would later be replicated by Kate Hevner (1935). Consistently, Gerald Guthrie and Morton Wiener (1966) found that it was the sharpness of the lines used to close the angles in an image depicting a man, and not the presence of a gun, that made participants describe an image presented subliminally as portraying negative connotations. More recently, Moshe Bar and Maital Neta (2006) employed a like/dislike forced-choice task with everyday objects, letters, and meaningless patterns to find a significant preference for curvature as opposed to neutral and sharp contours. They would later hypothesise that said preference results from a primitive perception of sharp transitions in contour as conveying a sense of threat (Bar and Neta 2007). By using fMRI, they found higher levels of activation of the amygdala, a brain structure involved in fear processing, when participants looked at the sharp version of the stimuli, a result that seemed to support their original claim. Unfortunately, this hypothesis is not exempt of problems. For starters, it predicts avoidance of sharp angles, rather than preference for rounded shapes. It is not clear that it would be advantageous to have such an avoidance mechanism, nor which kind of environmental pressure would make advantageous to possess the capacity to quickly detect and avoid sharp shapes. Furthermore, all the studies mentioned were carried out among Western educated individuals, which weakens its claims of universality. As a matter of fact, Claus-Christian Carbon (2010) has reported that appreciation for curvature changes dynamically over time, proposing adaptation effects as plausible candidates for trig-

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gering such changes. That is, preference for curvature would be mediated by fashion or trends, in what he calls a Zeitgeist effect. This proposal is sustained by his empirical research, in which, after presenting images of car exteriors spanning different decades to participants, he found that their preference for curvature in cars through time followed an U shape, being at its peak for models produced during the middle and the end of the 20th century, and at its lowest during the 1970s. Furthermore, Helmut Leder, Pablo Tinio, and Moshe Bar (2011) while replicating Bar and Neta’s findings about preference for curvature when using the same stimuli, found that it disappeared when employing stimuli of negative valence. That is, participants did still prefer the curved version when the object depicted had positive connotations; but there was no effect of shape when using negative stimuli, such as a bomb or a coffin. While the authors’ interpretation of these results doesn’t confront the adaptive hypothesis, simply stating that valence is prioritised over contour—so that once an object has been identified as negative, there is no need for the contour to be taken in account—it brings into question once more the kind of scenario that would have created such an environmental pressure for the avoidance of sharp nonnegative contours to be adaptively relevant. In this case, it could be argued that, if the hypothesis were true, the sharp-avoidance system would have to be more ancient than the valence-evaluation one. 4

The Approach-Avoidance Research Programme

To address these issues, we propose a theoretical framework inspired by the embodiment thesis, especially as portrayed by Mark Johnson (2008), according to which cognition is action, and aesthetics a primary tool of meaning-making. For Johnson (2012), who follows John Dewey (1922), neither our experiences nor our judgments are neatly pre-categorised into different types: aesthetic, moral, political, scientific, or religious. Instead, we should see aesthetics or morals as a set of complex problem-solving systems that, by directing our interaction with the environment in a certain way, makes it meaningful. It is only a posteriori, when higher cognitive processes have mediated the experience, that we call a particular experience as aesthetic or moral. Thus, if humans were to prefer curved contours because of sharpness being perceived as a threat, such behaviour could easily be modelled as a basic drive under an approach-avoidance framework. It could also be a clear case of meaning making as described by Johnson, as this avoidance of sharpness would be a way in which

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our bodies are inhabiting, and interacting meaningfully with, the environment beneath the level of conscious awareness [. . .], forming the basis for both the meaning of our movements and, at the same time, the meaning of the world that we move within. (Johnson 2008, 24) Hence, the meaning of curvature and sharpness, of roundness and angularity, would arise from this original avoidance of a threat making contour fit the definition of aesthetic primitive as proposed by Richard Latto (1995, 68): “a property of a stimulus that is intrinsically interesting, even in the absence of narrative meaning.” In other words, it is our contention that verbal reporting is not the best way to assess perceptual preferences, which have to show up as a kind of sensorymotor loop. Therefore, we propose an experimental approach-avoidance paradigm, as one markedly suited for this task due to its naturalistic nature and its emphasis on primal interactions between an organism and its environment. This approach brings experimental aesthetics closer to the most basic and elemental behaviours, while averting, as much as possible, complicated cognitive interpretations from both participants and researchers. It is common for investigators in the fields of experimental aesthetics and neuroaesthetics to ask questions regarding liking, wanting, preference or appreciation in a given task. Sometimes, participants require conceptual clarifications about these terms, which adds an extra layer of alienation from the original task. Committing ourselves to the immediacy of the approach-­ avoidance paradigm and the idea that aesthetic traits arise from specific ­problem-solving situations in which human beings are driven to a pattern of action, we believe that the experimental design must follow these principles of specificity and conceptual simplicity. In addition, as Andrew Elliot and Martin Covington (2001) put it, the distinction between approach and avoidance motivations is basic for the understanding of human behaviour. They justify this position with the following five arguments, which we have also adopted as the basis of our framework. 1) This distinction has a long and rich history in intellectual thought. We can find it being used in psychology, in different forms, since its beginnings as a scientific discipline: pursuit of pleasure or avoidance of pain; movements of interest towards or away from social objects; orienting response towards the stimulus or a defensive response away from the stimulus; reference to the end towards or away from which the organism is moving; positive valences that attract and negative ones that repel; conditioned appetitive and a­ versive

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drives; and deficit needs to reduce a negative state of tension and growth needs to increase positive stimulation. That is, it is present in each of the major theoretical traditions in psychology: functionalism, psychoanalysis, reflexology, behaviourism, humanism, cognitivism, and psychobiology. 2) It can be applied to different forms of animated life: the distinction in behaviour and motivation can be found even in the lowest organisms of the phylogenetic scale. Theodore Schneirla (1965) stated that all organisms possess mechanisms that evoke approach reactions to facilitate food, shelter and mating, and mechanisms that evoke withdrawal reactions to facilitate defence, flight and protection in general. The sophistication of these mechanisms varies considerably across species: from rudimentary and rigid to advanced and flexible. These behavioural adjustments suppose a clearly significant adaptation to the environment. Moreover, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides (1990) argue that the behaviour of approach or withdrawal has been the fundamental adaptive decision that organisms have had to make throughout their evolutionary history; so that its survival value has driven organisms towards potentially beneficial stimuli and away from potentially harmful ones. As Elliot and Covington (2001), paraphrasing Schneirla (1965), say the high road of evolution has been littered with the remains of species that have failed to acquire one or more mechanisms for accurately determining the beneficial or harmful potential of environmental stimuli. (77) Therefore, the approach-withdraw behaviour presents itself as a paradigm well suited to reproduce the most natural human reactions throughout evolutionary and embodied experiments. Moreover, it allows us to run the same task among different cultures and species with minimal instructions and maximal reproducibility. 3) The most basic mechanisms of approach and avoidance are fast and automatic. These attributes are also characteristic in unconditioned reflexes and likely have a special significance in the process of survival. The approachavoidance mechanisms could be a small sophistication of these reflexes, allowing other mechanisms of the same organism to interact with them or even interrupt them. That is, they would be the first step to elude the rigidity of these reflexes and grant the organism more behavioural flexibility. Flexibility that some organisms would develop throughout their evolutive process. The ultimate expression of this flexibility would be the complex human cognition. However, as Johnson (2008) proposes and the general embodied approach argues, this complex cognition would have been built upon simpler

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s­ensorimotor mechanisms. In accordance with this argument, it would be appropriate to analyse the more sophisticated cognitive mechanisms based on these simpler sensorimotor behaviours such as the approach-avoidance one. 4) There is evidence of the existence of separate approach and avoidance systems in the brain. This evidence comes from research in subcortical (Cacioppo, Gardner, and Berntson 1999) along with cortical systems (Davidson 1995). This neurological division underlines and underlies the relevance of the two elemental behaviours in the cognitive system. 5) The distinction between approach and avoidance behaviour is highly intuitive. Using this framework in the experimental field, it is easy to design a scenario in which the participant has to decide between a response that will simulate approaching to the stimulus and another that will simulate withdrawing from it; thus, not requiring the understanding of complex cognitive concepts. In summary, our approach-avoidance paradigm offers an original and wellmotivated way to study perceptual preferences, in a way that makes possible comparative and cross-cultural research. 5

A Cross-Cultural Study

With these procedural assumptions in mind, and seeking to test the universality of the phenomenon of preference for curvature, we designed an experimental procedure based on the approach-avoidance paradigm, so it could be applied in different cultures and species. In order to reduce instructions to the minimum possible, we devised a two-alternative forced choice (2afc), so the participant—be it human or not—didn’t have to evaluate, but to simply select one between two options. For this, we prepared pairs of stimuli, selected among those previously employed by Bar and Neta (2006), trying to include objects that wouldn’t be too strange to non-western cultures (see Figure 1 as an example). These target pairs consisted of two images depicting the very same objects (baskets, buckets, cones, etc.), one of them of curved contour and the other of sharp one. This set was complemented with another one consisting of 36 pairs of distractor stimuli: objects matching in their overall contour, but conveying different semantic meanings. Furthermore, in order to avoid possible bias due to lateralization, two blocks consisting of the same pairs of images each were constructed: so in one of them half of the images would appear on one side of the screen, while in the other block they would be shown on the opposite side.

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figure 1.1 Pair of target stimuli employed in our research. These images of everyday real objects were first employed by Bar and Neta (2006).

The order of both blocks was randomised, as it was the order of the set of trials that conformed each of them. So we could make the task fully comparable to the one that other primates would perform, human participants were given very simple instructions: they were informed that they would be shown pairs of images on screen, their task consisting in choosing one of them by using the keyboard arrows, so the selected image would be shown once again enlarged. In this way we tried to replicate the effect of choosing to approach the object. As stated, this design allowed us to replicate an almost similar experiment with apes; the main difference being they used a touch screen to select the images, and being randomly rewarded 50% of the trials, whatever their response, so that they would stay interested. So far, we have run this experimental design with two human samples: one consisting of students from the University of the Balearic Islands, and the other comprising participants from Ghana. While the students carried out the task in an isolated laboratory, the Ghanaians did it in an enclosed space free from distracting stimuli. In both groups, curved objects were chosen with a higher proportion, in a manner that was significant among Spaniards, but only a strong trend among Ghanaians. However, when the results for the first and the second blocks were treated independently, we found that Ghanaians did indeed share the preference for curved contours in a very significant manner. Our experimenter in Ghana reported that the participants paid less attention during the latter part of the test, something that was confirmed by a high increase in the reaction time when the second block of stimuli was presented; a loss of attention that could be attributed to the lack of familiarity with this kind of tasks for the participants, among other cultural and environmental differences. All in all, these preliminary results point out a universal effect that demands further research in different populations. Exploratory analysis of the data

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obtained in a recent work with chimpanzees and gorillas, together with our latest results from Mexico seem to support this idea, showing a strongly significant trend of preference for curvature across different human cultures and different primate species. While our work is still in progress, we feel confident to suggest that perceptual preferences, such as that of curvature can be seen as elements of phylogenetic continuity in the appearance of our aesthetic capacity, constituting the roots of aesthetics. 6 Conclusion In this chapter, we have sought to present an experimental approach directed to untangle the roots of aesthetics that takes in account the embodied dimension of human cognition, and allows research into its evolutionary origin, given that it is well suited for cross-cultural and comparative research. We believe that aesthetics should be considered as a trait that emerged as a distinctive set of answers to specific environmental requirements; answers that cannot be understood without relating them to the stimuli and environments that favoured their appearance. As Johnson claims, aesthetics must not be narrowly construed as the study of the art, but the study of the human capacity to make and experience meaning, and basic preferences constitute its starting point. Thus, in accordance with Dewey’s principle of continuity, our so-called higher cognitive faculties recruit cognitive resources that operate in our sensorimotor experience and our monitoring of emotions, at the same level that the most basic aesthetic processes are working, so that preconscious meaning underlies our higher-level faculties of thought and communication. We have shown an example of how a research programme like this can be implemented. However, it could be argued that such a model should be improved in order to achieve a higher degree of ecological validity. This could be accomplished through the use of other kinds of stimuli that would better replicate a scenario of approach-avoidance, such as three-dimensional objects in movement, scenarios with a relevant context, simulations of the distance to the object, or the use of real objects. Similarly, other means of response input such as the use of a joystick, virtual reality, or simply allowing the participants to move freely, might also improve on ecological validity. Such an increase in the ecological aspects of the task should result in an augment of the examined effect. Thus, by employing effect size statistics together with other well-suited procedures, we could test one of the principal premises of the embodied approach: that the particular effect is stronger in the actual situation that gave rise to its emergence and it is weakened in other situations,

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according to the influence magnitude of other factors. In this way, it would be possible to test a hypothesis about the evolutionary origin of a particular effect, while identifying the kind of situation in which it might trigger cognitive and behavioural responses. Our proposal can be applied to the basic perceptual preferences as answers to specific environmental requirements that probably gave rise to what we have ended up calling aesthetics. We have started to apply it to the visual preference for rounded shapes against sharp-angled ones. We got results that indicate that this preference could be universal, and some data that the primates could also show this preference. After establishing the universality and ancient origin of the preference for curvature, we want to explore the different hypotheses that have been proposed to explain said preference. According to what we have discussed so far, this could be achieved by modifying the contextual cues of the test in an ecologically relevant manner. One way of doing this would be priming participants with threatening stimuli, before presenting them with a pair of images only varying in contour. We would expect them to seek the source of the menace, and therefore, if the threat hypothesis is correct, their pupils should first fixate on the sharp stimulus. In this manner, variations in the stimuli used and the cultures and species tested would help us shed light on the evolutionary origin of the preference. A different line of research dealing with this basic visual preference would lead us to test whether it might be related to similar effects in other sensory systems, such as hearing and touch. While the preference for curvature has been usually addressed from a visual perspective, Martina Jakesch and ClausChristian Carbon (2011) documented a clear preference for curved objects in the domain of haptics. It could be that these visual and haptic preferences have a common origin, maybe one being a consequence of the other; a matter that should be solved empirically. On the other hand and following Dewey’s principle of continuity, it will also be interesting to study if these preferences could be recruited for higher cognitive consequences, as some instances in language could show: ‘well rounded’, ‘sharp practice’, ‘come round’, ‘a short sharp shock’, ‘the sharp end’, and sharp as quite not honest. Finally, we would like to believe that, beyond its theoretical relevance, this program could lead to results in applied research. Finding the conditions in which this preference works and the factors that interact with it would be of great value for art, advertising and other applied fields. Good examples of this are the research of Westerman et al. (2012) in marketing and of Vartanian et al. (2013) in architecture; in both studies a preference for curvature was found. These studies show how an applied approach can be relevant to professionals and cognitive researchers alike.

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This way and despite some limitations of our approach, we contend that it offers a promising way to understand the roots of aesthetics, and to uncover the elements of continuity and novelty that make aesthetics one of the most salient human apomorphies. Acknowledgements This work was supported by grant ffi2010–20759 from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Spanish Government). References Bar, Moshe, and Maital Neta. 2006. “Humans Prefer Curved Visual Objects.” Psychological Science 17 (8):645–48. doi:10.1111/j.1467–9280.2006.01759.x. http://www .ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16913943 ―――. 2007. “Visual Elements of Subjective Preference Modulate Amygdala Activation.” Neuropsychologia 45:2191–2200. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.03 .008. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17462678 Bertamini, Marco, Alexis Makin, and Anna Pecchinenda. 2013. “Testing Whether and When Abstract Symmetric Patterns Produce Affective Responses.” PloS One 21. http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0068403 Bimler, David L., John Kirkland, and Kimberly A. Jameson. 2004. “Quantifying Variations in Personal Color Spaces: Are There Sex Differences in Color Vision?” Color Research & Application 29 (2):128–34. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ col.10232/abstract Bornstein, Marc H., Kay Ferdinandsen, and Charles G. Gross. 1981. “Perception of Symmetry in Infancy.” Developmental Psychology 17 (1):82–86. http://psycnet.apa .org/journals/dev/17/1/82/ Cacioppo, John T., Wendi L. Gardner, and Gary G. Berntson. 1999. “The Affect System Has Parallel and Integrative Processing Components: Form Follows Function.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76 (5):839–55. http://psycnet.apa.org/ journals/psp/76/5/839/ Carbon, Claus-Christian. 2010. “The Cycle of Preference: Long-Term Dynamics of Aesthetic Appreciation.” Acta Psychologica 134 (2):233–44. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2010 .02.004. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20236624 Cela-Conde, Camilo J., Francisco J. Ayala, Enric Munar, Fernando Maestú, Marcos Nadal, Miguel A. Capó, David del Río, Juan J. López-Ibor, Tomás Ortiz, Claudio Mirasso, and Gisèle Marty. 2009. “Sex-Related Similarities and Differences in the

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Neural Correlates of Beauty.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106:3847–52. doi:10.1073/pnas.0900304106 Cela-Conde, Camilo J., Juan García-Prieto, José J. Ramasco, Claudio R. Mirasso, Ricardo Bajo, Enric Munar, Albert Flexas, Francisco del-Pozo, and Fernando Maestú. 2013. “Dynamics of Brain Networks in the Aesthetic Appreciation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110 (Suppl): 10454–61. doi:10.1073/pnas.1302855110.  http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/06/ 04/1302855110.short Cela-Conde, Camilo J., Gisèle Marty, Fernando Maestú, Tomás Ortiz, Enric Munar, Alberto Fernández, Miquel Roca, Jaume Rosselló, and Felipe Quesney. 2004. “Activation of the Prefrontal Cortex in the Human Visual Aesthetic Perception.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101:6321–25. doi:10.1073/pnas.0401427101 Davidson, Richard J. 1995. “Cerebral Asymmetry, Emotion, and Affective Style.” In Brain Asymmetry, edited by Richard J. Davidson and Kenneth Hugdahl, 361–87. Cambridge, ma: The mit Press. Dewey, John. 1922. Human Nature and Conduct. Carbondale, il: Southern Illinois University Press. Elliot, Andrew J., and Martin V. Covington. 2001. “Approach and Avoidance Motivation.” Educational Psychology Review 13 (2):73–92. doi:10.1023/A:1009009018235. http://www .scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0–0035625841&partnerid=40&md5=d3e4 65a5831c61af87ef246880c479f1 Enquist, Magnus, and Anthony Arak. 1994. “Symmetry, Beauty and Evolution.” Nature 372:169–72. doi:10.1038/372169a0 Greene, Katherine S., and Malcolm D. Gynther. 1995. “Blue Versus Periwinkle: Color Identification and Gender.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 80:27–32. doi:10.2466/pms .1995.80.1.27 Guthrie, Gerald, and Morton Wiener. 1966. “Subliminal Perception or Perception of Partial Cue with Pictorial Stimuli.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 3 (6):619–28. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/5938997 Hevner, Kate. 1935. “Experimental Studies of the Affective Value of Colors and Lines.” Journal of Applied Psychology 19 (4):385. Hodgson, Derek. 2011. “The First Appearance of Symmetry in the Human Lineage: Where Perception Meets Art.” Symmetry. doi:10.3390/sym3010037 Humphrey, Diane. 1997. “Preferences in Symmetries and Symmetries in Drawings: Asymmetries Between Ages and Sexes.” Empirical Studies of the Arts 15 (1):41–60. Hurlbert, Anya C., and Yazhu Ling. 2007. “Biological Components of Sex Differences in Color Preference.” Current Biology 17:R623–R625. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2007.06.022 Jakesch, Martina and Claus-Christian Carbon. 2011. “Humans Prefer Curved Objects on Basis of Haptic Evaluation.” Perception 40:219.

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Johnson, Mark. 2008. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. ―――. 2012. “There is no moral faculty.” Philosophical Psychology 25 (3):409–32. Jones, Benedict C., Anthony C. Little, Ian S. Penton-Voak, Bernard P. Tiddeman, D. Michael Burt, and David I. Perrett. 2001. “Facial Symmetry and Judgements of Apparent Health: Support for a ‘Good Genes’ Explanation of the Attractiveness—symmetry Relationship.” Evolution and Human Behavior 22:417–29. doi:10.1016/S1090-5138(01) 00083-6 Kawabata, Hideaki, and Semir Zeki. 2004. “Neural Correlates of Beauty.” Journal of Neurophysiology 91:1699–1705. doi:10.1152/jn.00696.2003 Latto, Richard. 1995. “The Brain of the Beholder.” In The Artful Eye, edited by Richard L. Gregory, John Harris, Priscilla Heard, and David Rose, 66–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leder, Helmut, Pablo P.L. Tinio, and Moshe Bar. 2011. “Emotional Valence Modulates the Preference for Curved Objects.” Perception 40 (6):649–55. doi:10.1068/p6845. http://www.perceptionweb.com/abstract.cgi?id=p6845 McManus, I. Chris, A.L. Jones, and J. Cottrell. 1981. “The Aesthetics of Color.” Perception 10 (6):651–66. Møller, Anders P., and Randy Thornhill. 1998. “Bilateral Symmetry and Sexual Selection: A Meta-Analysis.” The American Naturalist 151:174–92. doi:10.1086/286110 Munar, Enric, Marcos Nadal, Jaume Rosselló, Albert Flexas, Stephan Moratti, Fernando Maestú, Gisèle Marty, and Camilo J. Cela-Conde. 2012a. “Lateral Orbitofrontal Cortex Involvement in Initial Negative Aesthetic Impression Formation.” PLoS one. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0038152 Munar, Enric, Marcos Nadal, Nazareth P. Castellanos, Albert Flexas, Fernando Maestú, Claudio Mirasso, and Camilo J. Cela-Conde. 2012b. “Aesthetic Appreciation: EventRelated Field and Time-Frequency Analyses.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2011.00185 Nadal, Marcos, Miguel-Angel Capo, Enric Munar, and Camilo-Jose Cela-Conde. 2009. “The Evolution of Aesthetic Appreciation.” Estudios de Psicología 30:3–20. Poffenberger, A.T., and B.E. Barrows. 1924. “The Feeling Value of Lines.” Journal of Applied Psychology 8:187–205. doi:10.1037/h0073513 Reber, Rolf. 2002. “Reasons for the Preference for Symmetry.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25:415–16. doi:10.1017/S0140525X02350076 Rhodes, Gillian, Fiona Proffitt, Jonathon M. Grady, and Alex Sumich. 1998. “Facial Symmetry and the Perception of Beauty.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 5:659–69. doi:10.3758/BF03208842 Schneirla, Theodore C. 1965. “Aspects of Stimulation and Organization in Approach/ withdrawal Processes Underlying Vertebrate Behavioral Development.” Advances in the Study of Behavior 1:1–74.

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Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. 1990. “The Past Explains the Present : Emotional Adaptations and the Structure of Ancestral Environments.” Ethology and Sociobiology 11:375–424. doi:10.1016/0162–3095(90)90017-Z. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ article/B6X2B-45xsnt0-3F/2/e4e15cb10456ef2fa163da81d26ff6e0 Tovée, Martin J., K. Tasker, and P.J. Benson. 2000. “Is Symmetry a Visual Cue to Attractiveness in the Human Female Body?” Evolution and Human Behavior 21:191–200. doi:10.1016/S1090-5138(00)00040-4 Vartanian, Oshin, and Vinod Goel. 2004. “Neuroanatomical Correlates of Aesthetic Preference for Paintings.” Neuroreport 15:893–97. doi:10.1097/00001756-20040409000032 Vartanian, Oshin, Gorka Navarrete, Anjan Chatterjee, Lars Brorson Fich, Helmut Leder, Cristián Modroño, Marcos Nadal, Nicolai Rostrup, and Martin Skov. 2013. “Impact of Contour on Aesthetic Judgments and Approach-Avoidance Decisions in Architecture.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110 (Suppl):10446–53. doi:10.1073/pnas.1301227110. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ articlerender.fcgi?artid=3690611&tool=pmcentrez&rendertype=abstract Westerman, Steve J., Peter H. Gardner, Ed J. Sutherland, Tom White, Katie Jordan, and Sophie Wells. 2012. “Product Design: Preference for Rounded Versus Angular Design Elements.” 29:595–605. doi:10.1002/mar Winch, W.H. 1909. “Colour Preference of School Children.” British Journal of Psychology 3:42–65.

CHAPTER 2

A Neuro-Evolutionary Mechanism for Aesthetic Phenomenology Joshua Fost 1 Introduction Recent studies clarify the brain mechanisms of aesthetic phenomenology. Many of these have used fmri to identify foci differentially activated when subjects make aesthetic judgments (Bohrn et al., 2013; Jacobsen et al., 2006; Nadal & Pearce, 2011; Nadal et al., 2008). The foci involved vary with modality: visual aesthetic judgments involve visual areas, musical judgments involve auditory areas, sensorimotor judgments (e.g. of dance) involve motor planning and proprioceptive areas. Brain areas responsible for reward, including the ventral tegmental area and ventral striatum, are commonly activated. Although these studies make important contributions, they do not go very far in elucidating neural mechanisms. To put it bluntly, we ought to know a priori that a sound perceived as pleasant will activate both auditory and reward circuits: given the functions that those circuits play in the brain, activating those circuits is what it is to be a pleasant sound. The more fundamental question, and one whose answer will get us closer to understanding the mechanisms and origins of aesthetic experience, is why some sounds but not others activate reward centers. In the words of (Chatterjee, 2010), “researchers need to move beyond mere localization of brain areas engaged in such experiences to produce a dynamic view of [aesthetic] neural processes.” My aim in this paper is to elucidate a hypothesis concerning the neural mechanisms of aesthetic phenomenology. I will try to answer the question just posed: What is it about the neural activity induced by some stimuli that makes the associated states aesthetic? The mechanism I propose is modality independent, applying equally well to the beauty of a painting, face, sonata, or theorem. It includes an argument concerning adaptive value and so aims also to explain the evolutionary origins of aesthetic psychology. Since the original publication of these ideas (Fost, 1999), the empirical landscape has changed somewhat and the large volume of relevant literature makes it difficult to determine how well supported the hypothesis is overall, but I hope to persuade the reader that the core processes I’ll discuss deserve from neuroaesthetic theorists more attention than they have heretofore received. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004281516_004

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The present work is informed by three observations: (a) Some drugs elicit aesthetic experiences; (b) some neuropsychiatric disorders seem to have an aesthetic component.; and (c) some aesthetic experiences are conceptual, not perceptual. I also borrow a methodological assumption from evolutionary psychology, namely that durable psychological traits are either adaptive themselves or side-effects of something that is adaptive. Reorganizing and reframing these observations gives the following statement of motivation: It seems to me obvious that the psychological state thatis-beautiful (I will refer throughout the paper to that state as the aesthetic experience) reaches beyond the arts, in particular well beyond the bastions of fine art. What, if anything, do all aesthetic experiences have in common? What is the adaptive value of neuropsychological machinery that underlies that core aesthetic experience—or, if aesthetic phenomenology is a spandrel, what evolutionary adaptation gave rise to it? Finally, can we learn anything from drugand disorder-induced phenomenology to help answer these questions? 2

Gaps in Current Accounts

The imaging studies mentioned above do not by any means exhaust the state of the literature. Indeed a growing body of aesthetic theory proposes psychological (though rarely neural) mechanisms to explain why the perceptual and cognitive features of aesthetic stimuli evoke hedonic responses. The theories in this collection share a view that might be summarized as follows: Beauty is the cognitive / emotional experience induced when surprise gives way to understanding. In this collection I would place Hekkert’s novelty-typicality theory (Hekkert et al., 2003); Winkielman’s fluency theory (Winkielman et al., 2006); Schmidhuber’s curiosity-reward theory (Schmidhuber, 2006); the prototypicality theories of Langlois (Rubenstein et al., 2002), Whitfield & Slatter (Whitfield & Slatter, 1979), Martindale (Martindale, 2001), and Smith & Melara (Smith & Melara, 1990); and Ramachandran & Hirstein’s “chunking” theory (Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999). What these theories share, in other words, is the view that the mechanisms of aesthetic phenomenology include the processes by which a perceiver recognizes that a novel and interesting experience is somehow exemplary of a pattern they already understand. Moreover, these processes are assumed to be evolutionarily adaptive. Let me unpack that. For most animals most of the time, uncategorizeable, unpredictable environments are dangerous. Consequently, perceptual systems have evolved to include attentional mechanisms whose main purpose is to collect the information needed to reliably recognize specific stimuli and patterns of circumstances. This process cannot be hedonically neutral, else animals would be as

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likely to look away from a rustle in the grass that might be a lion as to open their eyes wider and direct their ears toward it. Of course a recognized stimulus may have any emotional valence at all (“Ah, chocolate!” vs. “Oh no, a lion”) but the act of recognition must in itself be slightly rewarding. Let’s call that phenomenon the first-order categorization benefit (focb). The circuit underlying the focb is but one component of a larger aesthetic mechanism, but before continuing to build that, let me note that by itself it can explain two important aesthetic phenomena, namely the mere exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968) and the prototypicality effects described in some of the theories just mentioned. When an animal encounters a novel stimulus, there is no match to anything in memory, so it is unrecognizable and yields no focb. With repeated exposures, however, a memory develops. The strengthening of the memory and the increased probability of recognition yields reward through the focb. This is the mere exposure effect. Now suppose the stimulus in one instance is atypical. The match to memory being less robust, classificatory confidence drops: this might be a poor example of a familiar stimulus class or an altogether new thing. The magnitude of the reward associated with the focb will be correspondingly decreased. If, on the other hand, the stimulus presentation is exemplary, that is to say prototypical, then it will be easily recognized and yield more reward. This is the prototypicality effect. To understand both these effects, then, we need posit only an evolved neural mechanism that causes match-to-memory—which presumably takes place in the cortex—to activate reward circuitry—presumably in structures like the ventral tegmentum and nucleus accumbens. Obviously this is just a sketch, and more mechanistic detail would be useful. Moreover, there is more to aesthetic experience than mere exposure and prototypicality. As the paper proceeds I hope to clarify, to some extent, both of those issues. One of the most telling features of aesthetic experiences is that they can be induced by stimuli that seem at least prima facie evolutionarily neutral. To be sure, some of the traditional domains of the aesthetic have clear biological connections: the beauty of the human form (in portraiture, sculpture, dance) depends in part on assessments of reproductive partnership and physical fitness, the beauty of landscapes might be understood in terms of suitable human habitat (Orians & Heerwagen, 1992), and perhaps the beauty of some still-life paintings or artifacts might be understood in terms of the nutritive, comfortgiving, and/or status-indicating properties of their subjects. Music might be an example of a domain with less obvious evolutionary factors, though there are good arguments there too (Levitin, 2006), such as the theory that synchronized group performances facilitate social cohesion, that musical creativity

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both promotes and signals cognitive health and therefore (again) a good basis for mate selection, or that it builds on psychological mechanisms that arose to facilitate mother-infant bonding (Dissanayake, 2009). Extant theories have used all these Darwinian forces to explain the origins of aesthetic psychology— see Table 2.1 for a summary. One problem with these theories, however, is that most of them are domain-limited: it is difficult to extend an account that trades on forces in mate selection to include, let us say, the fact that trees and mobile phone interfaces can be beautiful. Some aesthetic stimuli and domains are amorphous and/or unbounded: poetry, for example, can certainly produce aesthetic experiences, but its subject matter has no limit. Rhythm and rhyme matter there, as do graceful and poignant expression, but how does this work? The beauty that a mathematician or physicist may see in a theorem or law of nature is even more abstract, and one strains to see how a specific capacity for that appreciation could have figured into the survival of our Pleistocene ancestors. Even some rather inclusive process-based theories, such as Leder’s (2013) model, leave much to be desired in explaining the beautiful but not conventionally artistic objects of our attention. And again, how (neurophysiologically) and why (evolutionarily) do psychological phenomena like those Leder invokes—things like memory integration, classification, cognitive mastery, etc.—generate reward signals? Examples like these illuminate the need for deeper, more domain-independent process theories. Probably the most powerful of these are theories of optimal representation and action, such as the “free energy theory” of Karl Friston (Friston, 2010; Friston et al., 2012). The idea here is that we are evolutionarily required to have decent generative models of the world, but the neural implementation of those models carries temporal and metabolic expenses. Optimal representations, in the face of that tradeoff, are possible when the stimulus is highly compressible either because of redundant internal structure or because the perceiver can leverage prior representations. Friston does not direct his theory to aesthetics specifically, but Wiesmann & Ishai (2011), offer a bridge to it in their report that expert architects are able to detect buildings more quickly and perceptually encode them with fewer neurons. On this view, expertise in any field is constituted by the metabolically-driven development and deployment of efficient representations. Promising though this proposal may be, the free energy principle endeavors to explain what the brain is doing, not how it is doing it, so the domain-independent neural mechanisms and processes that are the goal of the present inquiry remain unknown. So much for gaps in current theories: the domains are too specific and the proposed neural mechanisms are not specific enough. As a first step toward a

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hypothesis that remedies these problems I will now turn to the first of several promising lines of evidence, i.e. neurochemistry and the aesthetic features of certain recreational drugs. table 2.1  Summary of evolutionary theories of aesthetic function. Evolutionary benefit

Domain

Summary

Mate selection

Human form, music

Suitable habitat

Landscapes

Group cohesion

Music, dance

Mother-infant bonding

Poetry, music, dance, ritual, symbolic art

Minimize neural metabolic cost

All

Minimize behavioral risk

All

Average morphology & clear complexion indicate health. Muscle tone indicates health & provider capabilities. Creativity indicates cognitive health. Sexually dimorphic traits may be subject to peak shift effects. We need psychological dispositions toward suitable habitats, so those with all requirements (water, shelter, food, etc.) will evoke positive emotions. Activities fostering communal participation and coherence are advantageous, so will be rewarding. Stereotyped, repetitive, exaggerated interactions elicit affirmative responses from one’s parent or child. That affirmation is rewarding, thereby strengthening the evolutionarily advantageous bond. Neural activity is energetically expensive. Prototypical and familiar stimuli can be encoded efficiently; exposure to them is thereby preferred. Familiar and predictable stimuli are by definition safe—we encounter them often and are still alive. Thus we evolved a preference for high familiarity & predictability.

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Pharmacological Aesthetics

There are at least three drugs that elicit experiences people freely describe in aesthetic terms. These are psilocybin (the primary psychoactive compound in “magic mushrooms”), lsd, and mdma (“ecstasy”). All three have complex biological activities but their primary means of producing psychological, especially perceptual and emotional aesthetic effects involve the neurotransmitter serotonin (5-ht) and its receptors (J.L. Moreno et al., 2012; J.L. Moreno et al., 2011; Aghajanian & Marek, 1999). Anecdotal phenomenological accounts of these drugs are plentiful, but scientific study has been scarce until recently. MacLean et al. (2011) found that high-dose psilocybin increased subjects’ ratings on the neo Personality Inventory factor “Openness,” which includes an aesthetic facet measured by subjects’ agreement with statements like “I am intrigued by patterns I find in art and nature.” The authors cite McGlothlin et al. (1967) as having obtained a similar result with lsd. Griffiths et al. (2006) found that subjects receiving psilocybin (but not those receiving methylphenidate, which increases arousal and mood) reported effects on perception, mood lability, and cognition. These reports included feelings of transcendence, joy, a sense of meaning or reference, and visual hallucinations and synaesthesias. The findings of Studerus et al. (2011) were consistent with those of Griffiths, and included psilocybin dose-dependent changes in perception, mood, and cognition. The most prominent reports were of changes in visual experience (hallucinations, synaesthesia), altered meanings, and emotionally positive and negative experiences of altered self-awareness and ego-boundaries. mdma has more diverse pharmacological effects, particularly with respect to norepinephrine and dopamine, than psilocybin and lsd. It also differs phenomenologically, and its well-known pro-social effects may have little to do with aesthetic circuitry. These complications will be important in the telling of mdma’s whole story, but for my purposes mdma’s most provocative feature is its close ties with music-induced euphoria. One measure of this link is the finding that between 80–95% of dancers (in the sense of club dancing, not performance art), but only 5–15% of young people in general, report using mdma (Parrott, 2004). It should be noted that the musical genre favored by mdma users is “house” music with prominent rhythmic structures. While it is plausible that the generally loud and active environment of a dance club is what interacts with the mechanisms by which mdma produces its euphorigenic effects, it may be more likely that it is rhythmic music per se, not just brute arousal, that is responsible. In rats, mdma-induced reward (as measured by dopamine and serotonin release in the nucleus accumbens) is facilitated by exposure to rhythmic music but not equally loud white noise (Feduccia

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& Duvauchelle, 2008). I will clarify later why I think rhythm is functionally relevant; for the moment suffice to say that it relates to endogenous neural rhythms that underlie normal, non-drug-induced perceptual and mnemonic experiences. It would probably be taking things too far to say that the drugs mentioned here reproduce in fine detail the experiences categorized as aesthetic in ordinary life. But they seem to capture some of the most salient features of the thatis-beautiful state, viz. a hedonic perceptual or conceptual experience saturated with meaning. The three-way Venn diagram for the pharmacology of these drugs points clearly to serotonin, particularly the 5-ht2A receptor. Serotonin is further implicated, though admittedly somewhat obliquely, by studies of the relationship between measures of personality that track a propensity for “oceanic” and symbolically significant emotional experiences. Borg et al. (2003) found that 5-ht1A receptor density correlated inversely with “spiritual zeal.” This receptor inhibits 5-ht release, so lower levels of 5-ht1A receptors mean higher levels of synaptic serotonin and more oceanic / symbolic phenomenology. Relatedly, Hamer (2004) claimed that variation in the vmat2 gene, which transports serotonin and other neurotransmitters, explained a small portion of the variation in personality measures of “self-transcendence.” These are interesting results, but caution is warranted: the relationship between spiritual / religious-like and aesthetic experiences is complex, the evidence in these two cases is a bit soft, and others have argued that it is dopamine, not serotonin, that plays the larger role in spiritual/religious dispositions—see Previc (2006) for a review. For now I hope to have established a prima facie case for serotonin’s involvement in aesthetic phenomenology. A few more pieces are required before I can explain how serotonin fits into the broader hypothesized mechanism. 4

Cortical Oscillations

A famous problem in cognitive neuroscience is how neural ensembles coordinate their activity so as to encode complex representations. This is the binding problem. In the last twenty five years, good evidence has accumulated that synchronous neural oscillations comprise one of the key elements of a solution to this problem (see Ward (2003) for a review); indeed, oscillations in different eeg frequency bands appear to play important roles in a suite of core cognitive functions. For example, oscillations in the theta band (3.5–7 Hz) have been implicated in mnemonic processes, while the alpha band (8–13 Hz) is associated with attention and the gamma band (30–70 Hz) with perceptual

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COMPLEX PERCEPT (requires more attention)

SIMPLE PERCEPT background features set of

γ-bound

features

figure 2.1 Gamma-band oscillations (indicated by dashed circles) are used as “representational glue.” More complex percepts consist of greater numbers of gamma-bound partial representations.

coherence. Although these are all important in aesthetic functioning, I will focus on gamma and theta. When the perceptual system successfully parses inputs into coherent objects, gamma power increases: that is, increased numbers of neurons fire synchronous spikes at frequencies in the gamma band. Particular evidence for this comes from studies of perceptual closure in Mooney faces (Grutzner et al., 2010), perception of facial Gestalts (Keil et al., 1999) or a perceived human figure assembled from a set of disconnected points (Pavlova, 2004), perception of coherent auditory objects (Knief et al., 2000), and indeed in perception of coherent content regardless of modality (Tallon-Baudry & Bertrand, 1999). This “perceptual chunking” is important for survival, as animals must parse sensory input streams before other functions like categorization can occur. Thus one might suppose that there would have been an evolutionary advantage to a neuropsychological mechanism that made the chunking process rewarding. This would encourage perceivers to act so as to the facilitate chunking process, e.g. by orienting sensory apparatus so as to perceive more of an incomplete stimulus, dedicating attentional resources to subsets of the perceptual field, or spending more time around stimuli that could be successfully chunked. Reasoning along these lines, Fost (1999) and Ramachandran & Hirstein (1999) proposed that, inasmuch as cortical synchrony in the form of gamma oscillations may be the signal of successful chunking, perhaps synchrony itself is what allows a sensory signal to activate reward systems. That is, perhaps there is a neural circuit that makes the synchrony accompanying cortical ­oscillations

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Fost MEMORY

WORLD

Strong match

Weak match

Top-down influence

“Missing” features SENSATION PERCEPTION figure 2.2 Key steps in perceptual chunking. A partially occluded stimulus (curvy, dark grey, top left) activates a representation in early sensory processing areas. This gives rise to a gamma-bound perceptual ensemble consisting of all the percept features (dashed circle, bottom center). Pattern recognition machinery identifies the best match in memory; this gives rise to a second gamma- and theta-bound ensemble consisting of the whole percept and the memory (dashed capsule, center).

rewarding. One behavioral consequence of such a circuit is that animals with it would experience pleasure when their perceptual streams could be successfully parsed, so the genetic configuration that builds this ostensible circuit would confer evolutionary advantage. This hypothetical mechanism can help explain other aesthetic findings because as mentioned above, cortical oscillations appear in other aspects of perception and cognition—not just perceptual chunking. For example, gamma, theta, and alpha oscillations are increased when a perceptual representation has a match in memory (Burgess & Ali, 2002; Gruber et al., 2008; Herrmann et al., 2004; Mima et al., 2001). An animal with an oscillation →→ reward circuit might thereby experience familiar percepts as more rewarding than unfamiliar ones—rewarding, that is, at least until they are categorized under the focb. The category itself may have arbitrary emotional valence (cf. the earlier chocolate vs. lion example). This is a somewhat more detailed proposal for the neural basis of mere exposure and prototypicality effects.

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Figures 2.1 and 2.2 summarize the argument so far and illustrate that cortical oscillations may result from either perceptual or mnemonic binding. There are broader possibilities, however. Whenever two or more neural ensembles synchronize their activity in an oscillatory pattern, this will, under the present hypothesis, activate reward systems. Synchronization could occur if the perceiver imagined something (activating one representation) and then actually experienced something similar (activating another, similar representation). Cross & Ticini (2012) offer a model consistent with this proposal by suggesting “resonance” between imagery and observation as a possible basis for the aesthetic experience of dance. The evolutionary value of such a circuit might be understood as a reward system based on a perceiver’s ability to predict world events, i.e. based on the quality of their mental models. When the model is good, there will be strong correspondence, and therefore strong binding, between the neural ensemble representing the predicted state and observed states. Gamma or theta power, in such a case, would be inversely related to the size of the error signal. A challenge for this proposal comes from Pearce & Wiggins (2006) and Pearce et al. (2010), who offer an empirically-driven model of music perception in which listeners compare what they hear to internally-generated expectations of rhythm, meter, tone, etc. When the two are not in good agreement, i.e. when the heard music violates listener expectations, oscillations in the beta band (14–30 Hz, just slower than gamma) increase. Although this result concerns beta, not gamma oscillations, it is a potential difficulty for the present hypothesis. One possible response is that beta and gamma play functionally distinct roles—and Pearce et al. point this out explicitly. Another answer, indirectly suggested by Pearce et al., is that the violation of expectation calls for some sort of action on the listener’s part, and it is the recruitment of distal action-encoding representations that accounts for the increase in beta power. Finally, one might appeal to more direct studies of gamma and music perception, such as Bhattacharya & Petsche (2005), who found that gamma is increased (but beta is unchanged) when professional musicians but not nonmusicians listen to music. (In a related study, Bhattacharya & Petsche (2002) found that gamma oscillations are increased when artists but not non-artists look at paintings.) In any case, these are just provisional explanations and a fuller account of the relative roles of beta and gamma (and theta and alpha, for that matter) awaits future work. Most of the aforementioned studies probed brain processes in aesthetic perception indirectly, but several have investigated them head-on. For example, Munar et al. (2012) measured subjects’ eegs while showing them paintings in

28

Fost Unexpected High information Weak binding Low gamma power Low reward long term memory

(a) REPRESENTATION working memory

Center of mass = Prototype Expected Low information Strong binding High gamma power High reward

(c) Normal OCD / Autism

Cortical oscillatory power

Cortical oscillatory power

Reward center activation

(b)

+5-HT2a

Normal

Stimulus structure + familiarity

figure 2.3 More prototypical stimuli elicit stronger binding and higher power in some eeg frequency bands (esp. gamma and theta). This recruits reward circuits more effectively than less prototypical stimuli.

Realist, Impressionist and abstract styles, photographs of landscapes, artifacts, urban scenes, etc. They found that positive aesthetic experiences were associated with increased power in all four eeg frequency bands, the largest in theta and alpha. Lindsen et al. (2010) found that as subjects made aesthetic preference judgments for human faces, theta power rose in their left frontal lobe and gamma power rose in left-posterior regions. Sammler et al. (2007) found that theta power in frontal-midline regions was increased when subjects listened to “joyful instrumental dance tunes” but not versions of those same pieces modified to make them dissonant (other aspects of the composition, such as rhythm and meter, were unchanged). Finally, in connection with the earlier discussion of serotonin and spirituality, Lutz (2004) found that long-term Buddhist meditators focusing on the state of pure compassion (arguably a phenomenal state related to the aesthetic) self-induced elevated levels of gamma oscillation and cortical synchrony. Novice meditators showed no such effect.

A Neuro-evolutionary Mechanism For Aesthetic Phenomenology

(a)

(b)

29

Shared representation re-activated rhythmically

Partially overlapping cortical representations representation

=

Non-symmetrical stimulus

Symmetrical stimulus

= =

time

No shared representation for non-symmetric stimulus

figure 2.4 Symmetric stimuli increase the power of gamma oscillations because the representation of the stimulus “kernel” (that part of the stimulus that is copied through the symmetry operation) in one part of the stimulus overlaps with the representation of the kernel in another part. (a) Even though the two parts of the stimulus on the left are bound together in a single gamma ensemble, there is nothing shared in the representation of the left and right parts of the stimulus. On the right, the two parts of the stimulus are hypothesized to result in overlapping representations. (b) Plotting in an abstract representation space (y-axis) shows that the shared representation of the kernel is reactivated for symmetric, but not non-symmetric stimuli. Note that this mechanism applies not just to symmetric visual stimuli but also to any percept or concept with repeated internal structures.

A conservative conclusion incorporating the above results is that one of the neural markers of coherent, familiar, and aesthetic experiences may be an increase in cortical oscillations in several brain regions. By explaining what brain regions are doing when aesthetic phenomenology is in effect, this proposal helps push past the mere observation that a certain brain region is doing something. And because of cortical oscillations’ role in binding—itself a core neuro-cognitive process present in both non-aesthetic and aesthetic conditions—we can begin to conceive a hypothesis with both neural and evolutionary facets. The neural part is that cortical oscillations activate reward circuits (e.g. in the ventral tegmentum and nucleus accumbens). The more cells involved in the oscillations, and the more coherent those oscillations are, the stronger the reward-center activation will be (see Figures 2.3 and 2.4). The phenomenological effect of this circuit is that more familiar, more prototypical, more structured (e.g. symmetric, compressible), and more discriminable and coherent percepts and concepts will be more rewarding; this is the proposed basis for a variety of aesthetic experiences. The evolutionary part of the hypothesis is that this neural circuit is adaptive: it encourages perceivers to spend more time around objects and situations that they find intelligible,

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recognizable, and predictable. The hypothesis also offers a possible ­explanation for another curious feature of human behavior, namely the propensity to engage in rhythmic behaviors, even when these behaviors having nothing to do with social cohesion (e.g. rocking chairs, knee bouncing). The explanation is simply that in order to generate an oscillatory output, parts of the cortex must oscillate, and this activates the circuit just proposed. Unlike the evolutionary benefits of familiarity detection, however, this latter form of “empty” rhythmic behavior has no bearing on Darwinian fitness—it is a spandrel. (For a contrasting view, see Dissanayake (2009).) It remains to clarify how serotonin figures into this hypothetical circuit. This is the most uncertain part of the present model. One reasonably clear finding is that serotonin modulates cortical oscillations in various frequency bands. On one hand, stimulation of 5-ht2A receptors (e.g. with lsd) increases the coherence of cortical oscillations, while stimulation of 5-ht1A receptors weakens them (Abraham & Duffy, 2001; Puig & Gulledge, 2011). Moreover, this modulation tracks phenomenology: Frei et al. (2001) found that beta oscillations are generally increased following mdma administration, along with “increased emotional and sensory awareness, heightened mood but not euphoria.” On the other hand, serotonin itself decreases gamma in the prefrontal cortex (Puig & Gulledge, 2011) and subcortical areas (Cape & Jones, 1998). Psilocybin, too, may decrease cortical gamma (Páleníček (2011), cited in Carhart-Harris et al. (2012)). One reason for the complexity of the serotonergic story is the contrasting postsynaptic effects of the different receptors and the fact that most drugs interact with more than one receptor type. Another reason is the differential receptor densities across cortical layers, cell types, and even across different parts of individual neurons (Puig & Gulledge, 2011). .

5

Neuropsychiatric Disorders

In amelioration of some of this complexity, some clues about the intersections between serotonin, cortical oscillations, perceptual and mnemonic binding, and aesthetics come from the study of neuropsychiatric disorders, particularly obsessive-compulsive disorder (ocd) and autism. (See Table 2.2 for an index of the literature as it relates to these intersections.) Prevailing theories of ocd point to hyperactivity in the orbitofrontal cortex, possibly brought about by an increased activation of 5-ht2A receptors (Evans et al., 2004). The phenomenology of compulsions in ocd is that a behavior or sensation must be repeated, sometimes at great length, until it is “just right.” Failure to achieve this produces psychological distress. The autism spectrum includes similar and otherwise relevant behavioral symptoms: there are often

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31

table 2.2 Index of literature pertaining to relationships between serotonin, cortical oscillations, binding, and aesthetic experience.  

Serotonin

Perceptual & (Aghajanian & mnemonic Marek, 1999; Carhart-Harris binding et al., 2012; J.L. Moreno et al., 2012; José L. Moreno et al., 2011; Páleníček, 2011) Serotonin

n/a

Cortical oscillations

n/a

Cortical oscillations

Aesthetic phenomenology

(Behrendt, 2003; Burgess & Ali, 2002; Gruber et al., 2008; Grutzner et al., 2010; Herrmann et al., 2004; Keil et al., 1999; Mima et al., 2001; Pavlova, 2004; Pearce et al., 2010; Tallon-Baudry & Bertrand, 1999) (Abraham & Duffy, 2001; Cape & Jones, 1998; Heinemann et al., 2006; Lee & McCormick, 1996; Puig & Gulledge, 2011) n/a

(Hekkert et al., 2003; Martindale, 2001; Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999; Rubenstein et al., 2002; Smith & Melara, 1990; Whitfield & Slatter, 1979; Winkielman et al., 2002; Zeki, 1999) (Carter et al., 2011; Cook & Leventhal, 1996; Dougherty et al., 2013; F.A. Moreno et al., 2006)

(Bhattacharya & Petsche, 2002, 2005; Brock et al., 2002; Chugani, 2004; Dissanayake, 2009; Munar et al., 2012)

psychological pressures toward repetitive, ritualistic behaviors; the “savant” syndrome is sometimes directed at the obsessive production of artworks (for some discussion in this context see Chatterjee (2003) and Ramachandran & Hirstein (1999)); and autistic individuals may have diminished interest in novelty. Individuals with Williams syndrome, which is sometimes included in the autism spectrum, are notable for their enhanced enjoyment of and skills in music, especially rhythmic compositions (Levitin & Bellugi, 1998; Levitin et al., 2003). A knockout mouse model of Williams syndrome shows altered 5-ht function in prefrontal cortex (Proulx et al., 2010). Etiological theories and treatments of many of these symptoms have focused on the serotonergic system (Carter et al., 2011; Cook & Leventhal, 1996; Dougherty et al., 2013), and

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­ athological mechanisms of cortical binding have also been proposed as a p cause (Brock et al., 2002). Serotonin has also been implicated in the comorbidity of autism and seizure disorders (Chugani, 2004)—seizures being a pathological form of cortical oscillations. Knitting this together, we extend the hypothesis as follows. In ocd and autism, the cortical oscillations produced by everyday experience are insufficient to activate reward centers at typical levels. Due to this diminished reward, the person feels depressed and anxious. To assuage this, they engage in stereotyped, repetitive behaviors which precisely match prototypes stored in long-term memory. The elevated levels of cortical oscillations and synchrony produced by this match compensate for the decreased gain of the oscillation →→ reward circuit, and mood is normalized. Autistic savants focus on a narrow domain because as talent and expertise rise, they become increasingly able to generate behaviors and artifacts in tight registration with their conceptualizations. Treating these patients with serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitors (ssris), 5-ht2A agonists, or even psilocybin (F.A. Moreno et al., 2006) normalizes the gain of the oscillation →→ reward circuit, obviating the need to engage in stereotyped behaviors. I contend that in their obsession over “just-rightness,” ocd and autistic patients are, in effect, hyper-aesthetic. People without either of these disorders can engage in similar behaviors; the result there is overstrong neural oscillations and consequently elevated activation of reward centers. Under the proposed model, this is the basis for more typical aesthetic behaviors and phenomenology. The circuit that has gone wrong in ocd and autism is the same one that has been commandeered for opportunistic pleasure-seeking in healthy people, and it arose as an evolutionarily adaptive mechanism governing everyday perception and behavior. Whether this hypothesis hits the mark in all respects or not, it seems safe to say that serotonin and cortical oscillations may play important roles in aesthetic behavior and phenomenology. To the extent that these roles can be clarified, it will help advance finer-grained mechanistic explanations that remedy some of the weaknesses of brain locus-based models. References Abraham, H.D., & Duffy, F.H. (2001). eeg coherence in post-lsd visual hallucinations. Psychiatry Research, 107(3), 151–163. Aghajanian, G.K., & Marek, G.J. (1999). Serotonin and psychedelics. Psychopharmacology, 21 (2 Suppl), 16S–23S. Behrendt, R.P. (2003). Hallucinations: synchronisation of thalamocortical gamma oscillations underconstrained by sensory input. Consciousness and Cognition, 12(3), 413–51.

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CHAPTER 3

Interaction of Perception and Imagination in Pictorial Space Experience Joanna Ganczarek, Vezio Ruggieri, Daniele Nardi, Marta Olivetti Belardinelli 1 Introduction Amongst the multiple properties of visual artworks and in particular of paintings, one of the most prominent is the conflict between the bidimensional surface of support (e.g. canvas or paper) and the space depicted on it. As Frank Stella puts it: after all, the aim of art is to create space—space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space in which the subjects of painting can live. This is what painting has always been about. (Stella 1986, 5) From the artist’s point of view the question of how to compose a pictorial space is essential and constitutes the first step when approaching a blank canvas. The way elements are arranged in a painting determines the viewer’s reaction and directs his or hers attention to certain parts of the artwork. The space in paintings has been an issue of debate across centuries and across different artistic currents. One of the most established way to represent a three-dimensional world on a flat surface was the linear perspective mastered during the Italian Renaissance. Based primarily on a mathematical model of perception, it allows to reproduce a veridical view of a scene conveying a suggestive sense of depth. However, it has been argued whether the linear perspective reflects the way world is viewed or just illustrates an abstract model of the surrounding world. This debate is particularly evident when contrasting Nelson Goodman’s and Ernst Gombrich’s views (Carrier 1980, 283– 287). Goodman argued that the linear perspective does not take into account the binocular character of natural vision supported by constant saccadic eye movements therefore, the geometrical representation of space based on the correct viewing position with only one eye is a convention that artists use to express an idea of space. On the other hand, Gombrich rejected this form of

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criticism stating that the geometric model of linear perspective reflects the functioning of the visual system. This dispute is of particular interest as it concerns the dualism between the properties of visual system that shape perception and the internal representations of perceived objects. The Goodman—Gombrich discussion can be reinterpreted when taking into account the embodied nature of perception and—most importantly—of imagination. The interaction of these two processes is present both in everyday life where it allows to ascribe meaning to viewed stimuli as well as in an aesthetic situation. A single artwork can be perceived as a physical object evoking physiological response coherent with its properties as well as an intentional object provoking physiological reaction to imaginary states suggested by the physical properties. The space in painting, depicted with the use of linear perspective, is a good example of this dualism. Will the eye and body act ‘as if’ the pictorial space was real or does it respond to the physical properties of the object e.g. the surface of support, the distance from the observer or the size? In this chapter the problem is discussed, proposing that an experience of imaginative, pictorial spaces provokes physiological reactions similar to the perception of real distances. In other words, perception and imagination would be subserved by a common physiological mechanism. This question is analysed in view of the psychophysiological research on perception and imagination of space with special regard to the studies investigating the pictorial spaces. Moreover, a theoretical approach is presented that frames the results of these studies in a wider context of embodied aesthetic experience. 2

Perception and Imagination of Space

The embodied approach based on psychophysiological research offers an interesting contribution to this debate as it deals with both how the images are perceived by the subjects and what changes in the physiological structures are observed during perception. Therefore, in general, this type of research paradigm allows the evaluation of the correlated physiological and cognitive processes such as perception and imagination and in some cases—the most informative ones—the causal relationships between the two. Both perception and imagination are involved when experiencing art in general. In the case of paintings that with the use of linear perspective and

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other monocular depth cues evoke a veridical sensation of space extending in depth, the perceptual systems (e.g. eyes) receive information about the physical distance to the artwork (perception) and at the same time information that with the help of pictorial cues suggest distances that go beyond the material surface of support (imagination). If the viewer’s eyes and body react to the represented space ‘as if’ it was real, it suggests that perception and imagination might share at least a part of the same physiological substrate. The two physiological reactions that are discussed in this chapter are the oculomotor and postural mechanisms due to the fact that they are both responsive to the distances between observer and object and determine their relative spatial positions. The consideration of not just the visual system but also of the whole body posture derives from the Gibson’s idea of extended vision (1979, 227) and the coupling between position of gaze and posture (Ruggieri 2001, 284–286) that focus on the motor components of perception. The perception of space and spatial cognition has been studied by various scientific disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology and sociology aiming to discover how people use the knowledge about environment to act within it according to one’s goals (for a review see: Waller and Nadel 2012). The stress on the active perception of space means that different sensory modalities are involved depending on the spatial perspective i.e. the egocentric or allocentric one. The distinction between egocentric and allocentric space implies the use of two kinds of information according to two different frames of reference: relationships between the location of objects and one’s own body in the case of the egocentric frame of reference and relationships between the location of objects in the other case (see Millar 1994). Although both frames of reference cannot ignore the motor component, they involve different coding modalities, i.e. the prevalence of body and haptic coordinates in the egocentric space and of visual-motor coordinates in the allocentric space (Klatzky 1998). These modalities refer to different possibilities of actions within the peripersonal and the extrapersonal space (e.g. Reed, Grubb and Steele 2006; Abrams, Davoli, Du, Knapp and Paull 2008; Schendel and Robertson 2004). The peripersonal space is referred to space that can be reached by hands expanding up to approximately 1 meter. The distances beyond this area are classified as extrapersonal space (Previc 1998; Cutting and Vishton 1995). The link between action and perception suggests that the distances and depth estimation are not invariant and absolute. Rather, the perceived spaces can be extended including functional extensions of body such as tools (Berti and Frassinetti 2000; Iriki, Tanaka, and Iwamura 1996; Maravita, Spence, Kennett and Driver 2002) and virtual limbs (Iriki, Tanaka, Obayashi and Iwamura 2001) or illusory bodies (Ehrsson 2007). Moreover, the motor abilities of observers and their purposes influence distance perception. For

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example, it has been shown that perception of slope changes depending on whether the observer carries a heavy rucksack or not (Bhalla and Proffitt 1999). Additionally, Nardi showed that the detection of slope—which is an important directional cue in natural environment—is multimodal involving kinesthetic, vestibular and visual information that might be differently used by men and women (Nardi, Newcombe and Shipley 2011). Instead, when only visual cues are available the proficiency in identifying uphill seems to be mediated by subject’s abilities of mental rotation (Nardi et al. 2013), suggesting an interesting interplay of perception and mental imagery. From the physiological point of view, the accurate space estimations derive from various sources including, but not limited to, visual, auditory and tactile information. To perform a spatial judgement and in particular distance judgement, one needs to estimate own position with respect to an object. In the case of estimations based on visual input, the observer’s position is determined by gaze and whole body posture. The visual system has an obviously privileged status. It relies on pictorial, binocular and oculomotor input to encode and interpret the three-dimensional layout of a scene. The pictorial depth cues i.e. those used in paintings to convey a sensation of depth are monocular, static and include relative and familiar size, occlusion, height in the visual field, texture, shading and so on. In the actual environment, besides the pictorial cues, the binocular information such as retinal disparity and stereopsis aid distance estimation. The oculomotor depth cues comprise convergence and accommodation that change in function of distance from the observer, being most effective as a source of depth information at small distances up to 3 meters (Leibowitz, Shina and Hennessy 1973) yet possibly useful also at large distances (Palmisano et al. 2010). The position of gaze is supported by a certain body posture. The maintenance of upright posture is based on variations of tonic muscular tension, thus, not inducing phasic movement but body sway. The body sway reacts to the spatial properties of the environment. In the classical experiment by Lee and Lishman (1975) the participants were asked to fixate targets at different distances. It was found that when a distant object (wall) was fixated the body movement was greater then during fixations on a near object. This result was interpreted in terms of the optic flow perturbation or detection threshold in response to body movement i.e. the changes in optic flow are bigger thus more noticeable when close targets are viewed as compared to distant targets. This mechanism has been found also in many other studies investigating the role of distance on postural control (Bles, Kapteyn, Brandt and Arnold 1980; Dijkstra, Gielen and Melis 1992; Paulus, Straube, Krafczyk and Brandt 1989). Although distance and relative optic flow contribute to the postural control, this mechanism might not be as automatic as posited by these authors.

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Indeed, it has been shown that the body sway is controlled as to facilitate performance of a given task. In a modified version of the experiment by Lee and Lishman (1975) Stoffregen and colleagues (1999) asked the participants to fixate a distant target whilst ignoring a nearby one. The magnitude of the optical flow is bigger for the nearest visible surface therefore, the presence of a near object—independently of the fixation task—should lead to postural stabilisation. However, it was found that the fixations on the distant target led to an increase in anterio-posterior sway even with the presence of an object near to the observer. This result suggests that the postural response to distance might be adjusted in order to execute a particular task. The effect of different tasks (supra-postural tasks) has been largely studied as it can provide an answer to the question whether postural control, besides its primary goal i.e. the maintenance of equilibrium, contributes or interferes with cognitive activities (e.g. Stoffregen et al. 2000). In other words, the motor correlates of various forms of attention are investigated, bringing these studies close to the idea of embodied cognition, yet the researchers in this field do not explicitly refer to this term. As far as the perception of space is concerned it has been suggested by the early works of Kerr and colleagues (1985) and Maylor and Wing (1996) that spatial working memory tasks might have a greater influence on postural control than other types of tasks. Therefore, body posture might play a role in spatial cognition. However, the results of later studies are contradictory (Dault, Frank and Allard 2001; Maylor and Wing 2001) and prove that the relationship between spatial tasks and posture is very complex depending on the types of stimuli, times of presentation, procedures and phases of cognitive processing. Moreover, these studies are based on an assumption that postural control interferes with cognitive tasks and not that posture might be regulated as to facilitate a cognitive task (e.g. Stoffregen et al. 2000). In addition, the character of presented stimuli and their relative influence on postural control should be studied in relation to the individual strategies one uses to orient in space (e.g. Crémieux and Mesure 1994; Collins and De Luca 1995). An example of such strategy is the field-dependence. It has been suggested that field-dependent participants rely more on visual cues when estimating subjective vertical and body orientation whereas the field-independent participants use egocentric coordinates (Luyat et al. 1997). The study by Isableu and colleagues (1997) proved that field-dependent and field-independent subjects use visual information in different ways: the field-dependent ones were generally less stable than the field independent ones and were more prone to be captured by visual illusion. As in the case of perception of space, the imagination of space or spatial mental imagery is not invariant and depends for example on the type of per-

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spective applied (e.g. Hegarty and Waller 2004; Kozhevnikov and Hegarty 2001; Kozhevnikov, Motes, Rasch and Blajenkova 2006; Zacks and Michelon 2005) with the egocentric perspective being more effective. It has also been shown that the type of objects imagined might influence the performance. Amorim and colleagues (2006) found that performing mental rotations with human like blocks (equipped with head and arms) facilitates the task as compared to the classical Shepard-Metzler type blocks. Importantly, this facilitation effect was no longer present when the human type blocks were arranged in impossible postures which suggests that the sensorimotor constitution of the observer might have influenced the imaginative task. In other words, the mental imagery would be similar to the physical act of moving in space providing a clue to the close relationship between real movement, its perception and mental imagery. The idea that visual perception and imagination share common features is supported by a large body of evidence. For example, patients that have deficits in visual pathways show impairments also in visual imagery (e.g. Levine, Warach and Farah 1985), whereas the neuroimaging studies on healthy subjects suggest that the brain areas active during perception and imagination overlap in approximately two-thirds (Kosslyn, Thompson and Alpert 1997). Additionally, studies on early visual cortex activation during imagery with closed eyes shed some light on the possible role of imagination in shaping the actual perception: the mental schemes and expectations might interact with what is actually present in a physical stimulus (for a review see: Kosslyn, Ganis and Thompson 2001). Besides the neuroimaging studies, researchers used other methods to investigate the physiological changes in receptors occurring both during imagery and perception. In the study by Ruggieri and Alfieri (1992) the eye accommodation i.e. the curvature of crystalline lens, was tested during perception and imagination of objects placed at different distances to the viewer. The accommodation was measured when participants viewed actual objects placed either at 10 cm or 300 cm and when the same objects were imagined at these distances. The crystalline lens was more curved in the ‘near’ condition than in the ‘far’ condition for both perception and imagination (Ruggieri and Alfieri 1992). In another study by Ruggieri (1993) the hypothesis of coupling between perception and imagination was examined by asking the participants to imagine a scene or an object whilst looking through binoculars at a wooden silhouette. When the mental image was projected on the wooden silhouette the experimenter covered one of the lenses of the binoculars. Interestingly, this led to changes in both the real perception of the wooden silhouette and the mental image. This study indicates that the eye itself, not just the visual cortex, might

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be involved in mental imagery with open eyes. This idea can be found also in the scanpath theory which underlines the role of eye movement patterns in encoding and storing of mental images (Noton and Stark 1971; Brandt and Stark 1997). The theory is based on the similarity between scanpaths during perception and during recollection from memory of the same images. However, other experimental research has showed that images can be recognised without eye movements (e.g. Biederman et al. 1982; Thorpe et al. 1996) and the scanpaths patterns across repetitions are quite different (e.g. Mannan et al. 1997). Therefore, the scanpath theory might not be valid in its absolute form. On the other hand, it is possible that whereas certain patterns of scanpaths as such are not compulsory for coding and recognition of visual stimuli, the eye movements and the respective oculomotor afferent information might contribute to viewer’s perceptual experience. The nature of this hypothetical contribution is unclear, however it certainly deserves empirical scrutiny. In view of the studies on visual perception and imagination of space presented before, it can be concluded that on a physiological level they share some similarities, so an art beholder might respond to pictorial, imaginary spaces in a way that is analogical to the perception of physical distance. In the following paragraph research focused on the oculomotor and postural reaction to pictorial space is presented suggesting that viewer’s perceptual and imaginative experience involves precise bodily correlates. 3

Pictorial Space, Eye Movements and Body Sway

The representation of depth in painting relies on a series of monocular depth cues such as shading, transposition, gradient or linear perspective. As the surface of a painting is bidimensional, the accommodation and vergence, two mechanisms reflexively yoked during viewing, should not change when fixating objects placed at apparently and not physically different distances. This view has been initially challenged by Enright (1987) who measured vergence when participants viewed line drawings protruding or receding in depth. Subsequently, Takeda and colleagues (1999) measured both vergence and accommodation in response to artworks i.e. Christina’s World 1948 by Wyeth and one of the Hokusai’s views of the Mount Fuji. They found that the accommodation related to fixations on foreground and background differed significantly, yet was not accompanied by vergence movements. It suggests that the apparent depth caused changes in accommodation similar to the perception of real distances. However, it is not clear if it was the sensation of apparent distance to influence accommodation or the multiple depth cues directly caused

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accommodation changes. The question of subjectivity was raised by Wismeijer, van Ee and Erkelens (2008) with respect to vergence. They used bistable, slant rivalry stimuli i.e. shapes that can be perceived both as slanted rectangulars or slanted trapezoids. The authors found that the vergence response was governed by depth cues independently of the consciously perceived orientation of shapes. These results indicate that the oculomotor response of the viewer is highly influenced by depth cues and not by the subjective experience of apparent depth. The authors propose that perceptual experience of bistable stimuli can be dissociated into two separate systems: one allowing an illusionary perception of 3D space and one tuning the oculomotor system to the depth cues. On the other hand, when non bistable stimuli are viewed, such as for example artworks depicting a coherent space, these two systems respond in much the same way, making it difficult to assess their respective contributions to the perceptual experience. It cannot be ruled out that the the viewer’s attitude might lead to preference of one of the systems depending on how closely the perceptual experience is linked with a potential action. In the case observer needs to assess distances when imagining a walk into the depicted space, the oculomotor information might be used to subserve this type of imaginary situation. The question of motor components of perception of pictorial space has been also addressed in the field of biomechanics investigating postural equilibrium in response to apparent depth. As mentioned before, the body sway changes relatively to the physical distance of objects. The same question was asked regarding perception of objects placed at apparently, not physically, different distances. In the study by Kiyota and Fujiwara (2008) the participants viewed 2 sets of apparent movement stimuli. The apparent depth sensation was either ‘weak’ i.e. a small and large blue circles were presented alternately, or ‘strong’ where perspective and shading were added, augmenting the illusion of movement in depth. The authors found that the magnitude of body sway was influenced by the stimulus intensity: the strong stimulus led to a greater displacement of the centre of pressure along the anterio-posterior axis (the direction of apparent movement) as compared to the weak stimulus. The idea that viewer’s body might react to pictorial depth was also tested by Kapoula and colleagues (2011). The authors conducted two experiments with the use of actual paintings suggesting depth. In the first one, the participants viewed two paintings including multiple perspectives (The Grey Room and Egypt by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva) and their two cubist transformations in which the perspectival cues were eliminated. The participants also rated their sensation of depth. The results showed that viewing only The Grey Room painting increased body sway (see Figure 3.1 A) as compared with its cubist version. Instead, the subjective ratings of depth were high for both of the

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paintings. This discrepancy suggests that postural equilibrium might be governed more by physical cues rather than the perceived sense of depth in much the same way as the vergence or accommodation. The depth rendered in The Grey Room is more suggestive, supported by multiple vergence points, that in The Egypt, where the horizontal lines in the foreground break the receding lines. Thus, the destabilising effect of the former painting might be related to its dynamic composition suggesting movement in depth. In order to verify if the results obtained were due to apparent depth, the second experiment was conducted in which the effects of fixations on the background versus foreground and eye vergence on body sway were examined (Kapoula et al. 2011). The participants fixated on two areas of the painting (The Annunciation by Piero della Francesca), one in the foreground and one in the background. Subsequently, the same areas of the painting were fixated but participants wore prism lenses that forced eye convergence to the near plane. Although, in the no lens condition there was no significant difference in body sway between the two planes, when the prism was applied the fixations on the background were accompanied by a reduction of body sway. This effect confirms the hypothesis that eye convergence might be an influential factor in postural stabilisation and govern body sway in response to fixations on elements placed at different apparent depths (Kapoula and Le 2006). The question of oculomotor and postural coupling has been under investigation for many years leading to rather contrasting findings. For example, some authors report that the execution of saccades improves postural stability (Kikukawa and Taguchi 1985; Oblack, Gregoric and Gyergyek 1985; Uchida, Hashimoto, Suzuki, Tagekami and Iwase 1979; cf: Le and Kapoula 2008), whereas others show an opposite effect (Brandt 1999 cf: Le and Kapoula 2008). Besides the oculomotor influence on posture, the increased body sway when viewing paintings representing depth, might be related to the concept embodied simulation. According to Freedberg and Gallese (2007) the aesthetic experience engages corticomotor activity in response to depicted actions, objects, emotions and sensations through the mechanism of embodied simulation. Drawing on the mirror neuron research they describe a series of potential interactions between an object of art and a viewer. Recent neuroimaging experiment (Battaglia, Lisanby and Freedberg 2011) offered an experimental evidence of this simulative activity, present both during imagination and perception, providing another clue to the close link between them. In this frame of reference, the increased body sway of the observer found in the study by Kapoula and colleagues (2011) might be attributed to a simulated movement inside the pictorial space.

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Ganczarek, Ruggieri, Giannini and Olivetti Belardinelli (2012) addressed this question by investigating the hypothetical difference in postural response to imagined movement inside the pictorial space contrasted with free exploration of the given space. In order to differentiate the possible motor involvement of the viewer two perspectives were applied: 1st person and 3rd person perspective when imagining the walk inside the painting. Based on the research suggesting that the act of perspective taking is influenced by subjects’ posture and involves motor brain regions (Sirigu and Duhamel 2001; Ruby and Decety 2001; 2003; 2004), the type of instruction, i.e. the 1st and 3rd person perspectives should lead to different postural responses. The first-person perspective is believed to involve higher activity in motor and motor-related structures so the postural configuration of one’s own body should be particularly relevant in the 1st person perspective simulation (Lorey et al. 2009). The images applied included the painting used in the study by Kapoula and colleagues (2011), i.e. The Grey Room by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, that significantly influenced the body sway of the observers (see Figure 3.1). Additionally, one human silhouette was inserted in the painting as a reference for the movement to be imagined. Instead of cubist transformations, a blank screen was added as a control condition. In accordance with the study by Kapoula and colleagues (2011) the blank screen should increase postural stability due to the lack of depth cues. However, it was found that the postural parameters did not differ significantly between the blank screen and the pictorial image. This result suggests that either the depth cues as such do not increase body sway, or the presence of a human silhouette acted as an orienting cue for otherwise confused perspectival background.1 In addition, it was seen that when the imaginative act of walking inside the painting was performed, the participants tended to be more stable as compared to the free exploration condition. This finding supports the hypothesis that the use of a suprapostural task regulates body sway in order to improve the performance (Stoffregen, Smart, Bardy and Pagulayan 1999). More precisely, the visual attention might be connected to the muscular, tonic activity (Ruggieri 1997, e.g. 82–85; 2001, 54–57). In particular, attention would be realised by increasing tonic tension, stabilising posture and directing gaze towards a certain stimulus. An alternative explanation concerns the 1  The painting contains multiple perspectives and cues such as texture and shading that enhance the perspectival lines following different directions. Thus, the results found by Kapoula and colleagues (2011) might be explained by the lack of a stable point of reference for the confounding pictorial space.

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character and location of the human silhouette: it was static and placed in the foreground. Both of these features might have interfered with the task to imagine its movement in depth. A follow-up study introduced a few modifications (Ganczarek, Ruggieri, Nardi, Olivetti Belardinelli 2013) that aimed to investigate in detail whether the definition of the spatial layout for the human silhouette influenced the body sway and if the type of silhouette triggered different postural adjustments. Additionally, eye-tracking equipment was used to identify particular sway patterns when subjects fixated specific areas of the images i.e. the silhouette or the background. In order to isolate the effect of perspectival construction of the pictorial space, three types of backgrounds for the human silhouettes were presented: the original painting ‘The Grey Room’, its schematic drawing2 and a blank background (see Figure 3.1). The human silhouette placed in the image was either dynamic i.e. suggesting movement in depth or static (see Figure 3.2). The results indicate that blank backgrounds had a destabilising impact on the viewers’ posture, whereas no such effect was found for the images containing perspective. This finding might be explained in terms of lacking spatial frame of reference for the human silhouette depicted on blank backgrounds thus disorienting for the observer. Moreover, the use of eye tracking allowed to observe that the body sway was high when participants looked at the blank background, but not the silhouette. In particular, when looking at the static silhouette the body sway was reduced. Interestingly, fixations on the dynamic silhouette did not exert this stabilising influence. Similar tendency was found for both perspectival backgrounds: the more the participants viewed the static silhouette, but not the dynamic one, the more stable was their posture. These data suggest that the postural reaction of the viewer is sensitive to the presence or lack of depth and movement cues in a painting: not only the position of an object in a painting (foreground vs background) governs the postural adjustments but also its character: the fixations on the static silhouette were accompanied by a more stable posture. It might be related to the idea of embodied simulation (Freedberg and Gallese 2007) or the imitative decoding hypothesis (Ruggieri 1997, 21) that underline the motor components of aesthetic perception. The latter theory will be presented in the following

2  The schematic drawing contained only the simplified, main perspectival lines, whereas all shading and textures were removed.

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figure 3.1 The backgrounds used for the human silhouette. (A) The Grey Room by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, (B) schematic representation of the painting. Additionally, a blank background was presented as a control.

figure 3.2 Types of human silhouettes used in the experiment: (A) static; (B) dynamic suggesting movement in depth.

paragraph as a framing for the interaction of perception and imagination during both experience of space and aesthetic situation. 4

Imitative Decoding Hypothesis

The imitative decoding hypothesis in aesthetic experience revolves around protomental, pre-cognitive and automatic process of decoding, through covert muscular activity, certain properties of works of art, such as for example lines of tension (Ruggieri 1997, 20; 144–159). The concept of tension has its bodily roots in the muscular tonic activity, that represents a pattern of interacting motor schemes. The motor activity is an expression of the central arousal level but remains covert in form of preparation for action. Preparation for action leads to an increase in the level of tonic tension without the resulting

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­ ovement. This form of tension, together with neurovegetative information, m is hypothesised to constitute the bodily, peripheral mechanism of imitation. The moment of imitation resides on a certain symmetry between the creative process and aesthetic reception. An artist projects his corporeal, muscular pattern of tensions onto a work of art and the viewer re-enacts this pattern by decoding the artistic stimulus through muscular activity. The decoding of artistic stimuli has two moments. First one consists in visual decoding of the stimulus (analogical representation) and the second one relies on muscular re-writing of the stimulus that in turn contributes to the subjective evaluation of the stimulus (non analogical representations). In other words, the decoding has a denotative (visual transduction) and connotative (proprioceptive transduction) components. The connotative process involves both imitative, muscular covert activity and feedback generated by this imitation. According to Ruggieri (1997, 52–70; 77–81) this feedback is crucial to the pre-cognitive, non-verbal, protomental moment of aesthetic experience. In the case of perception of pictorial space, the viewer would experience its volume and distances through synthesis of feedback information from the receptors, including eyes and proprioceptive signals coming from the muscles. It means that the imaginative and real spaces are both constructed by the perceiving subjects and not given a priori (Ruggieri 2001, 267–297). The construction of space and distance would be based on the sequence of events occurring in the surrounding world. It is not only related to the visual perception but it is transmodal i.e. it integrates various sensory modalities. It has been shown, for example, that the auditory information might influence the distance perception (Ruggieri and Cocchia 2012): high rhythmic frequencies led to an underestimation of distances, whereas the low frequencies evoked an increase in distance estimations. According to Ruggieri, the experience of rhythm is directly linked to muscular activity: the increase of tension accompanies the attention, whilst resolution when a stimulus reappears provokes a reduction of tension (e.g. Ruggieri 1997, 82–92). The interplay between the auditory and visual input is realised by the synthesis of motor information related to both modalities. Thus, the experience of space and distance estimation is linked to the integration of different sensorimotor signals. In particular, muscular tonic tension is a ‘measure’ for the distances present in the actual environment, in an imaginary scene or in artworks as it defines the relationships between single events and their positions relative to one’s body. The lack of distinction between physical space and imaginary space is based on the assumption that the experience of both types of spaces rely on similar processes. In particular, it has been shown that mental representations or images have precise spatial collocations defined also by the position of the

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eyes (Ruggieri, Qualiozzi and Plevi 2011; Ruggieri 2011, 139–144). Analogically, a point of view or spatial perspective would relate to a concrete position one adapts looking at a certain object, be it physical or present in imagery (Ruggieri, Nasello and Stilo 2011, 125–129). Thus, when a viewer assumes a certain perspective looking at the pictorial space, his or hers body posture and position of gaze follows the visual cues. This view leads to an idea of a close relationship between perception and imagination as the receptors activity is engaged both when the physical stimulus is present as well as when it is imagined by the subject. These two processes result in mental representations that are formed on the basis of afferent information coming from various receptors (Ruggieri 1993). With respect to the neurophysiological research on this subject (e.g. Kosslyn, Thompson and Alpert 1997) this idea strengthens the concept of similarity between perception and imagination assigning a causal role to the activation of not only the cortex but also respective receptors. This way the position of the gaze and orientation of posture is not correlational but defines the interpretation of the viewed space. Moreover, the experience of the volume of space relates to one’s own body perception: the spatial body dimensions would determine to perception of both physical, real volumes as well as those represented in a painting (e.g. Ruggieri 1997, 149–150). This effect is particularly evident, when the spatial construction of an image is absent or poorly indicated and thus the subject, in order to imagine its volume, needs to create a sense of third dimension by distancing the figure from the background. In the process of figure-ground discrimination the two eyes play different roles: one eye focuses on the figure, whereas the other one synthesises the remaining elements into an integrated background (Ruggieri, Ceridono, Cei and Bergerone 1982). The role of gaze position has been also demonstrated when viewing reversible figures: in order to view either one of the two images the eyes need to focus on different areas of the figure (Ruggieri and Fernandez 1994). The same process is hypothesised in the perception of one’s body: person experiences own’s body as background, whist single parts or events can be focused on as an emerging figure. Therefore, both the body space and the external space are part of the same process of construction of distances and volumes. 5 Conclusions The studies presented in the previous paragraphs suggest that when persons view perspectival images the eyes and the posture, the two mechanisms that define attention to different spatial locations, react to represented spaces

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‘as if’ these spaces had physical dimensions. In particular, the viewer’s posture is adjusted according to the movement and depth cues in an image. Depending on whether the observed silhouette’s posture was static or contains movement cues, the viewer’s posture was more or less stable, even though both silhouettes were placed in the foreground. This finding suggests that not just the location of elements in a pictorial space, but also their character influences observer’s body sway. In particular, the presence of a static human silhouette acts as an orienting cue for otherwise confusing spatial layout. Possibly, this clarification of pictorial space is mediated by an imitative activity of the viewer’s motor system. Moreover, the well structured backgrounds had a stabilising effect on viewer’s posture, whereas blank, empty backgrounds caused a postural destabilisation. It indicates that the definition of spatial composition for elements placed in an image or painting governs viewer’s attention anchoring the eyes and the whole posture to spatial points of reference. In addition, the studies evidenced the motor correlate of attention: when participants performed a particular cognitive task their posture was more stable than during the free exploration. In the light of these findings the dispute about the effectiveness of the use of perspective becomes clearer. In accordance with Gombrich’s view it seems to stimulate the visual system in a similar manner to the natural surrounding, proving that it represents a ‘natural’ way to reproduce depth on a bidimensional surface. On the other hand, these physiological reactions sometimes— but not always as in the case of bistable stimuli—are accompanied by the subjective experience of illusionary three-dimensional spaces. The question of the relationship between subjectivity and physiological reactions to pictorial spaces is of particular interest as it can provide insight to if, how and which afferent information are used by the viewers in both everyday perception and in aesthetic situation. Moreover, a possible contribution of individual differences should be taken into account. For example, the body awareness level or style of interpersonal contact can determine what proprioceptive information one uses when facing a work of art. In Ruggieri’s view (1997, 43–51) the ability to enter in contact with an artistic object determines whether the imitative decoding and its relative effects to the subjective experience are in act. The style of contact would be defined by a concrete physical relation between an observer and a stimulus. In other words, the observer has a certain spatial position with respect to an object which can be viewed as a behaviour along the approach-avoidance dimension. The approach and avoidance are characterised by certain levels of muscular tension (Ruggieri and Giustini 1994). For example, in the study by Ruggieri and Giustini (1994) increased myographic frequency reflected the refusal of contact,

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whilst the increased myographic amplitude was associated with a facilitation effect. Therefore, the physiological reactions to the pictorial space and its subjective experience might be mediated by the beholder’s capacity to establish contact with a work of art. The artist’s use of perspective and other means to convey a sensation of a three-dimensional space would then enable an embodied immersion of the viewer into the imaginary artistic worlds. References Abrams, R.A., Davoli, C.C., Du, F., Knapp, W.K., and Paull, D. 2008. “Altered vision near the hands.” Cognition 107:1035–1047. Amorim, M.A., Isableu, B., and Jarraya, M. 2006. “Embodied spatial transformations: Body analogy for the mental rotation of objects.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 1353:327–347. Battaglia, F., Lisanby, S.H., and Freedberg, D. 2011. “Corticomotor Excitability during Observation and Imagination of a Work of Art”. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 579:1–6. Berti, A., and Frassinetti, F. 2000. “When far becomes near: Remapping of space by tool use.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12:415–420. Bhalla, M., and Proffitt, D.R. 1999. “Visual-motor recalibration in geographical slant perception.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 25:1076–1096. Biederman, I., Mezzanotte, R., and Rabinowitz, J. 1982 “Scene perception: detecting and judging objects undergoing relational violations.” Cognitive Psychology 14:143–177. Bles, W., Kapteyn, T.S., Brandt, T., and Arnold, F. 1980. “The mechanism of physiological height vertigo.” ii. Posturography. Acta Otolaryngology 895–6:534–540. Brandt, T. 1999. “Eye movements, oculomotor disorders, and postural balance”. In Vertigo: its multisensory syndromes. 2nd ed. edited by T. Brandt, 428–9. Springer. Brandt, S.A., and Stark, L.W. 1997. “Spontaneous eye movements during visual imagery reflect the content of the visual scene.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 9(1):27–38. Carrier, D. 1980. “Perspective as a Convention: On the Views of Nelson Goodman and Ernst Gombrich.” Leonardo 13(4):283–287. Collins, J.J., and De Luca, C.J. 1995. “The effects of visual input on open-loop and closedloop postural control mechanisms.” Experimental Brain Research 1031:151–163. Crémieux, J., and Mesure, S. 1994. “Differential sensitivity to static visual cues in the control of postural equilibrium in man.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 781:67–74. Cutting, J.E., and Vishton, P.M. 1995. “Perceiving layout and knowing distances: The integration, relative potency and contextual use of different information about

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Kikukawa, M., and Taguchi, K. 1985. “Characteristics of body sway during saccadic eye movement in patients with peripheral vestibular disorders.” In Vestibular and visual control on posture and locomotor equilibrium, edited by M. Igarashi and F.O. Black, 355–359. New York: Karger. Kiyota, T., and Fujiwara, K. 2008. “Postural sway and brain potentials evoked by visual depth stimuli.” International Journal of Neuroscience 118(7):935–953. Klatzky, R.L. 1998. “Allocentric and egocentric spatial representations: Definitions, distinctions, and interconnections.” In Spatial cognition—An interdisciplinary approach to representation and processing of spatial knowledge (Lecture notes in artificial intelligence 1404) edited by C. Freska, C. Habel, and K.F. Wender, 1–17. Berlin: Springer-Verlag Kosslyn, S.M., Ganis, G., and Thompson, W.L. 2001. “Neural foundations of imagery.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2(9):635–642. Kosslyn, S.M., Thompson, W.L., and Alpert, N.M. 1997. “Neural systems shared by visual imagery and visual perception: A positron emission tomography study.” Neuroimage 64:320–334. Kozhevnikov, M., and Hegarty, M. 2001. “A dissociation between object manipulation spatial ability and spatial orientation ability.” Memory and Cognition 295:745–756. Kozhevnikov, M., Motes, M.A., Rasch, B., and Blajenkova, O. 2006. “Perspective-taking vs. mental rotation transformations and how they predict spatial navigation performance.” Applied Cognitive Psychology 20(3):397–417. Lê, T.T., and Kapoula, Z. 2008. “Role of ocular convergence in the Romberg quotient.” Gait and posture 273:493–500. Lee, D.N., and Lishman, J.R. 1975. “Visual proprioceptive control of stance.” Journal of Human Movement Studies 1:87–95. Leibowitz, H.W., Shina, K., and Hennessy, H.R. 1972. “Oculomotor adjustments and size constancy.” Perception and Psychophysics 12:497–500. Levine, D.N., Warach, J., and Farah, M. 1985. “Two visual systems in mental imagery Dissociation of ‘what’ and ‘where’ in imagery disorders due to bilateral posterior cerebral lesions.” Neurology 357:1010–1010. Lorey, B., Bischoff, M., Pilgramm, S., Stark, R., Munzert, J., and Zentgraf, K. 2009. “The embodied nature of motor imagery: the influence of posture and perspective.” Experimental Brain Research 194(2):233–243. Luyat, M., Ohlmann, T., and Barraud, P.A. 1997. “Subjective vertical and postural activity.” Acta Psychologica 952:181–193. Mannan, S.K., Ruddock, K.H., and Wooding, D.S. 1996. “The relationship between the locations of spatial features and those of fixations made during visual examination of briefly presented images.” Spatial vision 10(3):165–188.

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CHAPTER 4

Effortless Bodies and Beyond Barbara Gail Montero Effortless bodily movements, effortless speech or writing, even effortless objects affect us in a way that one naturally thinks of as aesthetic. But just what is effortlessness? What are we appreciating when we admire a dancer’s effortless technique, precision or presence? Why is it, for example, that when the renown Alicia Markova “finished her effortless variation, with the turn of its final phrase rounded off meticulously to the fraction of a beat, it is no wonder that the house bursts into applause almost as a automatic reaction”?1 What makes effortlessness aesthetically valuable? The concept of aesthetic effortlessness is rarely discussed in academic circles today, particularly in analytic philosophy. Moreover, in the art world, effortlessness, though still highly valued by some, has generally gone the way of the two related qualities of beauty and grace, with many contemporary artists more interested in creating works that are provocative, powerful, beleaguered or shocking, than in creating works that are effortless. The choreography of Pina Bausch, for example, is certainly aesthetically valuable; but it is valuable because it expresses frustration, alienation, brutality and pain, not because it expresses effortlessness. Though perhaps unpopular in academic circles today, it cannot be denied that effortlessness captures us, and its aesthetic appeal seems to be more immediate, more bodily and less cerebral than our interest in the conceptually charged work of artists such as Pina Bausch. Moreover, the idea of effortlessness has drawn the attention of many great thinkers in the past. To look at just a few examples, the ancient Chinese Daoist thinkers Laozi and Zhuangzi exalted effortless action, or wu-wei (literally translated as “no trying”), in both the artisan and the political leader. The Italian Renaissance theorist, Baldassare Castiglione’s (1975/1528), Book of the Courtier, inspired the artists of his day to, as he puts it, “practice[s] in all things a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless.” And, arguably, one aspect of what Kant meant when he said that “the fine arts must not seem purposeful, although they are purposeful,” or, as he explains, that “fine art must be able to be considered as nature,” is, in part, that fine art 1  See John Martin (1941).

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must appear to be merely a product of nature, that is, it must appear to be effortless.2 To mention one more historical period during which the concept of effortlessness garnered the attention of theorists (a period I shall return to) we find effortlessness and the closely related concept of grace, discussed, analyzed and greatly admired by the late-nineteenth-early-twentieth century thinkers, Henri Bergson and Herbert Spencer, with Bergson describing the perception of grace as “the perception of a certain ease, a certain facility in the outward movements,” and Spencer claiming that “truly graceful movements . . . . are those preformed with comparatively little effort . . . [and that] a good dancer makes us feel that . . . an economy of effort has been achieved.” Today, though the concept is largely passed over by tough-minded academics, the allure of effortlessness is apparent in the media where one frequently finds various athletes, artists, and artworks praised for their effortlessness: the ballerina Natalia Osipova’s grand jetés, for example, are extolled in for their effortless elevation, soaring “through the air with so little effort that the sight of her lithe form hanging high above the stage is a shock every time,” the opera singer Beverly Sills is described as being able to “dispatch coloratura roulades and embellishments, capped with radiant high D’s and E-flats, with seemingly effortless agility,” and of Yo-Yo Ma, the novelist Mark Saltzman says, “his playing was so beautiful, so original, so intelligent, so effortless that by the end of the first movement I knew my cello career was over.” And in the world of politics, one finds individuals chastised for their lack of effortlessness and for displaying “what appear to be laboriously studied moves rather than anything that comes naturally.”3 Effortlessness, it seems, can be ascribed to bodily movements, to intellectual insights, to poetry, prose and paintings. Even the Golden Gate bridge has been extolled for its “seeming effortlessness,” being described as, “Grace Kelly in Rear Window.”4 Indeed, perhaps one reason the topic of effortlessness does not have foothold in analytic aesthetics is this multifariousness. There is something to be said in favor of this stance: trying to figure out what it means for 2  See Hammermeister (2002), for discussion. 3  The quotes are taken, respectively, from “Elusive Treasure, Object of a Pirate’s Affections; ‘Le Corsaire’: American Ballet Theater with Natalia Osipova” by Gia Kourlas, published in the New York Times, July 6, 2012; “Doubt Lasts Only a Moment in an Open Win,” by Dan Manoyan, the New York Times, July 8, 2012; and “Slugfest,” by James Fallows, The Atlantic, September 2012. 4  As stated by urban design critic, John King and California Historical Society, executive director, Anthea Hartig, respectively in their interview with Christensen (2012).

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a portrait to represent a person, one might say, is difficult enough, ought we really to confuse things further by trying to understand what it is for a bridge to represent effortlessness? I am not immune such methodological scruples and in my work in philosophy of mind I have frequently advocated that we should not bother trying to understand whether the mind is physical until we have understood more basic ideas, such as what it means to be physical.5 But when it comes to aesthetics, my relationship to the subject matter is somewhat different; it is not that of detached theoretical interest but rather it is that of an individual with prior interests that have developed from years of work in the field.6 Thus, being less driven by the pursuit of truth than by passion, I am inclined focus straightaway on what is of interest to me. If this is inconsistency, so be it. I imagine I am not the first. What, then, is it for an action to be effortless? What are we appreciating when we admire Castiglione’s effortless courtier, a dancer’s effortless leaps, a basketball player’s effortless shot, or even a seagull’s effortless soar? For Castiglione as well as for the ancient Chinese thinkers, effortlessness was primarily a social value. According to Castiglione, effortlessness, or at least the façade of effortlessness enabled individuals to gain recognition, approval and promotion to higher political positions in the Royal Court, and according to the Daoist tradition it engendered, de, a type of charisma that allows rulers to persuade neither by force nor decree but merely in virtue of their magnetism. Though no less relevant to politics now than it was in the past, my concern is more with aesthetic rather than social value, and specifically with the aesthetic value of effortlessness in works of art. 1

Medium, Representation, Process

In appreciating a work of art such as a dance, a sculpture, a painting or a musical performance, the accolade “effortless” may apply, as I shall put it, to three aspects of a work, what I shall call the “medium,” the “representation,” and the “process.” The medium encompasses the relatively lower-level entities, properties, processes and relations that comprise the work. For a dance, this might be bodily movements, for a painting this might be the array of paint. The 5  See Montero (1999), (2001), (2009). 6  Though I have theoretical interest as well since in a forthcoming book, I argue for the important of effort in expert action and thus it is incumbent on me to make sense of our appreciation of effortlessness in a way that is consistent with all this effort. (Some inconsistency, I’m comfortable with, but I do have standards!).

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representation is what the work represents, such as how John Ward’s sculpture of William Shakespeare represents the great author in a pensive, yet effortless pose. And the processes is what goes into creating the work, as it appears in the work (rather than, say, the hours in the rehearsal room). Perhaps a few examples will help clarify these distinctions. The painting is of an effortless figure (the representation is of an effortless figure). The painting looks as if the painter created it effortlessly (the process seems effortless). The brush-strokes seem effortless (the medium is effortless). She played a piece representing a carefree dance (a representation of effortlessness). It sounds as if the pianist plays effortlessly (the process of playing seems effortless). The piano sonata sounds effortless (the medium, the sound produced, is effortless). What are the relationships between these forms of effortlessness? Can we have one without the others? Or are some sorts of effortlessness inextricably connected? It seems that we can readily differentiate the representation of an effortless from the other two forms of effortlessness. That is, we may appreciate represented effortlessness—of the sculpted torso, painted hand, or a poetic description of a stream, and so forth—without necessarily feeling either that the process of creating the representations is effortless or the medium itself is effortless. Consider Michelangelo’s David standing in a relaxed contrapposto: with his hip protruding slightly, he effortlessly bears his weight on one straight leg with the other resting, gently bent. The statue represents an effortless figure. Yet the statue might very well appear to have been effortfully created and the shapes of the marble might not be perceived as effortless. Or let us return to Raphael’s paining of Pope x. The painting represents an effortless figure, yet one can reasonably see both the process and the medium as effortful. With dance, the connections between effortless representation, process and medium are tighter, yet perhaps still possible to pull apart. A dancer performing the female lead in the ballet La Sylphide, for example, may represent an effortless winged being who is both enormously enticing and unattainable, yet it might not seem that the dancer is effortlessly coming up with her movements. And perhaps one even need not see the movements themselves as effortless, though I imagine that the best representations of effortless creatures in dance also evince effortless movements (effortlessness in the medium).

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One can also at least sometimes identify effortless mediums without identifying an effortless processes or representations. The Golden Gate Bridge may appear effortless, yet it does not appear to have been created effortlessly nor even less does it represent something effortless; for example, it certainly doesn’t represent Grace Kelly. (Might it represent effortlessness or freedom or some other property, a property which is itself effortless? I leave this footnote to Plato aside.) A rock garden may appear effortless while also appearing to have been created with great care (perhaps because the curves suggest an effortless way of movement); and a Glen Gould performance of Art of the Fugue may sound effortless, but not represent effortlessness. Again, other times the connection among these three elements may be tighter: a Chagall painting might seem to be simply thrown together, in part because of the effortless individuals it represents; good writing, as Somerset Maugham put it, may appear, “a happy accident,” but in seeing a piece of poetry or prose as a happy accident one attributes both an effortless process and feels the writing itself to be effortless. Moreover, one is more likely to experience such happy accidents in writing that represents effortless characters than in writing that portrays struggle, in T.S. Elliot’s Possum’s Book of Cats rather than in “The Wasteland.” (Is this because the authors have chosen to match their writing style to their subject matter or does the subject matter itself affect our attributions of effortless style?) It may also be that our attribution of effortless style influence our attribution of effortless represented subjects. And in many, or perhaps most cases when we ascribe effortlessness to bodily movements, we understand the movements as being both effortlessly created and effortless themselves. Fred Astaire, the king of effortlessness in dance, seems to move effortlessly and to come up with his ideas about how to move, or about which steps to do effortlessly (and this last effect may be apparent despite his following set choreography). 2

Bergson on Effortlessness and Grace

On Bergson’s (1889/2001) view, effortlessness, which he closely aligns with grace, is the spilling of one movement right into another.7 With effortless 7  I am not sure that the connection between gracefulness and effortlessness is as tight as Bergson sees it since, as I shall explain later, I understand our attributions of effortlessness to depend in part on our knowledge of the difficultly of the movement; it is not clear that our attributions of gracefulness depend on this, or at least depend on this to the same degree. Clearly, there is much more to say about the relationship between effortlessness and grace,

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movements, according to Bergson, you expect what is going to happen next: “perception of ease in motion passes over into the pleasure of mastering the flow of time and of holding the future in the present” (p. 12). Music that accompanies dance, for Bergson, adds to this effect. As he says, “the rhythm and measures.. [allow] us to foresee to a still greater extent the movements of the dancer.”8 This is an appealing idea, for many of the bodily movements we think of as effortless have a smooth, flowing, predictable quality and we dub many smooth, flowing movements as effortless. For example, when we think of the effortlessness of great athletes or dancers, we might imagine a smooth, perhaps even slow motion, picture of their movements, and when we see individuals walking in an even, perfectly coordinated way, we understand their gait as effortless. Additionally, smooth actions not only appear to be effortless but also generally take less effort to produce than sharp ones, which require a burst of energy at each start and stop. However, although many actions that we understand as effortless do appear smooth and flowing, it is not clear that all effortless movements are like this. A breakdancer’s movements, for example, may appear effortless yet include at least some sharp, jerky movements, and in fencing, a riposte may be quick, sharp, brilliant and effortless. True enough, Michael Jackson’s breakdancing was a preternaturally fluid, but, arguably, even he could include a sharp, effortless, accent now and again. If these examples are accurately described— and there is room to question them, of course—not all effortless actions are smooth. In addition, the sharp accents or quick ripostes, though effortless, may not be predictable from looking at the current movement. Perhaps more apparent, not all fluid movements look effortless. For example, if one notices a tense expression on a performer’s face, a smooth and flowing movement might appear effortful. Or if a movement is smooth, yet extraordinarily slow—not slow as seen on a slow motion film, but physically slow— it might look effortful. This is especially evident in the Japanese dance form Butoh, in which performers often move at a glacial pace. Butoh can be smooth and beautiful, yet look extremely effortful. Moreover, effortful actions, such as Butoh, might also contain, as Bergson saw it, the future in the present. You might now, for example, that a Butoh dancer is going to fall, in an excruciatingly

yet I shall, for the most part, pass over this, as there is already too much to say about effortlessness and its relation to other perhaps less difficult concepts. 8  Ibid., p. 12.

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painful and protracted way, to the bottom of a staircase.9 Yet you may also feel that this fall takes all his effort and then some. Predictability might also occur without either smoothness or effortlessness. A toddler’s steps do not appear effortless, yet, an observer often knows what is coming next; and a parent might sometimes rush over to get ready to catch before the fall has even started. Thus, though often found together, it seems that smooth, flowing, predictable actions are neither necessary nor sufficient for effortless actions. Nonetheless, it may be that smooth, flowing movements, done at a normal pace, without any facial signs of effort, at least often seem effortless. But why might we attribute effortlessness to a sharp movement and why do glacially slow yet smooth movements appear effortful? 3

Spencer on Effortless Bodily Movements

For Spencer, as I mentioned, grace is exemplified by movements “performed with comparatively little effort.” And in line with this view, it does seem that in praising the effortlessness of a dancer or athlete’s movements, we seem to be noting, among other things, an apparent reduction in bodily effort. We may not see his or her movements as requiring little bodily exertion—it would be hard to explain all that sweat if that were the case. Rather, we perceive the movements as efficient. As Spencer notes: “after calling to mind sundry confirmatory facts,” he concludes that “grace, as applied to motion, describes motion that is effected with economy of force.” “A good dancer,” he tells us, “makes us feel that . . . an economy of effort has been achieved.” Effortless bodily movement seems to use just the muscles necessary for the job. But it is not entirely straightforward how to explain what this is. The Tennis player Roger Federer has been noted for, among other things, his effortless playing. He may be putting 100% of his energy into a game. But his playing appears to have no wasted movements. For example, other players when they run for a ball might end up taking a number of small steps at the end to get right where they need to go; Federer gets there with the minimum number. Spencer, if he were to have had the opportunity to watch Federer play, would likely have held that it was because of this efficiency we marvel at his effortless games. However, in dance, the efficiency equation is a bit more complicated, for in dance sometimes many little steps, as in a pas de couru (which involves 9  As does the Swiss Butoh dancer, Imre Thormann, in his 2006 performance at Hiyoshi Taisha Shrine in Japan. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ms7mgs2Nh8 for a youtube excerpt of this remarkable event.

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many fast tiny steps) are exactly what is called for. Or consider a pas de cheval, a movement in which the foot moves from a standing position, sensuously wraps around the ankle and then, after a slight lilt, is extended from the body and lowered down to the floor. Clearly this is not the most direct way to get from point A to point B. Efficient bodily movements in dance, then, cannot be understood as moving with the minimum number of motions or in the most direct way possible from one point to another. Rather, in this context, it seems that an efficient movement is one that involves no superfluous muscle tension. Raised shoulders, for example, will not help one to perform the pas de cheval better, so raised shoulders while doing this step would typically indicate superfluous muscle tension. (Of course, sometime a raised shoulder is an important part of the movement, such as if one is trying to portray coquettishness. But here the movement would not be superfluous.) Perhaps the idea that effortless movements do not involve superfluous muscle tension helps explain some of the apparent counterexamples to the Bergsonian view of effortlessness as involving smooth, predictable flowing movements. Perhaps the breakdancer’s sharp movements might seem to involve no excessive effort, that is, no superfluous muscle use. On the other hand, glacially slow yet smooth movement may appear effortful because we sense both the effortful will power and bodily control. 4

Effortlessness and Difficulty

What else must be present if we are to understand a work of art as effortless? When we attribute effortlessness to bodily movements in dance, it seems that at least in many cases we also see the work as, in some sense, difficult; we see it as difficult, yet appearing easy. Osipova’s effortless leaps are certainly difficult. In classical music, as well, we often attribute effortlessness to pieces that are technically challenging; that is we attribute effortlessness to the medium—the notes played— in light of an underlying difficulty. Even the Golden Gate Bridge seems to accomplish something very difficult—the longest span—with ease. This seems to be part of what we love: accomplishing something difficult with ease, or at least apparent ease. But in what sense is it difficult? I said that we can, at times, separate our attributions of an effortless process from both an effortless medium and representation. For example, we might see a painting as representing an effortless individual yet not think that the process was effortless. Yet, it may be that if the individuals who is observing a work of art is positively convinced that the process is difficult for an artist, then the appearance effortlessness, at least effortlessness of medium and perhaps even of representation may be lessened or destroyed; for effortlessness, it seems is highly

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cognitively penetrable: our beliefs about it, affect how we experience it. Upon listening, you might feel that Glen Gould’s music is effortless (product), yet after watching him play and seeing that it appears difficult for him (or at least uncomfortable, given his odd posture) you might not hear it in quite this same way. Even our perception of effortlessness in an artist’s representation might be affected by our beliefs about how difficult the work seemed to produce. The Renaissance artists held this view and kept their toils hidden so as to not destroy the effortlessness of their represented figures. And although I seem to be able to see the Golden gate Bridge as both effortless (medium) yet not having been created effortlessly, perhaps an engineer who fully understands the difficulty of such an accomplishment would not even be able to see the bridge itself as effortless. So we find difficulty in effortlessness in as much as we see the process as difficult, however, if we understand extremely well just how difficult the process really is, this may lesson or destroy our ability to perceive the medium as effortless. Yet what are we to say of the movements of dancers who are dancing in pieces choreographed using everyday movements? Such movements would not be difficult for us to perform. Do we, then, not appreciate the effortlessness in such movements? The Judson Dance Theater, for example, was known for creating dances out of everyday movements, sometimes even taking untrained individuals to perform the movements. In cases when the individual is untrained, I would say that the value of the dances has nothing to do with its effortless. Though there may be conceptual interest in a dance performance that consists, say, of people of the street moving furniture on stage, we typically do not appreciate the effortlessness of the “dancers” movements” in such a performance. Of course, the movements themselves might not have required effort (if the movement was walking, for example, rather than moving heavy furniture), but the movements were not aesthetically effortless. Or at least, they may not have been effortless. For there are those charmed individuals who, without any training, seem to just have a naturally effortless gate. Certain individuals just seem to embody aesthetic effortlessness in the way the move about in everyday situations. But even here perhaps we can find that the difficulty resides in how they are moving. They are moving in a way— so smoothly and evenly—that would be difficult for us.10 The seagull spreads

10  If this is correct, those who walk effortlessly should not see effortlessness (as opposed to merely smooth even movement) in the gate of others, for they do not see it as anything that would be difficult for them to do. Or at least they would not see it to the same extent and those who are not endowed with such grace. Whether this is true, however, I do not know.

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its wings and effortlessly soars. It’s not hard for the seagull to do this, but it is an impossibility for us, and so we see it glide unencumbered. In other cases, where everyday movements comprise a dance, yet such movements are performed by dancers, we might value the effortlessness of such dances. Yet such dances involve difficulty as well. For example, it would be quite difficult to perform the everyday sorts of movements that show up in some of Merce Cunningham’s work in the way his dancers perform them; the movements may be ordinary walking or running, but the dancers perform them in an extraordinary way.11 5

Objective, Apparent and Intentional Ease

Effortlessness involves an element of difficultly, or so I have argued, but what is it that we admire about this difficulty? In certain cases of natural effortlessness, such as the seagull’s effortless soar, the action is not difficult to perform for the one who is performing it. Yet we are in awe that it can be done at all— we certainly could not soar—and done with such ease. However, how are we to understand the effortlessness of actions that require long hours of deliberate practice to perfect? In particular, when we admire the effortlessness of a dancer or athlete, do we marvel at the fact that someone has mastered a movement to such a high degree that it has actually become easy for her to perform? Or is it that we value the appearance, that is, the artist or athlete’s ability to make what is difficult for her appear easy? In most sports, athletes do not deliberately try to make their movements look easy (exceptions might be gymnastics, figure skating and other such endeavors). However, even in basketball, one can still ask: do we cherish the actual ease of the athlete’s movements, or the (unintentional) appearance of effortlessness in movements that are, for the athlete herself, extremely difficult to perform. Finally, in cases where there is a deliberate attempt to create effortlessness, do we, in addition to treasuring the beauty of the apparent effortlessness of the movement, treasure the ability to create the guise of effortless? I suggested earlier that our attributions of effortlessness to the medium (such as the bodily movements of a dancer) depends on our familiarity with how difficult the action is to perform. And if you fully understand that a move11  We may understand some examples of everyday movements in dance as representing ordinary movements, such as the stage sweeper, while others as ordinary movements that comprise the abstract dance, such as when ordinary walking and running comprise some of the dance movements. In either case, however, when such movements are valued as effortless, it seems that they can’t be done, in the way they are done, by just anyone.

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ment is difficult to perform, for the performer, you may be inclined to not see the movement as effortless. But sometimes, even if you are familiar with the difficulty of a movement, you may be able to perceive it as (merely) apparently effortless. Or at least, this is what my own experience suggests. With movements that I am very familiar with, and that I know are difficult, I am less likely to think that the movements have actually become easy for the performer, though I still may relish the apparent ease of those movements. Similarly, sports journalists, who I assume frequently have practical knowledge of the skilled movement they write about, often couple their praise of an athlete’s effortlessness with an acknowledgement that the effortlessness is only apparent. Choi’s game may have looked effortless, “yet,” it is pointed out, “it was anything but.” It seems that what is being noted in such cases is not that the athlete’s movements are easy for her to perform, but rather that they appear easy. Thus, it might be that the more one knows about a type of highly skilled movement, the less likely one is to see it as actually easy rather than as merely appearing easy. It may be that in thinking about the effort of one’s own movements, we place more weight on whether the task requires effortful will power, (than, say, whether it requires great muscular strength) and thus whether we judge an action as requiring a great effort often turns on whether we judge it as requiring great will power. And whether we determine that an action requires great will power often depends, it seems, on whether the action is pleasurable. Doing the dishes, though in some objective sense is an easy task, is an activity I find unpleasant—especially when I have waited until midnight—and thus it requires will power to do and, and thus I judge it as effortful. A dancer, in contrast, may perform something that is in some objective sense effortful, in watching him I might think of his movements, not as presenting the guise of effortlessness, but as truly effortless (with regard to the will) if I assume that the movement is pleasurable and thus requires little will power. Over and above the appreciation of apparent ease, is the appreciation of the guise of ease, that is, the deliberate creation of ease. Castiglione held that a courtier’s manner should not only appear effortless but also give no indication of the great pains the courtier must take in order to create this appearance, for it was believed by him that the courtier’s effortlessness, or sprezzatura, would be destroyed by any suggestion that the process of creating an effortless manner itself required effort. The great artists of his time, influenced by his work, believed this as well and kept their labors carefully hidden from view in order to preserve the effortlessness, or sprezzatura, of their paintings.12 No doubt, 12  The effortlessness in these works is in the representation. Rafael’s portrait of Pope Leo X, for example, reveals a man in tranquil thought with his hands so smooth and delicate that

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there is something correct about this; as I have been emphasizing, our background knowledge seems to affect our attributions of effortlessness. However, it might be that one can see a bodily movement as effortless, even if it is produced by mental effort, or will power; we might call this a “studied effortlessness.” Yet, distinct from this, at times one might appreciate the guise itself, that is, not the effortlessness of a movement, but the difficult process of making an action appear (to those not in the know) effortless. 6

The Perception and Pleasure of Effortlessness

How is it that we perceive effortless movement? Most simply, while an effortless piano cadenza is heard, an effortless bodily movement is seen. But is there something special about the way we see effortless movement? Bergson (1889/2001) thought that our perception of grace had to do with “physical sympathy;” we feel, in watching a graceful movement that our bodily, though stationary, is in some way attuned to the body of the graceful individual. As I understand this, it is the process by which upon watching someone else move, one feels as if one were moving in a similar way oneself. One might call this “proprioceptive sympathy,” and what I have elsewhere called “proprioceiving another’s movement.13 Is proprioceptive sympathy relevant to our perception of effortlessness? The question is not easy to answer. It does seem that part of the experience of watching effortless dance involves an experience, in the observer, of bodily ease. However, while knowing that someone is putting large amounts of effort into a movement reduces the appearance of effortlessness, the more practically familiar you are with the movement you are seeing, the greater your proprioceptive sympathy with the movement. In watching a ballet dancer, for example, I am less likely to sympathetically proprioceive her effortless bodily movements—as I know from practice how difficult they are—than I am when watching basketball. Nonetheless, in watching dance may feel a strong proprioceptive sympathy with her movements. So proprioceptive sympathy would appear to be only part of the story.

they appear not only to being utterly relaxed as they rest but to never have engaged in manual labor at all, and his portrait of the great Castiglione, himself, reveals an individual who embodies the ideal described in the Book of the Courtier. 13  Montero (2006a), (2006b) see also Montero (2011) wherein I discuss a number of the ideas that have come up in this chapter.

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For Bergson, however, proprioceptive sympathy accounts, at least in a large part, for our pleasure in watching what he thought of as higher grace. Such movements, he seemed to think, were effortless but not just effortless. We take pleasure in them, he seems to think because of their “affinity with moral sympathy;” and he tells us that “anything that we call very graceful we imagine ourselves able to detect . . . some suggestion of a possible movements towards ourselves of a virtual even nascent sympathy,” criticizing Herbert Spencer, for claiming that what we appreciate is merely reduced effort. How could account for why grace affords us such pleasure, if it is just the saving of effort. I think Spencer’s (1868/2008) view, however, might have something to recommend it since if the movements we dub as effortless are movements that would be for us difficult to perform yet appear to be performed with reduced effort, then part of the reason why effortless action is attractive could be that it reveals a superfluity of fitness. Of course, proprioceptive sympathy could be part of the reason we admire effortless movement as well. Whether this is in part because proprioceptive sympathy makes us feel as if we were attuned to our fellow human beings, as Bergson seemed to think, I am not so sure, but it does seem that upon watching effortless movement, one of the things we enjoy is the feeling of performing difficult movements in a smooth, coordinated, efficient way (and this, perhaps, can be experienced even if we now great work was put into creating this coordinated efficiency.) But perhaps most importantly, effortless movements are pleasurable because they are beautiful. And it may be that we recognize them as beautiful because we both sympathetically proprioceive them and see them as revealing a superfluity of fitness.14 7

A Call to Further Study

As I have pointed out, the concept of effortlessness has been thought of as important by many great thinkers throughout history and, despite the relative lack of attention it receives in academia, it seems to have a profound effect on us. But what exactly is effortlessness? How do we perceive it? And why do we 14  Is every attribution of effortlessness normative? Is effortlessness necessarily an aesthetic attribute? Or might there be cases in which we attribute it but do not intend to make an evaluative judgment? I am not sure how to answer these questions. The term effortless is usually used with a positive connotation, however, as it is not the case that all dance should look effortless, one can find if not the term, then perhaps at least the notion of effortlessness being used with a negative connotation.

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like it? I have, in the preceding remarks, tried to address these questions to some extent as well as to have inspired others to pursue further study into the nature of effortlessness. References Bergson, H. (1889/2001), Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson (Dover). Castiglione, B. (1975/1528), The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull, (Penguin). Christensen, J. (2012), “The Color, Romance, and Impact of the Golden Gate at 75,” in The Atlantic Monthly, May 27. Hammermeister, K. (2002), The German Aesthetic Tradition, (Cambridge University Press). Louden, L. (1968), “Sprezzatura in Raphael and Castiglione,” Art Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 43–49. Martin, J. (1941), “Dolin work given by ballet group,” New York Times, Nov. 29. Montero (1999), “The Body Problem,” Noûs, 33:3, pp. 183–20. ―――. (2001), “Post-Physicalism,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8:2, pp. 61–80. ―――. (2009), “What is the Physical?” in Oxford Handbook in the Philosophy of Mind, McLaughlin B. and A. Beckermann, eds. Oxford University Press, pp. 173–188. ―――. (2006a), Proprioceiving Someone Else’s Movement,” Philosophical Explorations, pp. 149–161. ―――. (2006b), “Proprioception as an Aesthetic Sense,” Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64:2, pp. 231–242. ―――. (2011), “Effortless Bodily Movement,” Philosophical Topics, 39:1, pp. 67–79. Spencer, H. (1868/2008), “Gracefulness” in Essays vol. ii, 315–17 (Kosta Press).

CHAPTER 5

The Dancing Body and the Revelation of Prepersonal Existence through Art Xavier Escribano 1

Introduction: Dance, A Forgotten Art

In a memorable article paying tribute to Merce Cunningham, who at the age of 90 continued to explore the possibilities of body movement through his choreographies, art critic Andrés Ibáñez delivers a passionate eulogy of contemporary dance as an art form that expresses not only the glory of the human body but also its tragedy. Among his memories of unforgettable performances by representative but very different artists such as Martha Graham, Trisha Brown or Sankai Juku and others, there is one vision that stands out especially: “I remember Kazuo Ohno representing a twisted cherry tree in the air and I felt for the first time that I was seeing a human being” (Ibáñez, 2009). It is a most suggestive observation, and yet at the same time enigmatic. It does not just highlight the expressive power of a great dancer in a brilliant performance. It also suggests the capacity for revelation or manifestation of a profound meaning that the art of dance itself possesses, through the body, gesture and movement. Let us ask, then, in this case, what this revelation is that the contorted body of Kazuo Ohno affords us. Evidently, his gestures do not refer to the satisfaction of any physiological need or to any action related to everyday life. Rather it expresses a peculiar relationship with a natural being, in this case a cherry tree, which has somehow been internalized and then recreated in the flesh. In Kazuo Ohno’s dancing, that we have taken here as an example, the human being is shown as a being which is open corporally to other beings, one able to identify itself with them and communicate internally with them, and able to reproduce in its own structure the characteristic feature, the ‘essential gesture’ (cf. Jousse 1974, 52), of any cosmic reality (be it a cherry tree, a snake, a hurricane, and so on). This universal openness to the multiple reality of the world is expressed, in the case of dance, in the body itself and not in any representation or production external to it, as the celebrated verses of W.B. Yeats put it: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the

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dancer from the dance?”1 Thus, when the human body transcends its organic reality and takes on the gesture or characteristic action of the other in its own capabilities of gesture or movement, i.e. when it “uses its own parts as a general system of symbols for the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 48), it provides us with an experience of meaning which grants us a greater understanding of human nature. The countless metamorphoses of which a dancer is capable, the ability to assume one form after another and to abandon them without being committed or linked to any of them, leads Paul Valéry, in his famous dialogue L’âme et la danse, to compare the dancing body to a flame. “Ô Flamme! . . .” Socrates exclaims ecstatically on seeing the constantly changing forms of the extraordinary dancer Athiké (Valéry 1960, 171). But fire, the most subtle of the four elements, one which is almost immaterial, has traditionally been considered a reflection of the spirit, its incarnation or material epiphany. That dancing flame of the human body, as described or depicted by Valéry manifests a meaning that puts into question the rigid distinctions of Cartesian dualism. We may recall, with Merleau-Ponty, that for Descartes there are only two ways of being: We have become accustomed, through the influence of the Cartesian tradition, to disengage from the object: the reflective attitude simultaneously purifies the common notions of body and soul by defining the body as the sum of its parts with no interior, and the soul as a being wholly present to itself without distance. [. . .] There are two senses, and two only, of the word ‘exist’: one exists as a thing or else one exists as a consciousness. (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 230) Rather, to paraphrase the poetic language of Valéry, it seems as if the dancing body is able to break the impassible boundaries between ‘thing’ and ‘consciousness’ and aspires to own or emulate some of the prerogatives of the spirit: its freedom, its ubiquity. It is not enough to occupy a certain place, as an inert object does. Consequently, through gesture and movement, it itself generates its own space, its own temporality, and causes to emerge around itself the dimensions and limits within which it chooses to move. Nor is it simply resigned to be a particular thing, a closed-in ‘this’ or ‘that’. Exercising its proteic processing capacity, it points to an unlimited universe of possible paths. In short, like the poet said, “Being a mere thing, it bursts into events!” (Étant chose, il éclate en événements!) (Valéry 1960, 170–173). 1  Verses from the poem “Among School Children” in The Tower (1928).

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For Socrates, Phaedrus and Eryximachus, the characters of Valéry’s socratic dialogue, the contemplation of Athiké’s dance is not only an occasion of entertainment but a particularly intense experience in which a deep sense of the human condition manifests itself. Note that the attitude that these characters illustrate does not correspond to the traditional neglect that art itself has suffered from philosophy. The thesis that art is worthy of greater attention from philosophers to the extent that “it provides heightened, intensified, and highly integrated experiences of meaning” is one of the fundamental assertions that Mark Johnson makes, following John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934), in The Meaning of the Body (2007): In sharp contrast with this traditional philosophical disparagement of the arts, most people turn to art not just because of its entertainment value, but precisely because it is meaningful and because it helps us to understand our human condition. We all want to be entertained, but beyond that, we want meaning in art. We are not mistaken when we look for meaning in music, poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, drama, and architecture. (Johnson 2007, 208) It is surprising, however, that an author like Johnson, who believes that “[t]o discover how meaning works, we should turn first to gesture, social interaction, ritual, and art” ( Johnson 2007, 208), did not choose dance as the quintessential example, where—in my view—all those elements listed above are concentrated in a prominent and paradigmatic manner. Johnson, preferring to devote his attention to poetry, painting and music, is further evidence of the pertinent opinion of Maxine Sheets-Johnston when she states that dance is an art form commonly forgotten or barely considered even in the field of ­aesthetics (Sheets-Johnston 2009, 306). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an author who will largely guide my analysis below, represents such a case. On the one hand, he devotes considerable attention to aesthetics, mainly painting and literature, as the ambient of the manifestation of meaning in a nascent condition, the logos of the world of perception. On the other hand, despite this, Merleau-Ponty rarely uses the example of dance to illustrate the nascent condition which emerges from the contact of the body with the world.2 Sheets-Johnstone finds that a more serious treatment of dance in Merleau-Ponty is lacking. It hardly appears in his work and always 2  In it, Merleau-Ponty follows in the footsteps of other founding phenomenologists who, as Gediminas Karoblis observes, “mentioned dance only casually as an example of bodily skill or entertainment, and made no efforts at phenomenological understanding or description

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takes a second place: “Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic judgment of dance is surprisingly ill-informed and appears utterly lacking an experiential base” (SheetsJohnstone 2009, 307). The absence of a careful reflection on dance as an art of body movement is even more surprising considering that, for Merleau-Ponty, the understanding of bodily existence is necessarily linked to the exercise itself, the practice of that bodily existence, and cannot be adequately provided for by the theoretical consideration alone: “I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it myself, and except insofar as I am a body which rises toward the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 87). It is not my pretension to think that my contribution here might in some measure remedy this situation. However, as a philosopher interested in the phenomenology of embodiment I must admit that I feel strongly attracted by the way that dance shows what it is to be a living being endowed with the capability for gesture, expression and movement. I think there is no art form which realizes this goal more fully than dance. My aim, therefore, is to identify the reasons for my own fascination with dance. I must also add that, to my detriment, I myself am not a dancer. Just as Paul Valéry, who in his lecture Philosophie de la danse acknowledged that he was hazarding his reflections as a man who does not dance (“un homme qui ne danse pas”), I must say that my only experience of this wonderful art is as a spectator who observes, but who is at the same time caught up in the dance. Despite this shared failing with the eminent French poet and essayist, my point of departure is precisely the conclusion of his brilliant lecture: I wanted to show how this art, far from being a futile distraction, far from being a specialty that is limited to the production of shows, for the entertainment of the eyes that see it or the bodies that are given over to it, is simply a general poetic of the action of living beings (une poésie générale de l’action des êtres vivants). (Valéry 1957, 1402) Understanding the human body requires paying special attention to dance, since dance is the general poetic of bodily existence. In dance this is revealed and made clearly visible, and its almost limitless possibilities of articulations are explored, and it ultimately celebrates its glory and laments its tragedy. What I have just stated corresponds to the three themes that will follow in my

of it” (Karoblis 2010, 67). For a general vision of the treatment of dance in phenomenological tradition see: (Karoblis 2010; Behnke 1997).

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article: dance as revelation (expression), dance as exploration (creation), and dance as a celebration ( joy) of our embodied existence. 2

Dance as Revelation of the Latent

The dramatic actor who takes on the role of a character in a theatre play in a certain manner expresses or highlights the poetics of human action and passion insofar as they relate to a specific individual. His performance, in which gestures and words, emotions and reactions, attitudes and decisions, etc. are intertwined, refer to the biographical dimension of our existence, that is, the existence of an agent which through actions and passions weaves the story of his own life. However, we cannot forget that man is not just an ‘agent’, but more precisely an ‘embodied agent’ (Taylor 1989, 1) who does not just inhabit a historical world, but also a physical world. In that sense, it is necessary to note that: round the human world which each of us has made for himself is a world in general terms to which one must first of all belong in order to be able to enclose oneself in the particular context of a love or an ambition. (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 96–97) We therefore recognize, around our initiatives and around that strictly individual project which is oneself, a zone of generalized existence and of projects already formed, significances which trail between ourselves and things. (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 523) It could therefore be said that the tapestry of existence is not woven solely with actions and decisions, but also by those rhythms, cycles, dimensions or structures—and all the meanings, so to speak, bound up with them—that link the ‘embodied agent’ as a result of his incarnation to a physical world and conditions the exercise of his freedom for him: Insofar as I inhabit a ‘physical world’, in which consistent ‘stimuli’ and typical situations recur—and not merely the historical world in which situations are never exactly comparable—my life is made up of rhythms which have not their reason in what I have chosen to be, but their ­condition in the humdrum setting which is mine. (Merleau-Ponty 1945/ 2002, 96)

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The direct expression or the representation of this ‘world in general terms’, that ‘zone of generalized existence’ or those ‘rhythms’ which underlie, support and even set the standards of human action, are not usually the domain of a dramatic actor.3 The double movement of inspiration and expiration that takes place in the act of breathing, for example, the alternating cycle of wakefulness and sleep, the earth’s gravitational pull on our body, the permanent contact of our feet with the ground beneath our feet, above which we raise ourselves, on which we fall or we rest, the amazing familiarity of our hands with the objects that they handle, the almost choreographic moves of our gestures in response to the gestures and movements of others, are not the prerogative of any single individual; they do not characterize a character, but rather are supposed in any characterization. Horizontality and verticality, along with narrowness or breadth, are ‘significant anthropological directions’ as Binswanger said, but they are not the focus of our attention, nor do we consider them separately. They appear avoidable in the narrative we give of our individual avatars (see: Binswanger 1996). Thus the set of conditions and meanings that support or underpin options and free choices in their generality and anonymity usually go unnoticed or are simply taken as understood. We decide, for example, to go for a pleasant stroll in a nearby park. Although it may seem irrelevant, it is certainly a personal decision which could be included in our biography. But what goes unnoticed, that to which we pay no attention at all, is the meaning of what constitutes ‘to put a foot forward’ or simply to ‘begin walking’.4 The condition of a typical biographical or personal action such as moving towards a place is a fact that we might call ‘prebiographical’ or ‘prepersonal’, which remains supposed and unnoticed in itself, but at the same time supports the action and makes it possible. 3  Nevertheless, a method of teaching drama such as that of Jacques Lecoq, for example, presupposes having previously explored the predramatic territory of the corporal relationship with natural reality. Before immersing the students in the different dramatic styles (which he called “territories”) of tragedy, comedy or melodrama, Lecoq directs his attention for a period of one year—half the duration of the total learning programme—to the previous relationship (i.e., prior to any definite character or dramatic situation) between the actor’s body and the elements, shapes and movements of nature (See: Lecoq 1997, 43 and ff.). That level of corporeal relationship with reality is implicit in, and underlies, everyday situations of life or expressive drama situations. Only by making explicit that level of prepersonal relationship between the body and the world can one be aware of it and learn and explore its expressive possibilities (Lecoq 1997, 48). 4  Of course, one might point to some works, such as Eloge de la marche (2000) by David Le Breton (Paris: Éditions Métailé) where the act of walking is treated anthropologically and philosophically.

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Focusing our attention on, or directing it to, this deed that was initially ignored, the mere fact of ‘taking a step’, implies, to start with, ignoring the identity of whoever is walking, even avoiding the existential situation in which the act occurs, moving the body to a field of generality and anonymity in which we obscure that which is usually the center of our attention (the personal or biographical significance of the action) and from an athematic depth, so to speak, rescue the simple phenomenon of motion. By placing it in this way before our eyes in its strangeness (since its everyday nature is to remain hidden or wrapped up in other meanings of the personal sphere) and in its wonder (because even the simplest gesture can be considered a true prodigious act), we are performing a poetic act or revelation or expression. It is a poetry of prepersonal existence, of those poetic rhythms, movements, links, dimensions in which we are living and dwelling as embodied subjects. This poetic revelation of our embodied existence, insomuch as a prepersonal condition of personal existence, allows us to become aware of it and even be able to celebrate and savor it. And that is precisely what dance does, as evidenced by Eryximachus and Socrates in the aforementioned text by Paul Valéry L’âme et la danse. They are completely in awe of the first movement made in Athiké’s dance, which is actually a simple first step, and it causes the first of them to exclaim: “Dear Socrates, she teaches us what we do, clearly showing our souls, what our bodies do obscurely. In the light of her legs, our immediate movements seem as miracles” (Valéry 1960, 157). Merce Cunningham himself seems to understand his own artistic work with the same perspective. As he himself says, his work is reduced to three elements: body, movement, space. His interest lies not in the representation of something, but in exploring all the possibilities of bodily motion in space: For me, the subject of dance is dancing itself. It is not meant to represent something else, whether psychological, literary or aesthetic. It relates much more to everyday experience, daily life, watching people as they move on the streets. (Cunningham 1985, 139) His dance is an ode to the corporal manner of living, experiencing or ‘inhabiting’ space: “What I was trying to find out was how people move, within my own experience, which I kept trying to enlarge.” (Cunningham 1985, 43). That task of revealing the latent meaning, the logos of the world of perception is the converging objective which Merleau-Ponty establishes as much for phenomenology as for modern art. Thus, not only phenomenology, but art itself, as set out by Merleau-Ponty in his well-known Preface from his Phénoménologie de la perception (1945), are intended to perform a revelation

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of that ‘ground’ of meaning that remains hidden from view and is not spoken of. By doing so, phenomenology converges with artistic enterprise in the modern world: It is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valéry or Cézanne—by reason of the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being. In this way it merges into the general effort of modern thought. (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, xvi) Making use of the contrast between a dramatic actor, playing a character, and a dancer, revealing the dimensions, the structures and the rhythms in which all human action is encompassed, the distinction can be established intuitively between a ‘personal history’ (which can be told in a biography) and a ‘primordial historicity’ (latent, underlying, common to all human beings, and in this sense anonymous ) that only an artistic task of explicitation as dance, moving in the realm of the prepersonal, can manifest. While the ‘personal self’ would be the subject of the history in the first sense, we might call the subject of this anonymous, prepersonal and general existence, as Merleau-Ponty sometimes does, the ‘natural self’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 198). Indeed, beneath the thinking subject, the reflective and active subject which is the protagonist of this personal existence, we find the body as a ‘natural self’, which draws us into a web of meanings and links with the world which precede and are always assumed in any action. The body, as a ‘natural self’, without any prior decision or deliberation by the reflexive subject, achieves “a prepersonal cleaving to the general form of the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 97) on the basis of which personal existence is built. For this reason, while providing us with a set of references and basic dimensions in which we find ourselves implicated, or towards which we incline, without us having previously decided, it can be said that the corporal dynamic sketches out existence, but it cannot itself be considered a full existence in a personal sense: Bodily existence which runs through me, yet does so independently of me, is only the barest raw material of a genuine presence in the world. Yet at least it provides the possibility of such presence, and establishes our first consonance with the world. (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 192) Personal history and primordial historicity, a personal subject and a prepersonal subject, are not strata that are merely superimposed. It is not a matter of generating a new dualism, which would be the result of a simple a­ bstraction.

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Between the generalized and anonymous existence of the ‘natural self’ and the individual existence of the ‘personal self’ there is a real exchange, conditioning or interlinkage: “There is an exchange between generalized and individual existence, each receiving and giving something” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 522). On the one hand, personal existence supports and retakes a vital movement that has been previously outlined in the prepersonal dimension of existence “bodily existence [. . .] continually sets the prospect of living before me” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 191); on the other hand, it is always possible to disconnect oneself or abandon oneself in the rhythm or cadence of bodily existence, as happens, for example, when one succumbs to sleep: “it is the possibility enjoyed by my existence of discarding itself, of making itself anonymous and passive” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 190). To put it another way: from our individual and personal existence we are at all times ready to let ourselves be carried off to the sensorimotor area of our existence and once there to respond only to the requirements that occur at that level: Even when normal and even when involved in situations with other people, the subject, insofar as he has a body, retains every moment the power to withdraw from it. At the very moment when I live in the world, when I am given over to my plans, my occupations, my friends, my memories, I can close my eyes, lie down, listen to the blood pulsating in my ears, lose myself in some pleasure or pain, and shut myself up in this anonymous life which subtends my personal one. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2002, 191) Thus, two possible movements are sketched out: one is the movement of the sublimation of our prepersonal existence into personal existence, “the sublimation of biological into personal existence” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 97): we take up the invitation or proposition to live out our senses, our most immediate emotional reactions and movements, and we follow them or amplify them in a personal life that is under the control of our will; the other movement is an inverse operation, involving disconnecting or uncoupling ourselves in our prepersonal life, in the anonymous general rhythm or cadence that is always a backdrop to our actions. But neither movement completely overrides the other level, “without, in other words, being able either to reduce the organism to its existential self, or itself to the organism” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 97). Dance, then, is the poetic revelation of that ‘natural self’ which sustains our personal and individual life. Dance could be interpreted as a way to move oneself or take oneself to the sensorimotor area of our existence and once there to make it poetically manifest, that is, artistically. The dancing body allows us

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to see the world and its primordial meanings before human action touches them and fills them with content, free choice, the development of a specific vital project, or biography. It supposes a return to the Adamic world, so to speak, of the first encounter with things, emotions and pure reactions still void of the content given to them by history. The poetic body sings of the quintessential in our relations with the world, as the result of a radical simplification, and even of a depersonalization, since it achieves the revelation of a life previous to all biography, or better still, of life itself (of the life of the eyes, of the life of the hands, the life of the whole body in motion) that underlies all biography. The artistic unveiling of the body-world relationship in its most basic and essential manifestations highlights somehow the prepersonal grounding of our personal life, the general possibilities of an anonymous subject, before the particular life journey that shapes identity, the life of a subject when it is still not a specific I, or has a personal story, when ascending or falling, being alone or accompanied only by existential possibilities with a general anthropological meaning. If the body is, as Merleau-Ponty would say, our general way of owning a world (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 192), then the dancing body has the ability to expose and celebrate that general structure that the ‘individual I’ will make concrete in a specific biography. 3

Dance as Exploration of the Possible

Dance, understood as a general poetic of the action of living beings, makes possible the expressive revelation of what is latent, of the prepersonal substrate of personal life, as we have seen above. At the same time, it can also be said, as choreographer and researcher Ivar Hageendoorn observes, that “[a] dance performance can be seen as a journey through the state space of all possible movements” (Hagendoorn 2003, 221). The possible movement is present, at least potentially, in every movement which is actually made, which is only one out of the infinite number of possible movements. An exploration of the possible movements, that leads far beyond the limited number of habitual movements, may be done haphazardly, as Merce Cunningham, for example, did in his choreography Suite by Chance, in which he decided at random all the possibilities of movement, or they can be examined in a systematic way, as Hagendoorn did “taking into account the workings of the motor system and the principles of aesthetic experience as implied by the properties of the visual system” (Hagendoorn 2003, 221). It is precisely dance that makes us discover the poverty of our habitual gestures, how far we are from our own expressive possibilities, and the gestural

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and dynamic marvel that we possess but hardly notice. Exploring the possibilities of body movement means freeing the body, somehow or other, from the rigidity of cultural modeling and some of the habits which socially transmitted ‘body techniques’5 have inculcated into it. The conscious attempt to avoid an acquired habit allows one not only to transcend it or free oneself from it, but also to become aware of its existence. “People mostly will step off the curb with the right foot. And go up again with the same foot, and suddenly in the dance, you have to step up with your left foot” (Cunningham 1985, 68). This exercise, through prioritizing the less usual foot, is at one and the same time a means of becoming aware of a motor habit, an act of freedom as regards this habit, and an exploration of other possibilities. These types of investigations6 are carried out systematically by Hagendoorn in search of greater awareness and freedom of movement: Habits are unconscious and can therefore get in the way of desired movements. [. . .] when improvising, dancers also tend unconsciously to repeat certain movements. [. . .] some dancers’ habits may constitute a personal style. The issue, however, is freedom: freedom from constraints and freedom to choose. (Hagendoorn, 2003) The reflection on the spatiality of one’s own body and motility, as discussed in Phénoménologie de la perception, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, seems very appropriate at this point. The French phenomenologist distinguishes between an ‘objective or positional spatiality’ and an ‘oriented or situational spatiality’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 115). The first is that which corresponds to any physical object and the human body itself considered as a physical body, whose position in space can be established objectively and externally through using certain coordinates. Unlike the latter, the ‘oriented or situational spatiality’ can only be attributed to living corporeal beings, which not only ‘are’ in space, as if inert objects, but which ‘inhabit’ space, and experience that spatiality. This experienced or inhabited space is full of vital meanings which polarize, manage or motivate action. By virtue of this ‘oriented or situational spatiality’ the human body inhabits space in a dynamic manner, linking or tying itself 5  Marcel Mauss uses the concept of ‘body techniques’ (techniques du corps) to refer to “the ways in which men, in every society, in a traditional manner know how to use their body” (Mauss 2008, 365). 6  Precisely one of the improvisation techniques developed by Hagendoorn, among many others (‘changing the leading movement’, ‘motor schemas’ or ‘fixed-point technique’, etc.) is that of ‘reversing the act limb’ or simply ‘reversals’ (Hagendoorn 2003, 224).

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through perception and movement to whatever object or tasks or possible behavior. The same body is experienced by the subject as a set of powers or capacities for action which link it to a particular situation and direct it towards it. The question to be asked here is this: does being ‘tied’ to a certain world, in a concrete spatial situation, mean or imply being ‘chained’ to such a world? That would be the case of the living animal body, having a finite number of instinctive responses, but would it also be the case for humans? What would the peculiar bodily spatiality of the human being consist of? In the human case, the spatiality of situation that presents us with specific tasks or possible responses in a given context can always be suspended or superseded, through the power of imaginative projection that itself creates the situation. Not only is there a spaciality of situation, but also the ability to transcend any given situation. This possibility, which has naturally to do with the freedom of human response from the world of surrounding stimuli, is expressed bodily in the possibility of ‘abstract movements’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 119). Unlike ‘concrete movement’, which is the body’s response to a given situation, ‘abstract motion’ is the exclusively human ability to decouple the body voluntarily from any specific situation requiring a response or a particular behavior here and now. The human being, through ‘abstract motion’, creates the situation itself stemming from its own initiative or spontaneity. It is to slide the body, as it were, into a virtual situation and for the body to behave in that situation according to the new meanings imaginatively projected there. That is precisely what happens in dance. In this case there is a reversal of, as Merleau-Ponty expresses it, “the natural relationship in which the body stands to its environment, and a human productive power must reveal itself through the density of being” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 129). It is no longer an oriented or situated body that responds vitally to a given situation, but the poetic or creative body, that through movement and gesture itself defines the situation. As Sheets-Johnston maintains: The inherent qualitative dynamics of movement come to the fore in dance: rather than simply taking place in space and in time, movement creates its own space, time, and force and thereby a particular dynamic that informs the dance every step of the way and in fact constitutes its uniqueness. (Sheets-Johnston 2012, 49) Indeed, dance (and in a different manner, mime or drama also) shows, in a plastic manner, the human capacity to remove the body from a given situation and to open itself up through spontaneous or autonomous behavior to

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any possible or imagined situation. It performs, as it were, in a creative fissure in space. Dissociating the living body from any particular situation seems to plunge it into immobility and nothingness, but this only happens in order to be able to represent some other reality in that significant space for body movement. Dance (which supposes the domination of body movements and reveals the body as an organ of free movement in space) dissociates or removes the body and its movement from the specific situations in which we all find ourselves every day, i.e. the practical solicitations of any moment, and which make the body conjure up, through its own means of expression, new situations that constitute a space of exploration, of reflection, of living and of the recreation of some other reality. In its expressive and poetic function, the body “opens the way to co-existence and once more (in the active sense) acquires significance beyond itself” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 191). Dance, whose first consideration is to remove the body from daily interaction with things and place it in a spatiality which is apparently empty, seems to bring the body out of the world, and abandon it to nothingness. However, it is precisely the mere presence of the body in empty space, disconnected from any given situation, in a state of uncertainty that appears to be previous to any concrete history, which points towards the whole, since the slightest movement or gesture opens up the possibility of creating any kind of new situation whatsoever. The mere presence of the body in the creative space of dance embodies the point of intersection between nothingness and everything, the tension between both of these and their mutual conditioning, something which is distinctively human. The mere presence of this dancing or poetic body in space directs our gaze towards a “nothingness” that Paul Valéry would say “strives to be everything” (Valéry 1960, 171). Dance takes us to a place, coinciding in a way with childhood, where gestures have not been determined in advance, to a language in a state of birth, where there are still many possible routes to explore. In empty space, the dancer’s body experiences the inebriation of the world yet to be made. Disconnecting oneself from any urgent need and all pragmatic function, the dancing body takes us to a primordial space, a world before the world began, in which it is possible to show, at least in a nascent condition, the limitless possibilities of embodied existence. 4

Dance as Celebration of the Existent

The human body is not confined to the expression of emotions or intentions, as too is the case in the animal world. It has the ability, through its gestures

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and movements, to symbolize other realities, to make them actual by embodying them. Such are elements or forces of nature as fire, or the waves of the ocean, or a hurricane or myriad animal forms (as in Solo, an eight-minute piece by Merce Cunnigham in which the choreography shifts from the one animal image to another: a bird, a snake, a lion . . .); or universal human relationships or emotions, such as loneliness, trust, frenzy, farewell or grief (as in Martha Graham’s Lamentation). In all these cases the symbolic capacity of the human body—as noted by Jean-Louis Chrétien—is not based on its appearance, but on its action (Chrétien 2005, 26). The body does not symbolize by what it seems to be, that is, by its appearance or morphology, but through what it does, for its ability to identify with the essential gesture or action of each being by transferring its own flesh and bones to these elements. This ability for universal identification through movement and gestuality— facilitated by the almost limitless capacity for articulation of the parts of the body which the art of dance and movement possesses—shows that the human body “uses its own parts as a general system of symbols for the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 48), as a kind of dwelling for all of reality that envelops us, or as the ancients said, as microcosms reflecting macrocosms. What highlights the poetics of bodily movement is the fact that, to use a well-known Aristotelian statement, the body is also, in a way, all things,7 since it is able to revive and recreate itself, and let itself be transformed by them, and be transfigured into them, thanks to a ‘symbolism of indivision’ (Merleau-Ponty 1995, 289) which breaks down the barriers between beings (Valéry 1960, 173) and revives the joy of belonging to a universe that is not alien, because the dancing body is able to reveal this basic co-naturality with the cosmos as a whole, a kind of “vital communication with the world which makes it present as a familiar setting of our life” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 61). Dance, art, gestural expressiveness and movement of celebration can be said to be, as Higinio Marín aptly states, a kind of ‘memory of Paradise’, an event that moves its participants to feel: that they are at one with themselves, with others and with the universe, that is, to represent not with words but with movements that ‘we are one’, and that between us and the cosmos our original community has been restored, and so the universe reappears as our home and we reside in it once more as if loneliness and difference have been defeated. We are regarding a modern (and ancient) ceremony of the unity of men among themselves and with the cosmos. (Marín 2010, 211) 7  Aristotle, De anima, L.iii, c. 8, 431b 20–25.

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The dancing body shows the celebratory component of art, in which, existence, the cosmos and our communion with it are fêted, but there is also a degree of plenitude or satisfaction associated with the mere exercise of its own means of expression and its own vital capacities, in this case movement. Thus, just as for Merleau-Ponty “painting never celebrated any another enigma, only visibility” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 26), it could also be argued that what dance celebrates above all is the very possibility of body movement in space and in time. Indeed, as Cole and Montero argue: “[m]ovement is not always a means to an end but may contain its end within it” and that is why we derive such great satisfaction from the experience of the movement itself or the movement of others, full of grace and precision (Cole & Montero 2007, 300 et seq.) In this treatment of the human body from the point of departure of the poetics of movement the celebratory impulse of incarnation has been especially highlighted, the paean to the plenitude of the mutual coexistence of body and world. Notwithstanding what has been said in the foregoing text, however, it is not possible to omit the fact that the embodied subject, which can experience itself and its relationship with the world in terms of timing and harmony, and express it in dance, is also open, by its very sensitive and vulnerable nature, to the contrary experiences of disorder, disharmony and pain. We will not address this issue here, but it is necessary to at least note that the hymn of praise and the celebration of dance by the body can also become a lament. And a general poetics of embodied existence as presented here in the case of dance should also include its own means of expressing pain and suffering to which an embodied subject has been exposed. If this were not so, its expressive task would not be complete. For this reason, in the early stages of this article, in evoking the figure of Kazuo Ohno, there was a reminder that contemporary dance had the ability to show human nature not just as an art that expresses the glory of the human body, but also its tragedy. 5 Conclusions It may not be easy to justify the relative absence of reflection on dance and movement arts in treatises on aesthetics. But what is truly amazing is that philosophers who have been concerned with a thorough description of the experience of embodiment and have devoted special attention to the implications of embodiment for knowledge, action or expression, have not granted preferential attention to this particular art form. In dance, the artist and the work are a moving, sentient and expressive unity, which shows the multiple dimensions of embodied existence, and its possibilities and limitations, without the need

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for words, as an ‘existential ground of self and culture’, to quote the words of Thomas Csordas (Csordas 2001). I believe, like Charles Taylor, that the merit or the main legacy of a philosophy such as that of Merleau-Ponty is the fact that it “more than any other taught us what it means to understand ourselves as embodied agents” and that he has explored the ramifications of this view to an unparalleled extent and in unparalleled depth (Taylor 1989, 1). For precisely this reason, I am still surprised that Merleau-Ponty only referred to dance incidentally, as an example to illustrate the acquisition of a motor habit (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, 165). In this paper I have tried to show the evident convergence between the phenomenology of embodiment of Merleau-Ponty and the reflective and creative work of contemporary dance as an exploration of the possibilities of movement and expression of human nature. Moreover, the philosophical reflection on the body such as that made by Merleau-Ponty and the explorations and investigations of contemporary dance not only converge in the same object of study, so to speak, but also illuminate and explain each other. To this end, working with an idea of the great French poet Paul Valéry, who defines dance as the general poetic of the action of living beings, I have presented my case in three sections. In the first place I have tried to show that dance performs a task of revelation and expression of the prepersonal substratum of our personal existence. The ‘natural self’, the subject of an anonymous, and overall prepersonal existence, the sketch and outline of a real personal life, is thus given shape and brought into the open. Secondly, I have shown that dance explores the possibilities of body movement in space and time, revealing acquired habits and exploring other paths, through a process of abstract movement. The dancing body, moving in a virtual existence, presents its own initiative to the world and makes its own space and its own temporality. Finally, in the third section, I have presented the celebratory character of dance, a paean to the plenitude of the mutual coexistence of body and world. The joy of the dancing body issues from a double source: the exercise of its own vital powers, and the possibility of communicating symbolically and profoundly with the forms that the cosmos offers. In this three-part exposition I have tried to show that dance is a special area of philosophical reflection on embodied existence. That this ‘other corporeality’ (Merleau-Ponty 1995, 270) of the human being, expressive and symbolic, transcends the idea of a body in harmony only with surrounding stimuli which are biologically significant. It also moves away from the old dualistic idea that it is merely supporting material for a ‘spectator consciousness’ that ‘flies above the world’ and sees it from the outside. Instead, the dancing body places before us for our consideration a lively physicality, substratum and sketch of our

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personal existence, endowed with limitless possibilities for animated coordination and movement, and with the possibility of entering into communion with the beings of the world, of identifying symbolically with them and expressing them using its own materiality in perpetual transformation. References Behnke, E.A. 1997. Dance. In Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, edited by L. Embree et alia, 129–132. Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Binswanger, L. 1996. Les directions significatives anthropologiques d’horizontalité et de verticalité (Etroitesse et largeur, profondeur et hauteur: la proportionanthropologique). In Henrik Ibsen et le problème de l’autoréalisationdansl’art, translated by M. Dupuis, 57–67. Bruxelles: De Boeck & Larcier. Chrétien, J.-L. 2005. Symbolique du corps. La tradition chrétienne du Cantique des Cantiques. Paris: puf. Cole, J. and B. Montero. 2007. Affective Proprioception. Janus Head, 9 (2):299–317. Csordas, Th. (ed.). 2001. Embodiment and experience. The existential ground of culture and self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cunningham, M. and J. Lesschaeve. 1985. The dancer and the dance: Merce Cunningham in conversation with Jacqueline Lesschaeve. London: Marion Boyards Publishers. Hagendoorn, I. 2003. Cognitive Dance Improvisation: How Study of the Motor System Can Inspire Dance (and Vice Versa). Leonardo 36, no. 3:221–227. Ibáñez, A. 2009. Merce Cunningham, 90 años en danza. abc. (19/iv/2009) n. 995:5. Johnson, M. 2007. The Meaning of the Body. Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Jousse, M. 1974. L’anthropologie du geste. Paris: Gallimard. Karoblis, G. 2010. Dance. In Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, edited by H.R. Sepp and L. Embree, 67–70. Dordrecht: Springer. Lecoq, J. 1997/2009. The Moving Body. Teaching Creative Theatre. London: Methuen Drama. Levin, D.M. 1980. On Heidegger: The Gathering Dance of Mortals. Research in Phenomenology 10:251–277. Marín, H. 2010. El baile o la memoria del Paraíso. In Teoría de la cordura y de los hábitos del corazón, 197–218. Valencia: Ed. Pre-Textos. Mauss, M. 1934/2008. Les techniques du corps. In Sociologie et anthropologie, 363–386. Paris: P.U.F. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1945/2002. Phenomenology of perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. ―――. 1964. L’Oeil et l’Esprit. Paris: Gallimard.

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―――. 1995. La Nature. Notes cours du Collège de France. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Sheets-Johnston, M. 1981. Thinking in Movement. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39:399–407. ―――. 2009. ‘Man Has Always Danced’ Forays into an Art Largely Forgotten by Philosophers. In The Corporeal Turn, 306–327. Exeter: Imprint Academic. ―――. 2012. From movement to dance. Phenomenology and Cognitive Science 11: 39–57. Taylor, Ch. 1989. Embodied Agency. In Merleau-Ponty: critical essays, edited by H. Pietersma, 1–13. Washington: University Press of America. Valéry, P. 1957. Philosophie de la danse. In Oeuvres I, 1390–1403. Paris: Gallimard. ―――. 1960. L’âme et la danse. In Oeuvres ii, 148–176. Paris: Gallimard.

CHAPTER 6

How to Perceive Oneself Perceiving? Gardens, Movement and the Semiotics of Embodiment Katarzyna Kaczmarczyk Gardens are multimodal works of art par excellence, engaging every sense of an individual. They provide visual, acoustic, olfactory and tactile stimuli, creating an immersive space for the moving body. The visitor walks around listening to the sounds of birds, gentle hum of water, feeling different types of ground under his feet, the wind and coolness of the shade on the skin. He feels the fatigue from walking uphill or ascending the stairs and rests on benches. It is hard to think of a type of art which engages its audience’s senses and—above all—their bodies more deeply. Yet, both the theory and history of gardening do not dedicate much thought to the moving body, but rather to a visitor perceived as a disembodied subject equipped mainly with the sense of sight. One testament to this is the long tradition of comparing gardens to other forms of art that do not engage the body to that extent: painting and poetry.1 Walking through a garden was conceptualized as similar to viewing a series of landscape paintings (in 18th century Britain) or scroll paintings (in China). In this way, instead of experiencing continuous movement, it was presented as a series of still poses filled with visual contemplation. The value of immersiveness was outweighed by the value of visual composition. Similarly, the method of describing and representing a garden through its plan shows the dominance of sight, which is in turn closely related to the notions of know ledge and power—seeing is associated with understanding and controlling space. The importance of vision in the engagement with the environment should not be underestimated, however, the steady neglect of other senses and bodily behaviors has left much research to be undertaken. On the one hand, this is in line with current tendencies—a spectacular rehabilitation of the body in the humanities and social sciences. On the other hand, this is problematic as senses such as touch or smell as well as motion of the body, are rarely the 1  Stephanie Ross, ‘The sister arts ii. Gardens and painting’, in What gardens mean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 85–120; John Dixon Hunt, The figure in the landscape: poetry, painting, and gardening during the eighteen century (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977).

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object of representation and conceptualization both in garden treatises and various representations in art and literature. There are noticeable efforts by the academic community to fill the gap in garden history2 but still more needs to be done. That is why this paper’s aim is to address the problem of the relations of garden design and motions of visitors as well as the functions of movement in the garden. 1

Goals, Methodologies, Perspectives

Movement is the most natural way of engaging with the environment, exploring, and reacting to it. It is often practical and goal oriented. The garden utilizes the obvious way of moving, i.e. walking, but transforms it aesthetically. Consequently, movement functions as a basic way of exploring the space, but is reshaped to serve additional functions as well: projecting a bodily-based set of values and meanings onto space, forming a rhythmic foundation of the experience, engaging an individual with special narratives, drawing attention to itself as a contemplative activity or serving as a social sign in its own right. Any specific walk in a garden is a function with many components: the knowledge and personal intentions of the visitor, the social context, design of the garden and many environmental factors, such as weather for instance. As the design of the space is the variable that can be controlled by the creator more than others, different ways in which garden design influences the movements of the visitors will be emphasized. However, there is no one-to-one relation between the space of a garden and a walk in it. Motion is necessary to experience a garden as a whole, but also to create it; the designer’s experience of movement is something he draws from while he plans the space, and finally there are the motions of visitors and gardeners that keep the place alive and functioning. Therefore, I am far from treating movement in the garden as an outcome of the designers’ work. I will rather try to show how the design of the garden is based on the experience of the moving body, how it shapes the movement of the body and how it is, in turn, shaped by it. I do not adhere strictly to one theoretical stance in conceptualizing different dimensions of movement in gardens, but rather to a conglomerate of perspectives, which as a common denominator have the belief that meaning is not ‘decoded’ by a computer-like human machine, but happens at the intersection of a person and his environment, at the point of contact between the human body and human surround2  Michel Conan, ed., Landscape design and the experience of motion (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks).

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ings. This rich background is created by contemporary semiotics, which draws heavily on Peircean philosophy, the works of pragmatists such as John Dewey and semiotically and phenomenologically oriented humanistic geographers, such as James S. Duncan or Tim Ingold. Semiotic and phenomenological orientations are understood as complementary, not competing. There are elements of the experience of gardens which, as they are based on our bodily and mental structures, are intercultural. However, specific characteristics of movement in gardens change with respect to epoch and tradition which gave raise to them. Some cultures may favor sensuous engagement with space over symbolic ones, some may form more structured, rigid ways of walking than others, some may be more inclined to prompt ‘reading’ of the space and some ‘reading’ of oneself in this space. However, my goal is to point to the most important functions of movement, independent of specific time and place. That is why I quite freely use examples from different cultures and times, hoping that this analysis may be a point of departure in analyzing a specific garden within its cultural setting or a way to better understand gardens in general. 2

How Gardens Support and Suppress Movement

Walking is the most instinctive, unquestioned form of exploring the environment. Because a garden is a part of the environment, walking around it is not naturally associated with aesthetic behavior. Yet movement in a garden is by various means aestheticized, and differentiated from everyday practices. It is, less than in everyday life, dependent on practical aims, but becomes rather a goal in itself. The design of the space provides both the incentives to move forward and obstacles preventing certain types or targets of movement. The most basic meaningful layer of a garden is constituted by signs of appropriate bodily behavior—moving forward, stopping, resting, and observing in motion and stillness. Some of these seem more ‘natural’: paths to walk on, benches to sit on, stairs to climb or fences to prevent wandering off into the countryside. The environment is full of affordances located in a way that structure the stroll as a mosaic of intermittent motion and stillness.3 There are signs of stopping that are understandable not only to humans, but also some other species inhabiting a garden, such as sheep, for example. These signs are fences, steep hills, and sunken ditches. However, gardens are full of more 3  Similar approaches to the semiotics of space are presented in: Geoffrey Broadbent, Richard Bunt, Charles Jencks, eds., Signs, Symbols and Architecture (Chichiester: Willey, 1980); Leonid F. Tchertov, ‘The specifics of the semiotization of space’, Semiotica 114 (1997): 287–294.

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conventional signs denoting ways of moving. These are often interpreted without the awareness of their conventionality. The most obvious sign of appropriate movement is a garden path constituting all the possible routes through the place. As Michel de Certeau would say, they constitute the langue of the garden.4 The lawn, although theoretically affording the possibility of a shortcut or a relaxing rest on the lush grass, may allow that activity or not, depending on the type of garden.5 Various signs such as ‘Do not walk on the grass’ are examples of that symbolic constraint of movement. Their linguistic form leaves no doubt as to their conventionality. Signs of stopping can be specific to certain epochs or cultures: in seventeen-century Versailles, stones stuck in the ground denoted places where visitors were supposed to stop and admire the view. In eighteen-century England—during the time of peak interest in landscape painting—the action of motionless studying of the scene was signified by ‘framing’ the scene with the arches of a bridge, trees on both sides of the view, or windows of a gazebo. The visitor stopped in the designated place and with small movements adjusted his own body to achieve the ‘correct cadre’.6 This—already conventional—way of walking through a place was even further conventionalized with the use of guidebooks explaining the most appropriate route through a garden, which become popular in the second part of the 18th century. A visitor comes to a garden, most probably, already with the idea of the function of a garden and also with the intention of walking in it. As contemporary urban planners would describe them: most gardens are characterized by ‘high walkability’; they are big enough to require movement to get to know them, and small enough that they could be walked around without much difficulty and are suitable for pedestrians. As has been established, to some extent the design of a garden structures movement. It also supports it, and makes it attractive to walk around and explore the place. We could approach the question of how a garden encourages movement on the micro- and macro-plane. 4  Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1984). 5  While lawns in Central Park give visitors a variety of possible uses, lawns in French gardens have a primarily ornamental function. 6  Eighteenth century Britain was one of the birth-places of modern tourism and picturesque aesthetics, with certain prospects perceived as worth searching out and admiring, which are still part of modern tourist reality. Judith Adler, ‘Origins of sightseeing’, Annals of Tourism Research 16 (1989); 7–29; Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: the origins of the uses of peripatetic in the nineteenth century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

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figure 6.1 Rousham. Landscape framed with the stone arch.

In gardens across cultures and times there are specific techniques stimulating movement. They usually rest on awaking curiosity in the visitor, suggesting something interesting to be discovered around the corner, behind the wall or across the bridge. In Japanese garden design this technique has its own name: ‘miegakure’, which means ‘hide and reveal’.7 Its essence is to hide important features of the garden behind others so that the visitor uncovers the design step by step always expecting more upon changing his position. This technique is characteristic both for large stroll gardens and roji—small gardens adjacent to tea pavilions. In principle, no element of roji is shown in its entirety. Like something intimated in what is left unsaid, the roji’s very spirit derives from its suggestiveness, and it is this that gives the garden its profundity. None of the furnishings in the outer roji—from the front gate to the yuritsuki (changing room), and the koshikake machiai (waiting bench), the setchin (lavatory) or the other elements—are plainly visible or shown in their entirety. Miegakure 7  Toshiro Inaji, ‘Kinetic, multifaced gardens and miegakure’ in The garden as architecture: form and spirit in the gardens of Japan, China, and Korea, (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1998), 61–82.

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figure 6.2 Roji at the Adachi Museum of Art, Yasugi, Japan.

plantings half-conceal the forms of buildings, and the partially-hidden, partially-revealed composition is achieved by making the path wind at key places.8 According to John Dixon Hunt these ‘hiding practices’ which are supposed to awaken curiosity in the visitor are associated with one type of motion in the garden, which he calls ‘the stroll’ and associates with specific types of gardens: stroll gardens in China, specific English landscape gardens, such as Stourhead or Painshill, some spaces of Central Park. The dynamics of movement in these gardens rest on various incentives for movement: These incentives are either a clearly designated path or a series of events and incidents along that path, usually both. These can be temples, pavilions, sculpture, seats or benches, inscriptions, urns—anything, in short, to allow some incentive for forward movement and some satisfaction upon the completion of each stage. They can be seen or glimpsed, so that the feet are tempted onward. This implies sight lines, either fully disclosed or half concealed. But it is equally possible to tempt the feet forward by the simple expedient of inspiring confidence that something lies ahead to be discovered.9

8  Harumichi Kitao, Roji (Suzuki Shoten, 1943), 59. 9  John Dixon Hunt, ‘Lordship of the feet. Toward a poetics of movement in the garden’ in Conan, Landscape design and the experience of motion, 195.

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While I agree with Hunt as to the important function of these incentives, I do not think that they are characteristic only of specific types of gardens. Even in small gardens—such as the described Japanese tea garden—visitors are encouraged to move around the objects to get to know them or move in order to acquire a different perspective. What is hidden or partially hidden prompts visitors to move or adjust their position. Even in a garden as small as a zen garden, visitors can move around the terrace of the temple to see more. In the Ryoanji rock garden fifteen rocks are arranged in groups so that from any vantage point at least one rock is hidden from view.10 The dynamics of hiding and revealing may be key to both the attractiveness of movement in the garden and to the attractiveness of a garden as a type of environment. Some answers may be found in theories of environmental aesthetics, which—drawing on evolutionary theories—try to explain human landscape preferences. The ‘prospect-refuge’ thesis proposed by Jay Appleton suggests that humans adapted to prefer terrains where they can see what is happening around them without being too exposed, because these conditions are favorable to survival.11 These preferred environments have savanna-like features and—interestingly enough—resemble gardens. Partially drawing on Appleton’s research, Rachel and Stephen Kaplan introduced the theory of ‘restorative environments’, which—to be perceived as aesthetically pleasing—should be relatively open but spatially defined at the same time.12 They should oscillate between two poles: ‘understanding’ and ‘exploration’. The Kaplans also stress that the perfect environment has a park-like form. The Kaplans’ Preference Matrix13

Immediate Inferred, predicted

Understanding

Exploration

COHERENCE LEGIBILITY

COMPLEXITY MYSTERY

10  François Berthier, Reading Zen in the rocks: the Japanese dry landscape gardens, translated and with philosophical essay by Graham Parkes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 34. 11  Jay Appleton, The experience of landscape (Chichester: Willey, 1978). 12  Rachel Kaplan, Stephan Kaplan, The experience of nature: a psychological perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 177–200. 13  Ibid., 53.

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It is worth noting that the same characteristics Appleton and the Kaplans associate with the attractiveness of the landscape are features which encourage movement by creating a safe and stimulating environment inviting to explore it. While I would like to distance myself from the unidirectional reasoning characteristic of evolutionists, I think it is safe to say that the same features which contribute to the aesthetic appeal of a landscape also encourage a visitor to move around it. Consequently, gardens support movement not only by specific techniques implemented in the design, but by their entire form—oscillating between legibility and mystery. 3

Functions of Movement in the Garden

Robin Jarvis in the book Romantic writing and pedestrian travel discussed important characteristics of walking and the influence of this type of movement on the experience of the environment: 1. the participatory and immersive character of person’s engagement, when sensations are perceived as depending on movements and choices; 2. slow changes in perception; 3. rhythm of steps fostering introspective, creative states of mind; 4. direct relation with the environment; 5. slow motion allowing a person to concentrate on the environment.14 These characteristics apply potentially to any pedestrian experience of the environment. However, the situation of gardens is different, because they are at the same time a built environment and a work of art.15 Although we could look for ‘everyday aesthetics’ in the casual experience of day-to-day walking16 (in its rhythmicity, perceptual and emotional engagement with the world) in a garden, the aesthetic quality of movement is enhanced and gains new dimensions. It seems important to consider the various functions of movement in a garden, especially emphasizing ways of transforming ordinary bodily behavior into an aesthetic activity.

14  Robin Jarvis, Romantic writing and pedestrian travel (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1997), 29–61. 15  For discussion on the ambivalent nature of gardens, see: Mara Miller, The garden as an art (New York: State University of New York, 1993), 69–120. 16  For the analysis of aesthetics of every-day walking, see (among others): Ben Jacks, ‘Reimagining walking: four practices’, Journal of Architectural Education 57 (2004), 5–9; Filipa Matos Wunderlich, ‘Walking and rhythmicity: sensing urban space’, Journal of Urban Design 13 (2008), 125–139.

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3.1 Movement as a Basic Mode of Experiencing a Garden There are some gardens which are not meant to be entered in order to be experienced, the standard example being a rock garden. However, the majority of gardens require movement in order to be discovered. Walking is one of the forms of acquiring information; it is—as Tim Ingold phrased it—‘a way of circumambulatory knowing’.17 What is more, movement enables us to store information in the form of habits, as ‘muscular consciousness’.18 The question needs to be asked: what does it mean to know or get to know a garden? One could try to answer: to know its components, places that it consists of and to be able to relate them to its entire composition. If this answer is accurate, than there are two poles constituting the experience of a garden: movement directed towards building a mental map of the place, understanding the relations between different places and objects, and the other oriented towards sensuous and bodily experiences occurring at a given moment. Although the experience of any garden is a fusion of these two, the tension between these extremes is an important part of the aesthetics of movement in a garden. Let us consider the design of two well-known gardens.

figure 6.3 Getty’s Central Garden. 17  Tim Ingold, ‘Culture on the ground. The world perceived through the feet’, Journal of Material Culture 9(2004), 331. 18  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, ma: Beacon Press, 1964), 11.

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The first is Getty’s Central Garden created by Robert Irwin in Los Angeles, famous for how it foregrounds sensorial and somatic experience. The Central Garden lies in the middle of the Getty Centre. A stroll through it starts with an overlook of the whole garden which, at the very beginning, reveals its structure. The visitor does not have to struggle in order to create a plan of the garden—the plan is perfectly legible with the Bowl Garden formed by several concentric rings planted with shrubs and perennials surrounding a pool with a floating maze of azaleas. The look from above gives visitors some knowledge about the composition of the place and the stroll itself fills it with specific sensorial experiences. These experiences—an array of lights, colors, textures, patterns and fragrances—are the true content of the Central Garden. First a visitor enters The Stream Garden formed by a path meandering down the slope and crossing the stream five times to eventually lead to a plaza planted with bougainvillea arbors. In its upper part a massive rocks prevents visitors from seeing the water. This, in a way, isolates just the modality of sound, forcing the visitor to look for its source and contemplate it. Next, the rocks become smaller—the water courses between them creating both auditory and visual effects. This is where the multi-sensorial effects caused by water add up to other visual stimuli—the plants in this section are selected mainly for the effect of their texture and shape. The color of the plants is relatively

figure 6.4 Stream Garden, Getty’s Central Garden.

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homogenous—greys and grey greens predominate, allowing the foregrounding of texture and ‘kicker’ colors: orange, blue green and yellow. In the Stream Garden the foregrounding of color is achieved through a subtle palette of greyish vegetation and carefully selected brighter plants. In the heart of the space the azalea maze provides a very strong experience of color and contrast. Red azalea bushes in full bloom cause a very strong, almost overpowering, sensation, which, nonetheless, is in perfect accordance with other sensorial modalities, also reaching their peak in this area—the movement and sound of water falling from a 20-foot waterfall, the colors of the azaleas in the center and all this experience strengthened by the awareness of being at the heart of a designed space. The paths encircling the pool are different than those in the Stream Garden. There the key elements are the flowers with their colors, shapes and fragrances, often displayed at the eye-level of the visitor. The sensory experience in this part of the garden becomes almost intimate because the plants are positioned unusually close to the visitor. The whole composition of sensations could be described in terms of their intensity: First are the big visual events, such as viewing the whole garden from the overlook at the top of the stream. Then come the midlevel events, gained while walking down the blue-stone path. And finally there are the small events, such as seeing a flower close-up in the Bowl Garden.19 Rousham Park in Oxfordshire, England created in the 18th century by William Kent, could not be more different when it comes to the dynamics of movement through it. Relatively small, oddly shaped grounds, situated between the manor of Rousham and River Charwell are filled with classical temples, statues of Roman gods, mythical creatures and serpentine lanes joining them. There are various memorable places in the garden which a visitor is likely to come across and remember: Venus Vale, Praeneste Tarrace, Bowling Green with the sculpture of Lion Attacking The Horse. However, there is no one ‘correct’ way of viewing the garden.20 On the contrary, Hal Moggridge estimated that there are 1064 ways of strolling around Rousham without repeating the

19  Duggan, J., Plants in the Getty’s Central Garden, (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003), 31. 20  The argument to the contrary was given by Kent’s gardener, who—in his letter to owners of the property—described a route through a garden. However, it is only one route out of many possible. See Mavis Batey, ‘The Way to View Rousham by Kent’s Gardener’, Garden History 11 (1983): 125–32.

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figure 6.5 Rousham. The sculpture of Lion Attacking The Horse, River Charwell and the surrounding countryside.

route.21 What adds to the variety of routes and the odd, unexpected shape of the grounds, are the boundaries of the garden in the form of a hidden ha-ha and the river Charwell, which cause the garden to visually merge with the countryside. The garden is filled with symbols of ancient and modern Rome, sensations of all the hues of green, shade and light. The stroll can be ‘read’ and interpreted. However, it also presents an additional task for the visitor: that of understanding the layout of the place and the relations between the various nooks and crannies in it. A walk is thus a cognitive task, and the type of task that is made more difficult by the design of the garden. The aesthetic experience arises in the continuing dichotomy of surprise and integration. The process of creating a mental map becomes aestheticized and the incomplete mental map happens to be a source of pleasure.

21  Hal Moggridge, ‘Notes on Kent’s garden at Rousham’, Journal of Garden History 6 (1986): 191.

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The stroll treated as a cognitive task of understanding the place is characteristic of a lot of 18th century gardens. Various buildings and temples in the famous Stowe Garden are arranged in such a way that they are visible from various places in the garden, creating a multiplicity of relations between the features of the garden. This design brings to mind the already mentioned Japanese technique of miegakure. Getty’s Central Garden and Rousham Park present two dimensions of movement in relation to getting to know a garden. In the first both the route and the plan are clear and straightforward, and it is a variety of sensory experiences that fills the stroll with ‘events’. In the case of the other it takes a lot of cognitive effort to be able to envision the garden as a whole. Both gardens, each in its own right, foreground and make conscious an aspect associated with the every-day experience of motion: sensory perceptions and building of a mentalmap of the place; the tendency toward one or the other becomes a driving force behind the movement in each of these gardens. 3.2 Self-Referencing Movement and Walking as Meditation The most important part of the experience of Getty’s Central Garden is sensory perception. Walking allows the succession of impressions and their integration, but in order to permit the visitor to concentrate on auditory, visual or olfactory stimuli, the action of moving oneself cannot continuously draw attention away from them. That is why lush and dense vegetation contrasts in this garden with simple paths enabling smooth motion. In the Stream Garden a wide path made from weathered steel cuts through the vegetation, contrasting with it and permitting a steady flow of visitors, granting comfort which would be impossible if they were walking on the rocky edges of the stream. The majority of gardens are designed in a way that makes a person walking in them as comfortable as possible: the lanes are wide and smooth, there is enough shade to cool down, and enough places to rest. The tradition of landscape gardens follows this principle of preventing a visitor from perceiving at any given moment his own movement as a task, or preventing his own body from undergoing stress, feeling weary; it prevents movement form being self-referential. Conversely, in many gardens movement itself becomes noticeable because it is designed to be difficult. Walking on the beaten earth, gravel or bark path does not draw so much of our attention, but walking on uneven stones—as is often the case in Japanese gardens—poses all new kinds of bodily challenges. Stepping stones, which initially created a path in roji leading to the tea pavilion, eventually became incorporated into other types of gardens. Apart from serving functions as practical as keeping one’s feet clean, they ­aestheticize the

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figure 6.6 Stony path in the palace garden in Takamatsu, Shikoku, Japan.

very action of walking.22 It is worth noting that, although this type of motion is supposed to be more difficult, it is not supposed to be uncomfortable, but conscious—stones are not placed in a straight line, but approximately 7.5–10 centimeters apart to allow a visitor to move naturally, while still controlling

22  David and Michiko Young, The art of Japanese garden (North Clarendon: Tuttle Publishing, 2005), 38.

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his own movement.23 Stepping stones strengthen the experience of rhythm— every step has its material equivalent clearly distinguished from the others; the composition of the walk is not invariable, but punctuated by garanseki— larger stones placed at the intersections of pathways and in places from where there is an interesting view to contemplate.24 The stony path shifts the attention of visitors onto their movement itself and back to the outside world in places where stopping is indicated by garanseki or nobedan—a type of flat stone ­paving.25 The dynamics of movement in a Japanese garden emphasize that a visitor constitutes one of the elements of space and experiencing a garden is both noticing an outer environment, as well as one’s own body moving through it. The achieved result can add to the pleasure of spending time among nature—as it is in stroll gardens—or it can turn into a type of walking meditation—as it functions in tea gardens, where walking through roji is supposed to clear the mind and prepare participants for the tea ceremony. The achieved effect is that visitors “perceive themselves perceiving”26: walking, smelling, and looking. The path “slows the viewer down, to prepare him, in effect, for an encounter”27 with the garden and with himself. The above quotations, while they suit so perfectly the description of Japanese gardens, originally referred to the works of Robert Irwin—the creator of Getty’s Central Garden. However, they shed light on the experience of movement in gardens more generally. Both the approach of Robert Irwin and the ways of aestheticizing motion and perception mentioned in this article bring to mind the ideas of the Russian Formalists and specifically the technique of defamiliarization, whose essence is presenting familiar objects and situations in a strange, unfamiliar way. This procedure is supposed to challenge the conventionality of our everyday perceptions and force us to re-think and re-cognize them for what they really are. While Victor Shklovsky wrote mainly about literature, his theory is related to art in general and seems exceptionally suitable to the experience of gardens as it has been problematized here:

23  Phillip Cave, Creating Japanese gardens (Boston: C.E. Tuttle, 1996), 116. 24  Bilingual [Japanese & English] Dictionary of Japanese Garden Terms (Nara: Insatsu Kansai Purosesu, 2001), 19. 25  Ibid., 69. 26  Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees: a life of contemporary artist Robert Irwin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 92. 27  Ibid.

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Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make object “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.28 John Dewey in Art as Experience and Mark Johnson in The Meaning of the Body propose a somewhat similar line of thinking, reasoning that ‘art matters because it provides heightened, intensified, and highly integrated experiences of meaning, using all of our ordinary resources of meaning-making’.29 Apart from drawing attention to itself, movement can also be subordinated to the symbolic meaning of a garden. Out of many European examples I would like to recall one type in particular: parks with Christian calvaries. A calvary is a monumental public crucifix, but the term also refers to complexes of chapels and statues situated in parks usually adjacent to monasteries or churches. Calvaries are meant to symbolize the place of Christ’s Passion and as a replacement for pilgrimages to Jerusalem. They began to appear in Europe in the fifteenth century, when pilgrimages to the Holy Land became impossible due to its occupation by the Turks.30 They had two conceptual sources: a verbal—the Bible—and visual—maps of Jerusalem distributed in the fifteenth century through the works of Christian Kruike van Adrichem, who persuaded his readers to build calvaries in mountainous areas topographically reminiscent of Jerusalem. Nowadays, some interesting examples of calvaries may be found in Central Europe: for example Kalwaria Zebrzydowska or Kalwaria Praszkowska in Poland. In these parks the movement of visitors is emphasized because it carries additional symbolic meaning—it constitutes a reading of the religious narrative of the Passion of Christ that is not only deciphered by pilgrims, but also enacted with their own bodies. Traditionally, apart from engaging in the walk itself, travelers carried with them crosses or depictions of Saints, which, by adding extra weight, made the journey more difficult. It was customary to tra28  Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art As Technique’ in Russian Formalist Criticism. Four Essays, Translated and with an introduction by Lee T. Lemon, Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebrasca Press, 1965), 12. 29  Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the body: aesthetics of human understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 208. 30   Elżbieta Bilska-Wodecka, Kalwarie europejskie. Analiza struktury, typów i genezy (Kraków: Instytut Geografii i Gospodarki Przestrzennej Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2003).

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verse at least part of the journey on ones’ knees. Nowadays, even if the visitor does not subject himself to the extra strain on his own, the design of space provides obstacles which make movement more difficult in selected places. Chapels carrying the most important symbolic meaning are usually situated on top of hills, with a steep entryway: narrow path or high steps. The action of walking in calvaries is foregrounded for at least two reasons: 1. is self-referential, a slowed down and defamiliarized movement becomes the basis for meditative practices (in a similar way as happens in Japanese tea gardens) and 2. visitors are forced to undergo some type of bodily stress, which forms the basis for physical empathy with the characters in the religious narrative presented in the park. 3.3 Movement as the Basis of Garden Narrative In calvaries the visitors both read the narrative encoded in various signs in space (statues, buildings, inscriptions, topographical relations) and enact this narrative with the movement of their own bodies. Consequently, the stroll can be both perceived as resembling the act of reading, and the act of performing. It is worth observing that calvaries—in how they engage a pilgrims with their narrative—are not unique among gardens. Narratives of a very similar character can be found in Pure Land gardens— a type of Buddhist temple garden built in Japan from the mid-Heian to the Kamakura periods in the tradition of Amidism.31 They represent the Pure Land—a realm created by Amida Buddha in order to liberate suffering beings from Samsara.32 Similarily to calvaries, they are based on both verbal and visual sources. Jointly with the sutra Kammuryojukyo and three mandalas of the Pure Land school, they form a triadic multi-medial representation of Buddha’s paradise. The sutra Kammuryojukyo contains descriptions of visualizations of The Pure Land, and the mandalas portray the Pure Land and the gardens which are supposed to be embodiments of both the paradise itself and of the process of visualizing it as the stroll through a garden progresses, that is, according to the order of visualizations meant to help the practitioner to be reborn in the Pure Land. Various gardens are created on the basis of already existing stories—not only religious ones. Both in Renaissance Italy and 18th century Britain, there was an established tradition of incorporating various symbols referring to ancient 31  Seiko Goto, The Japanese Garden. Gateway to the Human Spirit (New York: Peter Land 2003), 67–86. 32  Jonathan Z. Smith, ed., The HarperCollins dictionary of religion (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1995), 865–866.

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mythology in gardens. They often formed the basis of whole spatial narratives. Stourhead, the garden created by Henry Hoare in Wiltshire, England, is filled with symbolic references to the 4th book of Virgil’s Aeneid. The circular walk around the lake may symbolize the journey of Aeneas to the cave in Kumae, where he discovers the future of Rome. “It looks very much as if Henry, in his garden, celebrated the founding of Rome, just as he, like Aeneas, was establishing a family in a place.”33 Many gardens both in 18th century Britain and in other countries and times were influenced by masonic and esoteric traditions and were created as initiatory places “intentionally leading someone through a symbolically charged experience designed to uplift in some way or to awaken or deepen understanding of things that are otherwise secret, mysterious or obscure”.34 Initiatory narratives are believed to be encoded in such places as the Italian garden of Bomarzo, the French Désert de Retz, the Polish Arcadia, and the German Wörlitz or Portugese Quinta da Regaleira. There, differently than in gardens such as calvaries or Stourhead, the majority of signs do not refer to a specific story, but rather to various initiatory rituals; these signs are paths, entrances, thresholds, grottoes, etc.35 Nowadays, apart from telling stories from literature, mythology or history, designers more and more often refer to events as commonplace as the problems of local communities or the occurrence of illnesses. Cancer Survivor’s Park in Towson, Maryland represents the journey from getting ill, to fighting cancer and healing through the design of ascending circular paths each symbolizing a stage in the process, with the maze representing the time of illness.36 It is time to ask a question of utmost importance to the present study: in which way does the movement of a visitor become crucial, as the basis of the narrative? In most works about garden narratives the emphasis is put on the sequence of signs placed in a garden referring to various events in already existing outside stories. Narratives understood this way are common in gardens inviting a type of motion called by Hunt the procession: “a ritual move33  K. Woodbridge, Henry Hoare’s Paradise, “The Art Bulletin”, xlvii, 1965, s. 99. 34  Christopher McIntosh, “Gardens of Initiation: Horticulture, Esoteric Symbolism, and the Spirit of Play,” in R. Caron, J. Godwin et al., eds., Ésotérisme, Gnoses, and Imaginaire Symbolique: Mélanges offerts à Antoine Faivre, (Leuven: Peeters, 2001): 625. 35  Jan A.M. Snoek, Monika Scholl, Andrea A. Kroon, eds., Symbolism in 18th century gardens: the influence of intellectual and esoteric currents, such as Freemasonery (Den Haag: ovn, 2006). 36  Matthew Potteiger, Jamie Purinton, eds., Landscape Narratives: Design Practices for Telling Stories (New York: John Wiley&Sons, 1998), 125–126.

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ment that follows both a preordained path and purpose, which is, on account of its prescription, repeatable on innumerable occasions”.37 The visitor travels along the prescribed route and decodes—in a specific order—signs relating to events in pre-existing stories: the Passion of Christ, Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, historical narratives of wars and uprisings. This understanding of garden narrative suggests that the most important features of narrative are the events comprising it. However, the set of events is just one of the elements of narrative. Out of its many definitions let’s have a look at the one proposed by Marie Laure Ryan: [Narrative is] a mental image, or cognitive construct, which can be activated by various types of signs. This image consists of a world (setting) populated by intelligent agents (characters). These agents participate in actions and happenings (events, plot), which cause global changes in the narrative world.38 There are a few dimensions of this construct: a spatial dimension (the image of a world, the setting of a story), temporal dimension (not fully predictable changes that are caused by various events happening in the story-world), logical dimension (causal relations between events), mental dimension (the need of various physical events to be associated with mental states).39 In a garden, without the moving body unifying meaning into one experience, the only relations connecting various signs are spatial relations of proximity, distance, bordering etc. It is due to the motion of the visitor that temporal relations are projected onto spatial ones. Movement constitutes the essence of change and the body endows space with values. In the examples of calvaries, Pure Land gardens and gardens with the circuit walk, such as Stourhead, the time of the external narrative merges with the time of the walk, and the composition of the story—beginning, middle and ending—aligns itself with the topography of the garden. This enables a person to perceive himself as ‘the reader’ or ‘the performer’—he both decodes the narrative and—by walking through the correct route—enacts it. It is his own body that structures the garden as a ‘time-space continuum,’ projecting onto 37  Hunt, Lordship of the feet, 188. 38  Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘On Defining Narrative Media’, Image & Narrative 6 (2003). Viewed 8 November 2013. http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/mediumtheory/mariel aureryan.htm. 39  David Herman, Manfred Jahn, Marie-Laure Ryan, eds., Routledge encyclopedia of narrative theory (London: Routledge, 2005), 347.

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space a temporal plane, where what is in front of him is connected with the future and what is behind him—with the past.40 The most important dimensions specific to garden narratives are: the spatial dimension (the structure of the garden: the main entrance, central axis, center, borders with various sign referring to events of the narrative), temporal dimension (the temporal framework of the stroll: beginning, middle, end), and the dimension of bodily values (the framework set by the psychological conditions of our bodies). These three merge with stories known to the visitor or his own thoughts and memories and create a powerful environment capable of bringing to life and assimilating any narrative. The act of walking itself is so meaningful that often visitors do not need specific outside stories to create a narrative while moving. In many esoteric gardens there is no particular narrative encoded in space, but rather a set of symbols connected with transition, change, initiation. They create patterns of tension which instead of providing specific meaning, call out to be filled with it. Mentioned once before, the park Quinta da Regaleira, created at the beginning of 20th century in Sintra, Portugal, gathers various symbols related to Freemasonery, Rosicrucianism and alchemy under the unifying theme of initiatory journey from darkness to light. It relates not so much to one story, but rather to the archetype of the journey challenging and transformation the adventurer while he travels both through the Earth and beyond it (going into Hell/center of the Earth/Elysium/Hades and back). The motive is utilized in the Quinta da Regaleira, which—itself situated on a terraced slope—features many elements inviting actions of ascending and descending: staircases, tunnels, towers, wells and grottoes. Two ‘Inverted towers’ (wells with spiral staircases) are connected by a system of grottoes and tunnels. There are many ways of strolling through this garden. Nevertheless, the space filled with symbols in combination with the structuring power of the moving body allows the creation of the narrative of initiatory journey. The example of the Quinta da Regaleira is interesting also because, as the story it tells is about the journey itself, the design of space foregrounds the action of walking by way of its unsteady paths, dark gateways and strenuous ascents. As the journey’s aim is to re-discover a light symbolizing a form of higher knowledge, the act of understanding the topography of the park is also made difficult. This is caused not only by the serpentine layout of paths and 40  Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and place. The perspective of experience (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 34–50.

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figure 6.7 Stone stairs in Quinta da Regaleira, Sintra, Portugal.

the partial hiding of views, but also by an additional plane of movement— the visitor constantly moves both vertically and horizontally and this poses an additional challenge to his ability to construct a mental map. The example of this park shows how different functions of movement take part in forming a final aesthetic experience. 3.4 Movement as a Sign After analyzing how movement is the mode of experiencing a garden, how it is guided and restrained in the process of aestheticizing it and how it forms basis for decoding various signs in a garden, it is time to emphasize that movement in a garden functions as a sign of its own. Because one needs a lot of resources to create and maintain a garden (ownership of the land, security, money, professional expertise, free time), it is not surprising that gardens have always been symbols of status and rationed goods such as power, salvation, beauty, or—in some climates—shadow. Similarly, a simple stroll in a garden was a sign of social position, as a person had to be the owner of the place or had to be invited by him to lawfully enjoy a leisurely walk. Although nowadays we can relax in public parks and gardens, spending time in this way is still a sign of having free time (which does not necessarily indicate high social status nowadays). Acting in accordance with a set of direct

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and indirect rules governing movement in a garden proves that a person is familiar with them and that he is willing to obey them, indicating his relation to the rest of society. It is not only the act of movement but also its style that bears meaning. Although walking itself is common to all cultures, its specific styles are historical and rich in meaning. The style of strolling, or ‘promenading’, so much associated in our minds with walking through a garden, is a historical development believed to have emerged in the 18th century, when walking stopped being associated with poverty, and instead was embraced as a choice and tied to the developing theories of the picturesque. This way of engaging with the environment formed the basis for modern tourist practices. Slow movements, the pattern of resting and stopping, a slightly introverted pose—shifting attention from the person himself to the world around and back—these physical qualities are unquestionably an outcome of intensive acculturation and a clear sign for all around. Movement is thus not only a means of ‘reading’ the environment, but also itself a sign showing one’s knowledge, cultural background, and attitude towards norms, and it should be researched with that in mind. Conclusions The aim of this article has been to analyze the importance of motion for the aesthetic experience of gardens by showing the reciprocal relation between the garden and a moving visitor, especially in situations when, on the one hand, the design of the garden structures the movement of a person, and, on the other hand, the same design relies on the properties of his moving body to realize its full potential and to be appropriately interpreted. I tried to show how various functions of movement contribute to the overall experience of a garden—by enabling a person to get to know a place, by drawing attention to itself, serving as a sign and by structuring reading of various signs in a garden. However, as the aim of the article was to sketch a map of issues, it is only appropriate to acknowledge blank points on this map. The most important of them stem from the concentration on the visitor (as the main addressee of the design) and on ‘correct’ behavior in a garden. Consequently, it seems necessary to develop the analysis to accommodate the invisible movement—of gardeners and physical workers, of random passers-by or these who decide to contest the ideology of the garden or to use it inappropriately. Even appropriate, aestheticized and ritualized movement presents a challenge to academic analysis because of its pre-reflexive, pre-linguistic qualities, making it hard to conceptualize in design treatises and represent in both

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written and visual form. Exploring bodily discourse, that is additionally suppressed and hidden, is obviously all the more difficult. It is also all the more rewarding, because it is not only the visitor, whose movement is the source of meaningful relation with the environment. Let me quote Karel Čapek, whose description of the bodily experience of a gardener reveals its own aesthetics: If, perhaps, [a gardner] wants to plant a small androsace between those two stones he must tread one foot gingerly on this one here, which is a bit shaky and with the other lightly balanced in the air, to avoid crushing a cushion of erysimum or of flowering aubretia; he must make immense straddles, do knee bend, backward bend, forward bend, lying and standing positions, till, poke and weed among the picturesque and not altogether firm stones of his rock garden. Behind the hidden history of aesthetic movement in gardens, there is another history—of the aesthetics of working in it. Both are still to be written.41

41  Karel Čapek, The Gardener’s Year (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 62–63.

CHAPTER 7

From Film Studies to Interaction Design— An Emergent Aesthetics View Xin Xia, Nimish Biloria and Bernhard Hommel 1 Introduction People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it. They are afraid. By asking ‘What does this mean?’ they express a wish that everything be understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks other things. —Rene Magritte

What Magritte is referring to is the aesthetics experience of paintings, however when we look at other artistic creative works—sculpture, music, film, theater and interactive art—it is also applicable. People often experience this ‘mystery’ in interactive art. When a clear instruction is missing and the ‘meaning’ is not obvious, one applies his or her memory and previous experience to making meaning, and by trying things out, one seeks for his or her own position in the piece. Muscle Space’ project (Figure 7.1) was a student project by Hyperbody, a research group at Delft University of Technology. The aim of this project was to “design a passage that interacts with passers-by proactively. The movement of the actuated structure is a complex combination of scissoring, folding, bending and falling movements. Along the passage, pressure sensors laid on the floor register the steps of passers-by. Step patterns are fed into algorithms that affect the actuators and the spatial sound environment of the muscle passage.” (hyperbody.nl) From the description of this work, we understand how this ‘Muscle Space’ reacts to a participant’s movement—The passage gets the input signals (the step patterns and walking speeds of the participant) through the pressure sensors and then this signal will be processed in the computer (brain of the passage) and generate the behavior of the body (of the passage).

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figure 7.1 Muscle Space, Hyperbody, tu Delft, 2007.

This work aims to generate a conversation between the space and its participant, and it achieved this goal in a certain degree, so it can be considered as an interactive space. However, this interaction could be brought to a higher level, if there is more understanding in this conversation—if the step pattern and walking speed can convey the feeling of the participant and this feeling can be connected to the reaction of the passage. And even further, the participant’s aesthetics experience can be changed by adapting the behavior (the movement of the actuated structure) of the space. Many times, designers are too confident about their ability of predicting the reaction and emotion of the user or the participant. With some general knowledge or personal experience, they state, for example, “people feel welcomed and will be attracted by these opening wings”, without considering the possibility that people can also be experiencing a feeling of being lost or even want to escape, because the behavior of the space proposes a high level of complexity which could be beyond the participant’s appreciated arousal level. This possibility should not be ignored during the design activity. We create a space to talk to people, this space should first be able to listen to people, try to understand people, and then it can give a response based on this understanding. The goal of our study is a fully interactive space design. For reaching that, we need to stay at a clear position, take the right perspective, have a good view of the whole picture, and then use a powerful tool. 2

Emergent Aesthetics and Interactive Space Design

“User experience design” and “emotion design” have become popular terms in the last decade, especially in the fields of industrial design and interaction design. In his earlier book The Design of Everyday Things, Norman emphasized the importance of functionality. “An aesthetically pleasing appearance is only a part of a successful product. The other part is understandability and usability, which are more important than attractiveness.” (Norman, 1990). While in

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his later book Emotional Design, he agrees on “Usable designs are not necessarily enjoyable to use.” And “an attractive design is not necessarily the most efficient.” (Norman, 2004). However, many “experience design” and “emotion design” essentially classify users within categories of predictable behaviors and emotions. (Fiore et al. 2005) While we argue that human experience is more than a predictable calculation, which can be classified. No one can provide a “recipe” for evoking certain emotion by adding up certain colors, curves and softness. The “recipe” type of thinking “disregards the wealth of experience brought to the interaction by a person’s prior experiences and individual way of being, as well as an objects meaning-laden history and the uniqueness of a situation. It also fails to account for the inseparable integration of thinking, feeling and doing in an experience.” (Fiore et al. 2005) They stand from an analytic point of view of aesthetics, which emphasizes a view of humans as disembodied processors able to construct independent realities in the mind. Therefore, pragmatist aesthetics has been proposed for interactive design. Pragmatist aesthetics emphasizes how people experience the world dialogically as embodied subjects. “Functionality and clarity is not enough to meet human needs and desires when engaging with interactive system . . . Aesthetics is tightly connected to context, use and instrumentality.” (Petersen et al. 2004) In a pragmatist perspective, for anything to have value it must relate to human needs, desires, fears and hopes. (Petersen et al. 2004). Although in the last decade, several authors supported pragmatist aesthetics in the field of interaction design, to replace an analytic aesthetics attitude which is dominating, the voice of pragmatist aesthetics is still alone and weak. This is due to the fact that it explains a ‘Why’ with its rich philosophical nutrition, but does not provide a clear ‘How’. Why should we not try to ground aesthetics in psychology and find in this way a voice with matching tones? The mainstream cognitive theories, for example, cognitivism, see cognition as representative and computational, and see the mind as a processor plugged in the head, like a hardware plugged in the computer. (Protevi, 2011) However, cognition is much more than computation. It is not a slide between perception and action in the ‘Classical Sandwich Model’ (Hurly, 1998). For being able to reach a real interaction, which provides multiple and dynamic information process loops, which engage not only the mind, but also the body of the participant, and take into consideration the uniqueness of single situation, we embrace the 4ea cognitive approach, which argues that human cognition is Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended and Affective. It regards the vast majority of cognition as real-time interaction of a distributed and differential system composed of brain, body and world. (Xia & Nimish, 2012) Embodiment does not only refer to the involvement of a human body or non-human body—an agency, but also refers to the perspective of the

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body in a holistic system. Pragmatist aesthetics and 4ea cognition together can make a strong and convincing voice. We call it ‘Emergent Aesthetics’. Emergent aesthetics embodies some specific characteristics, which also explain why pragmatist aesthetics and 4EA cognitive approach can be merged under this new term. These characteristics can be explained as follows: 2.1 Embodiment Insisting that emotions are essentially bodily, William James notes that much of art’s aesthetic appeal is due to the pleasing emotions it engenders through its wide-ranging excitement of ‘the bodily sounding board’ that the perception of beauty can produce: ‘A glow, a pang in the breast, a shudder, a fullness of the breathing, a flutter of the heart, a shiver down the back, a moistening of the eyes, . . . and a thousand unnamable symptoms besides, may be felt the moment the beauty excites us’ and fills us with pleasure. (pp. 1084) (Shusterman 2011). ‘Embodiment’ is one of the key elements in 4ea cognition. It also has been emphasized by pragmatists. Shusterman proposes to transcend the mind-body opposition in aesthetics with “a more constructive strategy by proposing an aesthetic discipline, which pragmatically unites the somatic and the spiritual through the integrated exercise of body and mind.” (Shusterman 2000) For him, the feeling of worth must be somatic and not just intellectual. “As dancers, we understand the sense and rightness of a movement or posture proprioceptively, by feeling it in our spine and muscles, without translating it into conceptual linguistic terms. We can neither learn nor properly understand the movement simply by being talked through it.” (Shusterman, 2000) Different from analytic aesthetics, which is preoccupied with separating humans into mind and body, one part for thinking and one part for sensing, in a pragmatist perspective the role of art and design is to give “a satisfyingly integrated expression to both our bodily and intellectual dimensions.” (Petersen et al. 2004). According to the nature of interactive space, “embodiment” becomes a key element in the interaction design. Besides mental embodiment of their memory, previous experience and emotion, knowing the fact that oneself is supposed to ‘do something back’ to the space, one tries things out with one’s own body: waving, pushing things which look like buttons, walk backwards and forwards, bending, jumping, making sounds . . .  2.2 Unpredictability and Uncertainty “Meaningfulness and aesthetic experiences emerge in use, they are not predefined.” (Petersen, 2004) The bodily condition at that moment, the memory evoked, the expectation and imagination stimulated, the emotion influenced, the action

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taken . . . are all the elements of forming up a unique experience in that unique situation. When this unique experience becomes a new input to the space, a new situation has been created, for a new experience. Aesthetics emerges during interaction processes and cognitive processes. The whole procedure cannot be predicted and repeated. Here the ‘unpredictability’ doesn’t mean out of control, but refers to ‘uncertainty’ and “possible instead of actual”. (Susan Hurly 2008). Sensory lights and sensory doors are not interactive for sure, because they generate thousands of times the same behavior (open-shut or on-off ) to different people and different movements. While interactive responses never repeat, even to the same person, due to the differences within an experienced situation and the way they communicate. The “Muscle space” project mentioned earlier, as an interactive space example, proved this unpredictability, because its brain (the computer) generates new behavior in real time according to the new input. 3

Emergent Aesthetics in Film Studies and Its Inspiration

How to apply emergent aesthetics in interactive space design to involve more human cognition and emotion and therefore to reach a fully and meaningful interaction? Are there any examples in other fields that we can refer to? Let’s look at the field of film studies. Film studies and interaction design, the former being purely humanistic and theoretical, and the latter being technological and practical, seem as though they will never possess overlaps. However, an emergent aesthetic view already appears in film studies, and can become the first connection between film studies and interaction design. Film already has a history of more than 100 years and film theory has been built by generations of scholars. Hugo Munsterberg, Sergei Eisenstein, and other early film theorists initiated the study of the psychology of film from a broad cognitive perspective. There is a long tradition of thinking about the psychological effects and processes of film viewing from perspectives other than psychoanalysis. In the mid- to late- 1980s, the cognitive approach was introduced with a series of books and essays that began to make a decisive difference in how scholars think about the study of film. 1985 marked the appearance of two books: Narration in the Fiction Film and The classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. These books make a powerful case for the study of film form and spectator psychology based on the kinds of mental activities described by cognitive psychology. The Cognitive film theory today is primarily interested in how spectators make sense of and respond to films, together with the textual structures

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and techniques that cause the spectator’s activity and response. From the standpoint of the cognitive theory, Bordwell has established a constructivist approach and has developed an attractive and compelling theory of filmic narration. Bordwell’s theory of narration is useful, for example, in distinguishing between classical Hollywood cinema and art cinema, and in describing the mental activities of the film spectator. We want to focus here on two characteristics of cognitive film theory, since they prove our view of emergent aesthetics. The first is that cognitive film theory takes the perspective of the spectators into account. Cognitive film theory scholars look at film narration from the perspective of the spectators. They ask questions about “how information reaches the audience and is mentally or emotionally processed.” (Elsaesser, 2002: 37–38) “Narration is variable distribution of knowledge among characters and between characters and audience. Narration is a question of how information reaches the audience and is mentally or emotionally processed. It is thus a key factor in how a film addresses, involves, implicates, activates, and manipulates the spectator. The function of filmic narration is to guide the eye and cue the mind, which might involve either an optical or cognitive centering of the spectator, drawing him or her into the picture, or a manipulation of the spectator’s position of knowledge, playing either with his/her desire to see and observe (voyeurism, visual pleasure, scopophilia) or on his/her desire to know and infer (exploiting ignorance, anticipation, or superior knowledge vis-à-vis the characters).” (Thomas Elsaesser, 2002). The attention, memory and emotion that cognitive film scholars look for are not those in the persons performing the play, but in the spectator, and they “recognized that these mental activities and excitements in the audience were projected into the moving pictures.” (Munsterberg, 1970:48). We understand that these ‘attention, memory and emotion’ form a unique aesthetics experience. This perspective taking in cognitive film theory just matches the view of pragmatist aesthetics. The second is ‘embodiment’. In the view of cognitive film theory, film is not made only for the eyes and ears, but “all the senses in our body work simultaneously, interwoven in a system that unites sensual impressions, neuronal processes, memory, imagination and momentary mental activity.” (Dinkla Soke, 2003: 22). In cognitive film studies, there are three types of “agency” in narration: Narrator, Actor, Focalizer. A narrator offers statement about; An actor acts on or is acted upon; A focalizer has an experience of. Focalization (reflection) involves a character neither speaking (narrating, reporting, communicating) nor acting (focusing, focused by), but rather actually experiencing something through seeing or hearing it. Focalization also extends to more complex experiencing of

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objects: thinking, remembering, interpreting, wondering, fearing, believing, desiring, understanding, feeling guilt etc. (Branigan, 1992: 101) The application of a focalizer, transfers the spectators into one of the character in the film narration. The spectators are not anymore there holding a can of popcorn, whispering with their neighbours, but intensively applying their attention, experience, emotion and expectation to making the narration. They are embodied. Cognitive film theory is thus powerful in studying avant-garde films, art films and even in contemporary video art. Talking about engaging the body of the spectators and playing with the body, American video artist Bill Viola gives an example. When creating his video art installations, Viola often projects the figures in huge sizes. He calls these images “power pictures,” and he says “these ‘power pictures’ work like alarm calls, since before the soul can be aroused, the body must first be shaken awake.” (Viola, 1995: 66) Sometimes he applies actual human sizes, because he wants to create another reality that looks very realistic, to reduce the distance between the image and the spectator. In a dark museum surrounding, forgetting about the frame of the video and the other visitors, the spectator can get the illusion that the character is coming down from the screen standing in front of him or her, or the spectator himself is stepping into the video. A mental dialogue is thus created naturally. (Figure 7.2) So it is clear that cognitive film theory and interactive space design share in many points a view of emergent aesthetics. It makes it reasonable to seek for inspirations in film making for interaction design. The relation between complexity and arousal is one of them. It can help interaction design to engage the participants bodily and mentally, moreover, this engagement will benefit the interaction and make it rich and meaningful.

figure 7.2 ‘The Crossing’ [detail] (1996). Video/sound installation.

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Complexity and Arousal

At the beginning of the last century, people started, gradually, to get some experience of viewing films in early cinema. It was exciting to see the figures walking around on the screen, instead of being still on a painting canvas. In 1896 French filmmakers Lumière brothers had the first screening of his new film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat). (Figure 7.3) This 50-second silent film shows the entry of a train pulled by a steam locomotive into a train station. There is no apparent intentional camera movement, and the film consists of one continuous real-time shot. When the huge steam train slowly enters the station, towards the direction of the spectators (when shooting, the direction of the camera), the spectators got terrified by the accosting images, and was unable to grasp that the film was in another reality, many of the spectators screamed and ran for the exit doors. The experience of the spectators more than 100 years ago was a completely new stimuli. It went beyond the level of arousal that they could handle with. The same film can hardly scare away the spectators today, even using advanced 4D cinema equipment. This means that there is a certain relation between hedonic value and complexity, and that this relation is situated. And it implies that experience changes the way we react to previously novel events.

figure 7.3 Film clip of “L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat)”. Lumière brothers, 1895.

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Daniel Berlyne investigated this complex relationship between arousal, hedonic value, complexity, and experience. He assumed that complexity increases arousal and that the function relating complexity to hedonic value has an inverted U-shape. (Figure 7.4) This suggests that medium complexity is liked best: people do not want to be bored by the absence of novelty but they also do not want to be over challenged by too much of it. Importantly, however, the amount of arousal that complexity induces changes over time through habituation. That is, the same level of complexity that has scared us in the beginning is something we like and expect after some experience, and the same level that we like in the beginning starts boring us after some time. In other words, aesthetic experience is dynamic. Berlyne defined his approach as empirical aesthetics “from below” in contrast to speculative aesthetics “from above”. Focusing on Berlyne’s theory, it will be useful for interaction design studies to apply experimental psychology (behavioral and neuropsychological) methods for measurement and quantification, and to provide the necessary empirical grounding. Before getting there, one question is left: “How do we adapt and control complexity?” Berlyne (1963) noted that “the concept of complexity included different aspects: the irregularity of the arrangement of elements, the amount of elements, their heterogeneity, the irregularity of the shapes, the degree with which the different elements are perceived as a unit, asymmetry, and incongruence of the elements.” This rule was applied to many visual art works, while for film and interaction design they are not

Hedonic value

Repeated exposure and experience reduces complexity-induced arousal.

Complexity figure 7.4 Inverted U shape by Daniel Berlyne.

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yet sufficient. Berlyne proposed three elements to embed complexity in the stimuli for changing. 1. Surprise and incongruity: When a stimulus pattern fails to agree with an expectation that was aroused by what preceded it, we call it “surprising.” 2. Uncertainty: A basic resource of all narrative art forms is what commonly goes by the name of “suspense”. 3. Absence of clear expectations: Authors of plays and stories often create situations in which no plausible outcome at all can be readily recognized. (Berlyne, 1971, pp. 145–148) Avant-garde films and contemporary video arts took these elements to extremes. They use montages which seem less (or even not at all) connected to show surprise and incongruity; they use slow motions to give time to the spectators to involve more memory expectations, imaginations and to increase the feeling of uncertainty; they create more and wider ‘gaps’ (absence of clear expectations) in the narration for the spectators to make up their own versions of the story. 5 Discussion If ‘sound’ is basically adjectival while ‘vision’ is a noun (Branigan, 1977:98), we would like to add ‘space’ as the verb. Dealing with interactive space design, we are not only dealing with image and sound, but also with the space. Space is a reality that our body is physically situated in and interacts with. The interface of an interactive space is much different from the cinema screen, or computer screen, even if it involves touch screens. The interaction in an interactive space is therefore more dynamic and multi-dimensional. There is a major difference between film and interactive space. Film, with the playing of montage, applying the role of foculizer, creating surprise and gaps for changing the level of arousal, can in a large scale influence the emergence of the aesthetics experience. However, the film itself cannot be changed by those aesthetics experiences. Interactive spaces, on the other hand, can adapt in real-time to dynamic aesthetic experiences. Therefore, the emergent aesthetics experience in an interactive space is more active and dynamic. There is huge potential to apply artificial intelligence technologies and empirical methods in interaction design and there are various ways to test it. The methods that film developed to change complexity can be used in design and for testing an interactive space. In our current research, to establish a real time adaptive relation between gesture (bodily posture and movement) and complexity in the interactive space, we have introduced the following three steps. (Figure 7.5)

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Complexity

of the behavior of the interactive space

Arousal

Bodily Effect

(Skin Conductance, Heart Rate, Eye Blink)

Gesture

(Posture and Movement)

figure 7.5 Connections among arousal, bodily effect and gesture.

1. Step one: By running empirical experiments in a one-way reactive (not yet interactive) stage, we provide different levels of complexity, and record the bodily effect and gesture. Studies have proven that the arousal level can be measured in many bodily effects, like skin conductance, heart rate and eye blink. When participants perceiving a stimulus with either stable or changing levels of complexity, their skin conductance, heart rate and eye blink will be recorded and their posture and movement will be recorded, coded and interpreted. When the relation between arousal and bodily effect is known, and when the relation between bodily effect and gesture is found, then we have a connection between gesture and arousal. Gesture includes body movement and posture. According to Berlyne, bodily changes indicative of heightened arousal have been found to depend on a group of interacting structures in the brain that are collectively know as the “arousal system” or “ergotropic system.” Berlyne introduced the term “Arousal potential” which denote something like the “psychological strength” of a stimulus pattern, the degree to which it can disturb and alert the organism, the ease with which it can take over control of behavior and overcome the claims of competing stimuli. “Arousal potential” includes psychophysiological properties such as intensity; ecological properties such as association with biological gratifications or discomforts and collative properties such as novelty, surprisingness, and complexity. (Berlyne, 1971, p. 70)

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2. The second step is to run bi-directional reactive experiments: we make the interactive space adaptable (physical and ambient) by receiving the signal of changing bodily effects (eye blink, skin conductance, and heart rate). People interacting with the space and their dynamically changing bodily effect will be fed back to the space in a looped fashion, thus enabling the space to change its behavior accordingly. 3. The third step involves cultivating a real-time interaction scenario, thus making the interaction more alive and intuitively as well as physically felt by the user. Instead of communicating with the space via bodily effect, which requires sensors, stickers and wires attached to the body, people will be directly communicating to the space with their intuitive gesture (via ambient sensing methods). Based on the previous experiments and studies, the gesture carries information about their arousal level. The space can interact with the sensed arousal level of the participant by adapting its spatial and ambient complexity. This arousal is related to the aesthetic behavior “through which the appreciator seeks exposure to works of art.” (Berlyne 1971, p. 7) Getting back again to the ‘Muscle Space’ project, from the perspective of artistic creation and technique achievement it is a great piece of design work, and it reached “interaction” at a level that many other so-called “interactive” projects did not reach. If we ever have the chance to redo it by involving more human cognition and emotion, by embedding the relation between arousal and complexity, and applying empirical methods during the design process, the interaction will be richer and more powerful. Conclusion Don’t think beauty in appearance, think beauty in interaction.’ (Djajadiningrat et al. 2000, p. 132). Aesthetics not only exist in interaction, but also makes the interaction existing. An interaction which excludes the aspect of aesthetics cannot be alive. With the term ‘Emergent aesthetics’, we refer to two interconnected notions: pragmatist aesthetics and 4ea cognition, and we emphasize that aesthetics experience emerges in a fully interactive system, which comprises the body, mind and the environment, without a starting point nor an ending point. A truly interactive space is a space that encourages the dynamics of emerging aesthetics, then listens to it and interacts with it. It is a space that can shape the experience of the participant. In shaping the experience, film studies provide us with examples, both in perspective and in methods. To

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apply the emergent aesthetics view to interaction design, and answer the questions of how to involve human mind and body in the interactive space and therefore to reach a true interaction, we thus need to find out how an interactive space can influence the emergent aesthetics, and can be changed by the evoked emergent aesthetics in the multiple dynamic loops of interactive and cognitive systems. Berlyne’s theory of arousal and complexity is a powerful tool for reaching that goal. References Berlyne, D.E. (1971). Aesthetics and Psychobiology. New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 336 pages. Bordwell, D., Carroll, N. (eds.) (1996). Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bordwell, D. (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. Bordwell, D., Staiger, J. and Thompson, K. (1985). The classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. Bordwell, D. (1989). Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. ―――. (1999). “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice”, in: L. Braudy & M Cohen (eds.): Film Theory and Criticism, Oxford University Press. Branigan, E. (1992). Narrative Comprehension and Film, London and New York, Routledge. Buckland, W. (1995). (ed.): The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Carroll, N. (1997). Fiction, Non-Fiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: A Conceptual Analysis. In Smith, Murray (ed.): Film Theory and Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon. pp. 173–202. ―――. (1998). Interpreting the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge Studies in Film. Clark, A. (1997). Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Currie, G. (1997). The Film Theory That Never Was. In: Allen, Richard—Smith, Murray (eds.): Film Theory and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. pp. 42–59. ―――. (1995). Image and mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science, Cambridge University Press. Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. Capricorn.

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―――. (1958). Experience and Nature. Dover. Dinkla, S. (2003). “Memory Spaces: About the work of Bill Viola”, In Schmitz, Jeanette & Volz, Worlgang, Five Angels: Bill Viola Im Gasometer, Oberhausen. Doane, Mary Ann, (1999). “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of the Body and Space”, In L. Braudy & M Cohen (eds.): Film Theory and Criticism, Oxford University Press. Elsaesser, T. (2002) “Classical/Post-classical narrative (Die Hard)”, In Studying Contemporary American Film (P26–79), T. Elsaesser & W. Buckland, Oxford University. Fiore, S., Wright, P., Edwards, A. (2005). A Pragmatist Aesthetics Approach to the Design of a Technological Artefact. In Proc. aarhus’05, Denmark. Fox, M., Kemp, M. (2009). Interactive Architecture, Princeton Architectural Press. Gardner, H. (1982). Art, Mind, and Brain: A Cognitive Approach to Creativity, Basic Books, ing., Publishers, New York. Hochberg, J. & Brooks, V. (1996). Movies in the Mind’s Eye. In Bordwell, David— Carroll, Noël (eds.): Post Theory. (pp. 368–387). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Hurley, S. (1998). Consciousness in Action, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. ―――. (2008). “The shared circuits model (scm): How control, mirroring, and simulation can enable imitation, deliberation, and mindreading”, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (31, 1– 58.) Iles, C. (2000). Video and Film Space, In E. Suderberg, (ed.) Space Site Intervention. Situating Installation Art (pp. 252–262), University of Minesota. Locher, P., Overbeeke, K., Wensveen, S. (2010). Aesthetic Interaction: A Framework. In Design Issues: Volume 26, Number 2 Spring 2010. Munsterberg, H. (1970). The Film: A psychological Study: The Silent Photoplay in 1916, Dover Publication. Norman, D.A. (2005). Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Basic Books, New York, ny. Petersen, M.G., Iversen, O.S., Krogh, P.G. & Ludbigsen, M. (2004). Aesthetic Interaction— A Pragmatist’s Aesthetics of Interactive Systems. In Proc. dis2004. Peterson, James, “Is a Cognitive Approach to the Avant-garde Cinema Perverse?” In: Bordwell, David—Carroll, Noël (eds.): Post Theory. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. pp. 108–129. Protevi, J. (2011). “Deleuze and Wexler: Thinking Brain, Body, and Affect in Social Context”, in Hauptmann, D. and Neidich, W., (eds.) Cognitive Architecture, From Biopolitis to Noopolitics. Architecture & Mind in the age of Communication and Information. 2011. pp. 169–183. Shusterman, R. (2000). Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd edn. Lanham, md: Rowman and Littlefield. Pp. xix + 346. Cloth isbn 0-8476-9764-9. Paper isbn 0-8476-9765-7.

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―――. (2011). “The Pragmatist Aesthetics of William James”, British Journal of Aesthetics. Viola, B. (1995). Reasons for knocking at an empty house: Writings 1973–1994. First published by Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, in association with the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London. Xia, X., Biloria, N. (2012). “A 4ea Cognitive Approach for Rethinking the Human in Interactive Spaces”. In: Rethinking the Human in Techology-Driven Architecture, Maria Voyatzaki, Conference Proceedings, Constantin Spiridonidis (ed.).

CHAPTER 8

Spinoza, the Philosopher Craftsman: Understanding the World through Painting and Process Paul Uhlmann 1 Introduction In this paper I form the proposition that the philosophy of ‘one substance’ of exiled 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza was directly informed by his craft of grinding lenses and that this method of making meaning through process directly parallels contemporary developments within the methodologies of practice-led research. This philosophy of Spinoza, in which apparent diversity within all life forms is considered as being one unifying whole, moves in direct opposition to the dualism of Descartes and therefore shares common ground with contemporary philosopher Mark Johnson’s embodied mind thesis. I further propose that Johnson’s call for an urgent need for an aesthetics of human understanding, informed by the body’s visceral pre-conscious knowledge of the world (Johnson 2007) may be usefully developed through recent approaches within practice-led research methodologies—particularly in relation to phenomenological perception (Merleau-Ponty 1962). According to Johnson the aesthetic experience has been traditionally relegated to a minor key within Anglo-American analytic philosophy as it has been understood to remain locked within a personal engagement with the world, which therefore excludes fluent communication of this knowledge with others. Practice-led research directly engages with subjective experience in order to find ways to convert such personal understandings of the world into knowledge therefore is a powerful tool for illuminating aesthesis. I draw on my own recently completed practice-led research PhD project where I sought to create a series of temporary portable architectural installations in order to generate an immersive phenomenological experience for the viewer through painting. The central tenant of my project was to make works, which moved beyond mere ocular engagement with painting so that the viewer was immersed within the installations in order to encounter the concept of painting with all the senses of their whole body. Within this paper I reflect the process of moving towards my intention where I aimed to shift perceptions of the viewer, if even for the smallest of © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004281516_010

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moments, so that they might enter a ‘plane of immanence’ (Deleuze 2004). To enter a plane of immanence is to experience a world of endless becoming, of impermanence, where all of life’s forms dissolve to be perceived as one univocal substance. For Deleuze art is a portal, which makes this often fleeting change in perception possible. 2

Practice-led Research as a Tool for Understanding Aesthetics

In his book The Meaning of the Body contemporary philosopher Mark Johnson (2007) traces the reasons why art and aesthetics have been traditionally viewed as being a lesser forms of enquiry and he identifies two main historical sources in Kant and Plato. For Plato art was a form of ‘mimesis’ imitating the real and therefore he banished imitative poetry from his ideal state for he interpreted it as being a second rate derivative understanding of reality and not a direct presentation of reality (Johnson 2007, 210). Kant for his part made an exhaustive critique and found that art and what he called ‘aesthetic experience’ are not primarily sources of knowledge rather they are sources of a certain kind of refined, intellectual feeling. For Kant “nothing pertaining to taste can ever be the basis for universal concepts, propositions or knowledge” ( Johnson 2007, 218). Key to this evaluation of aesthetics as holding a secondary status in relation to knowledge is that it is considered to be a subjective personal experience, which will remain enclosed within the personal realm as ‘feelings’ and therefore cannot be conveyed successfully to others. Johnson’s book aims to overturn this view and to make the provocative claim that “insofar as aesthetics concerns the very conditions of meaningful experience and thought, philosophy must be grounded in aesthetics” ( Johnson 2007, 213). He goes on to write that art is the par excellence exemplar of meaning-making as in many ways it may successfully engage in a pre-conscious level of understanding phenomena within lived experience and furthermore function to translate this understanding through material engagement so that others might access similar pre-conscious understandings. The focus of this paper is to explore how practice-led research can be a powerful way of creating knowledge informing aesthetics (feelings, emotions and qualities) and how this in turn can be a way of supporting the thesis of Johnson—the moving towards a period in time where aesthetics will take its proper place as being the centre of philosophical enquiry. In order for aesthetics to shift from a secondary position to being considered central to philosophy it will be necessary to consider methodologies to enable knowledge generation within aesthetics and I assert that this can

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be generated through practice-led research. Traditional methodologies for research as methods of enquiry have broadly been divided as quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative research has been understood as being “the activity or operation of expressing something as a quantity or amount—for example, in numbers, graphs, or formulas” (Schwandt 2001, 215 as cited in Haseman 2006, 2). While qualitative research refers to “all forms of social inquiry that rely primarily on nonnumeric data in the form of words” (Schwandt 2001, 213 as cited in Haseman 2006, 2). Over the past eighteen years in universities in the United Kingdom and Australia practice-led research has been emerging as a third board methodology. This methodology is notoriously difficult to define as it is fluid in its approach and will differ widely from project to project depending on the research focus, however many commentators agree that it is a method of working through practice which can advance knowledge about or within practice leading to an original contribution towards knowledge. Artists employ this methodology, which may borrow from established fields of enquiry or employ a hybrid mix of cross-disciplinary concerns and collaborations, through a prolonged rigorous engagement tackling a string of questions or a question through practice (Green 2007). Parameters must be set for valid research to occur, the focus of the research must be relevant and in this way it will often follow established protocols from science and humanities that position research as “standing on the shoulders of history” (Green 2007) where an understanding of the body of knowledge relevant to the field of enquiry is established within the project in order to substantiate the contribution. As the reflexive researcher works through their practice (whether it be studio-based, performative, creative writing or other) on their focussed problem, they chart their trajectory through documentation and a process of evolving pilot projects. A conceptual framework of relevant practitioners and theoretical texts must be incorporated into the process so that the making and the conceptual thinking may become fused within the artwork. To work in this way, to collaborate with others through open discussion and to attempt to fuse concepts with materials, may be understood as a form of ‘material thinking’ (Carter 2004). The process of investigation is not linear, indeed it often moves along a more circular route or perhaps is best expressed by the concept of the ‘rhizome’ (Deleuze 2004); emulating the root system of a plant which throws out many roots from its core and is therefore an erratic system which recognises no hierarchy. The writer Felicity J. Coleman describes this concept as being an ‘open system of thought’ which operates as a ‘process’ of ‘perpetual transformation’ (Coleman 2005, 231–233). Often the artist works through intuition and experimentation to make leaps in their process and imagination towards their understanding.

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In attempting to define the value of practice-led research as field of enquiry into new knowledge the writer Graeme Sullivan articulates that “it is within the nature of aesthetics to encourage dialogue and to generate debates” (Sullivan 2009, 50). And it is partly through such dialogue, when an audience or viewer interacts with the work through for example, performance or exhibition that new knowledge emerges. Thus the resulting work exists on many holistic planes; through discussion and debate; within the work itself, whether that be music or performance, writing or exhibition, and finally within the exegesis where the concepts central to research are critically discussed, contextualised and examined. To move beyond generalisations and attempt to illuminate practice-led research I will turn my attention to my own work by way of example. My PhD practice-led research project sought to create temporary architectural installations through painting which would immerse the body of the viewer, in order to alter their perception if only for a moment so that they might move beyond habitual ways of seeing and experience the unfolding moment as if for the first time. I wanted the viewer to experience a sense of immanence and impermanence by creating spaces that would enable embodied contemplation. Impermanence is a central teaching within most wisdom traditions, which holds that “everything changes, nothing remains the same” (Rand 2004, 266). Philosopher Giles Deleuze has written about change and movement, continuous flux—as a principal tendency of life and reality—so that there is no being, there is only ‘becoming’. For my project and purposes these terms were interchangeable. Immanence is considered the opposite of transcendence. The philosophies of Deleuze and Spinoza are both considered to embody immanence where everything is ‘within’, whereas transcendence recognises an external power. For Spinoza there is ‘only substance’ comprising all the world and that is ‘god or nature’ (Scruton 2002, 51). Importantly mind and body are embodied and are infused within a more complex environment as a unified whole— there is no separation from self and world. My research project was informed by this philosophy of immanence where all of life is understood as being comprised of one complex but interrelated whole within nature. In this sense my project represents a positive ontology. From the outset this project was inspired by two separate subjective experiences from my life as an artist. One occurred in relation to an encounter with painting where I found myself immersed within the narrow but vaulting architecture of the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy, surrounded by the painted narratives of Giotto on walls and ceiling; while the other occurred in relation to nature during a series of night walks along remote locations of the Western

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Australian coastline, where it seemed as if my self and ego vanished and dissolved into the surrounding void. Both experiences involved a shock that induced a shift in my attention and perception. It was within the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze that I located a conceptual framework to attempt to understand these experiences. In related but differing ways both of these philosophers articulate pre-conscious understandings of experience as key to understanding perception. For Merleau-Ponty these are immersive phenomenological experiences. He defines phenomenology as relating to a direct and primitive contact where the subject experiences the world as it is—prior to conscious knowledge. For Merleau-Ponty, in order to truly understand the world we move through we must immerse ourselves subjectively in the world—for we are not a “bit of the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, ix)—we are not objectively cut off from our world. To see the world as if for the first time we must therefore return to the ‘things themselves’—to elemental experiences. Phenomenology is accessible only through a phenomenological method, and therefore we understand the world only through active engagement with it—through doing. Whereas science is a rationale or explanation of the world, phenomenology strives to understand the essence of being in the world of existence—through “attentiveness and wonder” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xxiv). For Merleau-Ponty the method of gaining knowledge through perception comes via experience of the ‘lived body’ through the ‘flesh’. Depth is a primary dimension of the senses. Depth preexists perception—it exists before humanity. The concept of ‘sensation’ also assisted to provide an intellectual scaffold for my project. Sensation is a concept articulated and developed by the philosopher Deleuze however it had a long currency in the history of painting through studio conversations between artists, with the letters of Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne’s making it a subject of wider critical discourse and interpretation. Deleuze writes that the affective nature of sensation is such that it acts initially directly on the body, through the nervous system, before being processed by the mind (Deleuze 1988, 34–45). It can therefore be considered to be a phenomenological method of understanding the world, of gaining knowledge, almost intuitively, both through the act of viewing and making a painting. Cézanne used this deliberately ambiguous and multi-layered term in relation to painting to represent the translation of feelings or emotions through paint in relation to the object seen. But he also thought of sensation as a painterly language to interpret the flux, change and impermanence of nature. It was through the process of painting, and the deep engagement that this requires of the subject, that Cézanne became aware that an expansion of his senses was a way of gaining knowledge of the world moving beyond

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mere ocular representation. As Cézanne states, “I paint as I see, as I feel” (Shiff 1998, 14); and “painting from nature is not copying the object, it is realising one’s sensations” (Kendall 1988, 289). In this way, ‘sensation’ may be understood to be “both inside and outside the body” (Shiff 1998, 13), so that the vibrations painted are part of nature (the object) as well as of the senses of the body (the subject). In 2009 I worked for five months as artist in residence at the Fremantle Arts Centre in Western Australia. This residency culminated in an exhibition entitled To hear the language of birds, which was installed in the grounds of the Centre as well as in an upstairs gallery. My main focus during this period was to find ways to observe and contemplate the bird life in the grounds in and around the Centre. From the beginning of my residency a touchstone for my project was the painting by Giotto (1266/7–1337) of St Francis of Assisi (1181/1182–1226) in which the holy man communes with birds. This painting is often called St Francis Preaching to the Birds; however, I preferred to think of it through my own understanding of an exchange between the human and the birds—where something might be learnt by listening and being attentive. Another touchstone for this period of investigation was the Arena Chapel in Padua. I visited this chapel twice, and both times was impressed by how this small space was an immersive experience for my body. I was overcome with a sense of wonder that I could be enfolded in a contemplative space of painted pigment, and I wanted to create something that was a small echo of that experience. For these five months I had my attention and senses trained sky-wards. To contemplate the sky in the western canon of painting is to contemplate transcendence (Ronnberg and Martin, 2010), but it was my intention from the outset to invert this tradition and to contemplate immanence. I brought to this residency a strong desire to work with lenses and a particular desire to work with the concept of the camera obscura. At the time I did not have a strong theoretical position for my intuitive desire to investigate this form of perception. In many ways, throughout my research using the camera obscura there was a great deal of experimentation—of not knowing. Through experimentation, as the contemporary artist Olafur Eliasson asserts “one cannot predict the outcome beforehand”1 ( Jasper 2009, 1). Therefore the connections and links which I reveal at the end of this paper are still surprising revelations and, I think, 1  Experimentation is key to the working process of Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson and he refers to his studio in Berlin as a ‘laboratory’ where he has a team of over 30 specialists ranging from scientists, architects, artists and technicians to art historians, working on a multitude of ambitious projects. Eliasson says, “I experiment a lot. An experiment failure can turn out to be successful in its own way; maybe it opens perspectives that I otherwise

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underwrite the importance of such research that practice-led approaches makes possible, where intuition can also guide a project. For some reason that I did not entirely understand at the time, I was fascinated (and remain so) with the camera obscura. I had my first memorable experience with a lens when I was about 12 years old, walking though the hallway of my parents’ home carrying a magnifying glass. I was lost in a solitary game of magnifying the mundane world when I made a discovery. Holding the glass lens to the wall with the soft afternoon light spilling in from the window I became transfixed by seeing the window projected upside-down in exact and minute detail on the wall. There was something wonderful about being able to see the events outside the window unfold in real time as I watched my brother move outside. He was weightless, upside-down, full of light and air. Rather than becoming overwhelmed with the complexity and scope of optics, during my residency I remained mindful in my experiments of the simplicity of my first boyhood encounter with the lens. I was intrigued to learn, as my knowledge deepened in the period after this residency that a biography on Spinoza by a contemporary of his made the insightful observation that the philosopher was in the particular habit of carrying a magnifying glass on his person and I discuss the relevance of this later in this paper. Early in my research I collected many images of old engravings of the camera obscura. This method has been with us for a long, long time, with Aristotle writing about it in the 4th century bc. Phillip Steadman2 defines the camera obscura thus: If a small hole is made in the wall of a darkened room, an image of the scene outside can be formed by light rays passing through the hole. The image may appear on a wall opposite the hole, or can be observed on a sheet of paper . . . This is the ‘camera obscura’ in its original meaning, the term coming from the astronomer Kepler in the early 17th century. (Steadman 2001, 4) Many different versions of the camera obscura have existed. Some of the archaic versions I discovered were very much like a modern reflex camera. One, for example, was made of wood and brass with a lens fixed to the front of wouldn’t have thought of at all. If you really are to experiment, you cannot predict the outcome beforehand” (Jasper 2009, 1). 2  Phillip Steadman is the author of the ground-breaking study on Vermeer, Vermeer’s Camera. This book convincingly argues that in order to achieve the often photographic qualities in Vermeer’s work, he must have used a camera obscura.

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the box. Inside the camera was a mirror which would throw the image upwards onto a transparent sheet of glass to allow the artist to trace the projected image onto lightweight papers (Steadman 2001). However, the versions that I found most interesting were portable tent-like structures, which allowed the artist to be enfolded in a chamber. The light was gathered at the top of the tent by a lens which was perched over an aperture in the centre of the apex, and this was then, again using a mirror and another lens, projected onto the working table underneath. Intrigued by this, I made my own portable camera obscura. By taking two garden arches, normally used to create arbours and wrapping the structure with black garden plastic, I created a dome room that stood approximately 2.5 metres high. The black plastic was simply clipped to the sides of the supports, and this meant that I was able to adjust it easily to make openings wherever needed. I made an opening to the sky, which was shaped like an eye, and under this I placed a trestle table with my drawing materials: paper and pencils, watercolours or oils and canvas. Hovering precariously, approximately 60 or 70 cm over my table, was a magnifying glass clipped to my tripod. The light would stream into the gloom through my lens and magically throw an image onto my paper. It seemed a paradox that in order to look up at the sky, I in fact was looking at a reversed image projected downwards. The image appeared in miniature at about 20 cm in diameter; it would tremble slightly, wavering across my page like a wild living thing. Movement was a distinctive quality of the image— it was not like a projected film or a defined photograph rather the edges of the image was soft and shifted with the availability of the light which moved through the flickering canopy of the trees above. The colours appeared intense and painterly on the cotton paper. The painterly quality occurred as a result of the lens shifting ever so slightly in degrees of focus across the diameter of the projection. This quality in particular caused the leaves of the trees above to fall out of focus for the most part, and therefore it shuddered as a field of indeterminate greenness, and this contrasted with the blended sea of cobalt blue of the sky. Birds would flit across my watercolour pad as specters and suggestions of bird shapes rather than clearly defined forms and they seemed to speed in an unusual spinning manner. I felt rather than saw the birds and came to understand these creatures as being immersed within the environment. Encased by darkness in my portable room I would stare at this constantly changing image and be held breathless—it was beautiful and beguiling. I would fall into a deep reverie, forgetting all sense of self and ego, as I raced to attempt to trace the lines of the trees and sky above. This was no easy manner of working as everything was continuously in flux and so my movements of my hand were very

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fast and became part of the experience of attempting to capture sensations of the aerial world above. From time to time a bird would appear and dart silently across the mirage, which floated on my page, and it seemed for an imperceptible moment that I became that winged creature. Why did the images of the camera obscura hold my attention more than when I simply looked at the sky with my own naked eyes? Perhaps via these illuminated projections a shift in attention occurred, and it was as if my sensory perceptions passed upwards through the aperture of my make-shift room so that I became more aware of my surroundings? It is indeed a paradox that I felt myself to be more connected to the environment when I was separated from the world by a thin membrane of plastic enfolding my darkened chamber. It seemed to me as if my portable room was a metaphor for seeing and almost a model of the eye. It was in many ways like sitting inside a head with a Cyclops eye turned to the sky so that the projected upside-down shimmering image was similar to how a retinal image might appear at the back of my eye, waiting to be interpreted by my mind. However with further reflection I came to understand these experiences were much more than ocular, rather they were embodied expressions where I could sense a wider engagement with my immediate world with my whole body. I came to consider that my portable room, with its cupola to the sky, provided my consciousness with access to a portal to the plane of immanence where for brief moments the illusion of all different organisms and separations between self, apparent borders of my skin, the trees, the sky and the birds dissolved into one substance. Johnson notes that it would be a “mistake . . . to think of the organism and its environment(s) as autonomous, independent entities that are only externally related” for these organisms and environments are “co-evolving aspects of experiential processes that make up situations” (Levin and Lewontin 1985, 89 as cited in Johnson 2007, 83). It was instructive that the device of the camera obscura increased my power of concentration, enabling renewed contemplation of the world and a new consideration of the limits and boundaries of self. Taken together these subjective experiences provided insights into how feelings, emotions and qualities might be processed to generate meaning through practice-led research in order to reflexively enrich and illuminate aesthetic experiences. 3

The Lens as an Eye of the Mind

It is intriguing that exiled mid 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632– 1677), in order to make a living, was a lens grinder during a time when there was

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great fascination with how lenses could enable new means of empirical perception of macro and micro worlds. Deleuze considers Spinoza to have been a “philosopher craftsman” (Deleuze 1988, 7)—someone who found knowledge through doing—through process. Spinoza lived at the same time as Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) and was also known to have drawn pictures and to have lived with an artist. In extrapolating from research by Deleuze and W.N.A. Klever, I therefore argue that he must have known about the camera obscura. I make a case for the idea that his practice of slowly grinding precise lenses by hand assisted the development of his philosophy to ‘see clearly’, and I maintain that Spinoza would have held it is a source of wonder that a simple glass lens opened humanity’s collective vision to see invisible worlds, and therefore that the lens provided an active empirical metaphor for the philosophy of ‘one substance’, where everything is connected to everything else. However his process goes beyond metaphor for it intertwines his actions and observations with his philosophy. The importance of this proposition is that it demonstrates that the craft of making: that is, practice-led research, can generate insights and new knowledge through the process of making and doing. An objective for Spinoza was to construct a philosophy of “clear and distinct ideas” (Scruton 2002, 40). This phrase appears to have been borrowed from the rhetoric of Descartes—ironically, for the monism of Spinoza can be seen to be in direct opposition to the dualism of Descartes. Perhaps this is not surprising however, as Spinoza’s thinking, however opposed, was influenced and informed by Descartes. He wrote The Principals of Descartes’ Philosophy in the geometric method favoured by Descartes, and he also wrote Ethics in this manner. To write in this way expressed a desire to create a universal system where ontological complexities could be rationally understandable. It is interesting that Deleuze argues that in order to understand the philosophy of Spinoza we must consider his life as a whole (Deleuze 1988): and thereby the geometric method employed by Spinoza and his profession of polishing lenses directly influenced the evolution of his thinking. Deleuze writes that Spinoza “expresses this ­precisely when he writes in Ethics that demonstrations are the ‘eyes of the mind’ ” (Deleuze 1988, 14). Deleuze understands this as being the third eye “which enables one to see life beyond all false appearances, passions and deaths” (1988, 14). The biography of Spinoza by Colerus provides another angle to give meaning to this axiom through the following observation from the daily life of Spinoza: He also often took his magnifying glass, observing through this the smallest mosquitoes and flies, at the same time reasoning about them. He

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knew, however, that things cannot be seen as they are in themselves. The eternal properties and laws of things and processes can only be discovered by deduction from common notions and evident axioms. “The eyes of the mind, by which it sees and observes things, are the demonstrations.” (Colerus as cited in Klever 1996, 35) Here Spinoza gazes through his lens but seeks a more unified philosophic understanding beyond the particular details of the creature he studies. W.N.A. Klever also stresses that optics held a special interest for Spinoza, and notes that historians tend to dismiss this aspect of his work as ‘marginal’ (Klever 1996, 33); however, in his opinion optics occupied a central position in his work. Klever emphasises that Spinoza was someone driven by science. Many scientists of the day, such as Christiaan Huygens and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, held Spinoza in high regard for his fine telescopes and microscopes: Leibniz actually wrote to Spinoza that he was a fine maker of “peep-tubes”, adding that “he would not easily find somebody who in this field of studies could judge better” (Klever 1996, 33). The correspondence of Spinoza make it clear that he worked on microscopes, and he also joined Huygens in surveying the night sky through a 30-foot telescope to observe the planet Jupiter (Klever 1996). One letter3 in particular which emphasises the deep intertwining of Spinoza’s philosophy and his love of optics was written to Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society in London, who was a friend and confidant of Robert Boyle the English physicist (Spinoza 1992, 280–282). In it Spinoza speaks about blood with the shared understanding of scientists who have had the direct experience of peering through a microscope at invisible worlds. In this beautiful piece of correspondence Spinoza invites his reader to imagine a worm existing within the bloodstream of the human body. The worm can see separate objects in the blood, and distinguishes them as distinct from each other—the particles of the lymph are different from the particles of chyle in “respect to shape and motion” (Spinoza 1992, 281). The worm however, would not conceive of these separate parts as being one whole—just as we living within our universe do not see the whole. For we see trees and birds and people and so on as separate entities rather than a whole unified substance. With this elegant example Spinoza discusses in a practical way the findings of his philosophy and justifies the human body as well as the human mind as part of the natural world. He sees that in “Nature there also exists an infinite power 3  Letter 32 from Baruch Spinoza to Henry Oldenburg, dated November 20th 1665.

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of thinking which, in so far as it is infinite, contains within itself the whole of Nature as an object of thought . . .” (Spinoza 1992, 282). I want to expand on this concept that lenses and optics were important to the development of Spinoza’s thinking by one further speculation, not mentioned in any of the readings that I have encountered, by adding that he would have had knowledge of the camera obscura. I base this on the following observations. He is known to have lived with the painter van der Spyck (Scruton 2002, 15) in the years around 1672, and according to his contemporary biographer and friend, J.M. Lucas he was “interested in the prevailing pastime of the Netherlands, and would pass many hours sketching with ink and paper” (Scruton 2002, 18). Another early biographer Colerus, relates that he made a sketch of himself “in the attitude and costume of the Neapolitan revolutionary Masaniello” (Deleuze 1988, 7). Therefore he would have had a day-to-day knowledge of the workings of an artist’s studio and first-hand insights into the problems that expressed themselves to someone concerned with representing an image. Lenses were an obsession of the time with learned men seeking out telescopes and microscopes, but lenses too were also being used secretly by artists through developments which shifted perception and the reliance from working directly with the ‘eye’ to working with the aid of a lens—this shift meant that, an artist such as Vermeer, who is considered by many scholars and artists to have employed the camera obscura, was able to attentively observe and faithfully render the patterns of light which fell on the camera screen as tonal values, shadow and colour in a manner rarely seen (Steadman 2001, 2). Knowledge of the wonder of this device would have appealed to his mind through his study of Descartes, who wrote about the mechanics of the eye in his book La Diotrique (1637), where he famously made an experiment using the membrane lens of an ox’s eye, placing it in the window aperture of a darkened chamber so that it projected onto a sheet of paper an up-side down image of the street outside; and through diagrams compared the eye to the workings of the camera obscura. Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687) the father of astronomer Christiaan Huygens, who was a neighbour and correspondent of Spinoza, brought back to Holland from England in 1622 a camera obscura made by his countryman, the renowned inventor Cornelius Drebbel. Constantijn Huygens marveled at the precision of this device and publicly showed the workings of it in his home (Hockney 2001, 210). Steadman further writes that Huygens is identified as the man who could have helped Vermeer develop his optics (Steadman 2001, 58). For me the notion of Spinoza grinding lenses places him in the context of the studio. Deleuze describes Spinoza as “a philosopher craftsman equipped with a manual trade, capable of grasping and working with the laws of optics”

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(Deleuze 1988, 7). To consider Spinoza as a ‘philosopher craftsman’ in the studio grinding lenses is to draw parallels with contemporary practice-led research. He understands the world and develops his concepts of the world through doing. His practice of slowly grinding lenses becomes a method for slowly forming concepts. He was acknowledged as a refined craftsman and highly knowledgeable about optics. Christiaan Huygens who, through his innovative work in astronomy required the very best quality lenses, spoke of the excellent instruments made by “that Israelite” living near Voorburg. Being in Paris Huygens frequently requested his brother to provide him all possible information about the theoretical and technical progress Spinoza made in this field (Klever 1996, 33)—a record of discussions about developments in optics between Huygens and Spinoza can also be found in Spinoza’s letter of May 1665 to Oldenburg4 (Spinoza, trans. Shirley, 175–176). Also towards the end of Letter 32 to Oldenburg where Spinoza writes about the worm in the blood, he briefly discusses the work of Christiaan Huygens writing how the astronomer is “fully occupied in polishing dioptrical glasses” and the correspondent goes on further to write that . . .  for this purpose he has devised a machine in which he can turn plates . . . I don’t know the success he has had with it, and, to tell the truth, I don’t particularly want to know. For experience has taught me that in polishing spherical plates a free hand yields safer and better results than any machine. (Spinoza, trans. Shirley 1992, 195–196) Here he gives an insight into the fact that he has spent countless hours perfecting his craft and that his is a very special kind of knowledge—the kind analogous to the artist, which is slowly amassed through hours and hours of immersed activity where the maker absorbs an understanding of the particularity of materials. The scholar Catherine S. Abou-Nemeh writes recently in the journal “History of Science about Nicolas Hartosoeker, a contemporary lens-maker and fellow Dutch countryman of Spinoza, that the lens making was “challenging” as it required “good-quality materials with glass that had few blemishes as possible”. She writes “any lens manufacturer had to master a high degree of precision and a polishing technique” which: would not damage, crack or scratch the lens. And finally, the manual process of polishing the lens was often long and physically demanding on 4  Letter 26 from Baruch Spinoza to Henry Oldenburg, dated May 1665.

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the lens maker himself. To master lens making could take many years. (Abou-Nemeh 2013, 6) A poem by the blind poet Jorge Luis Borges captures an image of Spinoza slowing polishing the crystal glass in the dying light of twilight; and the poet intimates that the activity of polishing the stubborn lens enabled dreams of the infinite to be unleased to reveal the “Map of the One” (Borges 1999, 229). Therefore I surmise that the philosophy of Spinoza’s ‘one substance’ is focused through the lens, through the activity of making—of doing. Just as the philosopher pondered his concepts for unity within apparent diversity, the lens acted as a powerful metaphor to contemplate that unity, whether by looking upwards to the heavens with the aid of a telescope, or downwards with a microscope at unseen micro-worlds, or projecting images from the everyday through a camera obscura. As I have demonstrated through my own research the camera obscura acts very differently to a contemporary film as there is the sense that the events are unfolding in real-time and that the projected image emulates the way we see. The image being projected unites the complex field being observed, so that through my own example, the separations between diverse phenomena appeared to become one living substance. All these ways of seeing would have contributed to his way of thinking which saw “every substance [as] necessary infinite” (Spinoza 1992, 34). There is a link between Spinoza’s desire for “clear and distinct ideas” and his occupation of grinding lenses slowly which were able to reveal hitherto unknown worlds. It is fascinating to contemplate how his desire to use the geometric method in philosophy finds material and metaphorical expression with the lens. Further in time, in my makeshift camera obscura tent, this link stretches like a “line of flight” (Deleuze, 2004) as I continue to trace out a line within my darkened chamber or simply observe the image through on-going experimentation. The paradox is that my tent-like structure divides me from the landscape but enables my mind to collapse, fold into itself and become imperceptible—to become landscape—through this deep meditation drawing process. I find parallels in the working process of Spinoza with the methodology of practice-led research which as I have discussed, can be usefully employed to work towards informing Johnson’s call for an aesthetics of human understanding. Practice-led research offers a third methodology in addition to quantitative or qualitative research so that in employing especially hybrid structures it can illuminate emotions, feelings and qualities in new ways and thus move towards a period in time when Johnson’s desire for a “visceral connection to life” (Johnson, 2007, ix) will become central to philosophical thought.

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References Abou-Nemeh, S. Catherine. 2013. “The Natural Philosopher and the Microscope: Nicholas. Hartsoeker Unravels Nature’s ‘Admirable Oeconomy’ ”, History of Science 51.170 (March): 1–32, 124. Baas, Jacquelynn, and Mary Jane Jacob. eds. 2004. Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art. London: University of California Press. Beiser, Frederick C. 2003, The Romantic Imperative: The concept of Early German Romanticism. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1999. Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poetry. Edited by Alexander Coleman. New York, ny: Penguin. Carter, Paul. 2004. Material Thinking. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press. Coleman Felicity, Jane. 2005. “Rhizome.” In The Deleuze Dictionary, edited by Adrian Parr, 231–233. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, Giles. 1988. Spinoza: Practical philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco, ca: City Lights Books. ―――. 2002. Pure immanence: Essays of a life. 2nd ed. Translated by Anne Boyman. New York, ny: Zone Books. Deleuze, Giles, and Felix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. London, ny: Continuum. Feldman, Seymour. 1992. “Introduction. Baruch Spinoza.” In The Ethics: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect; Selected Letters. 2nd ed. Translated by Samuel Shirley, and edited by Seymour Feldman. Indianapolis, in: Hackett Publishing Company. Green, Lelia. 2014. “Recognising practice-led research . . . at last!” Paper presented at the Hatched 07 Arts Research Symposium, Perth, Western Australia. Accessed January 1, 2014. http://www.pica.org.au/downloads/141/L_Green.pdf. Haseman, Brad. 2006. “A Manifesto for Performative Research.” Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, 118:98–106. Hamilton, Clive. 2010. Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change. Crows Nest, New South Wales, Australia: Allen & Unwin. Harrison, Charles H., Paul J. Wood and Jason Gaiger, eds. 1998. Art in Theory 1815–1900. Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishers. Hockney, David. 2001. Secret Knowledge: Recovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters. London: Thames & Hudson. Jasper, Adam. 2009. “Take your time: Olafur Eliasson.” Sydney Ideas Quarterly (December). Accessed May 22, 2012. http://www.usyd.edu.au/sydney_ideas_quarterly/ people/interviews/03_olafur.shtml.

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Johnson, Mark. 2007. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago & London, United Kingdom: The University of Chicago Press. Kendall, Richard, ed. 1988. Cezanne by Himself. London, uk: Macdonald Orbis. Klever, W.N.A. 1996. “Spinoza’s Life and Works.” In The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, edited by Don Garrett, 13–60. New York, ny: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1994. “Eye and mind”. Translated by Carleton Dallery. In Art and its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory. 3rd ed. Edited by Stephen Ross, 282–298. New York, ny: State University of New York Press. ―――. 2005. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin. Smith, New York, ny: Routledge. Pirenne, M.H. 1970. Optics Painting & Photography. London, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Rand, Yvonne. 2004. “Glossary”. In Buddha mind in contemporary art, edited by Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob, 265–267. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press. Ronnberg, Ami and Kathleen Martin, eds. 2010. The Book of Symbols. Cologne, Germany: Taschen. Schwandt, Thomas A. 2001. Dictionary of Qualitative Research, California Sage, Thousand Oaks. As cited in Haseman, Brad. 2006. “A Manifesto for Performative Research,” Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 118: 98–106. Scruton, Roger. 2002. Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction. 2nd ed. New York, ny: Oxford University Press. Shiff, Richard. 1998. “Sensation, Movement, Cezanne.” In Classic Cezanne, 14. Sydney, Australia: The Art Gallery of New South Wales. Spinoza, Baruch. 1992. The Ethics; Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect; Selected Letters. 2nd ed. Translated by Samuel Shirley and edited by Seymour Feldman, Indianapolis, in: Hackett Publishing Company. Stagoll, Clifford Scott. 2005. “Becoming”. In The Deleuze Dictionary, edited by Adrian Parr, 21–22. Edinburgh, United Kingdom: Edinburgh University Press. Steadman, Philip. 2001. Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces. New York, ny: Oxford University Press. Sullivan, Graeme. 2009. “Making Space: The Purpose and Place of Practice-Led Research.” In Practice-Led Research, Research-Led Practice in the Creative Arts, edited by Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean, 41–65. Edinburgh, uk: Edinburgh University Press. Wolf, Abraham. 1928. The Correspondence of Spinoza. Translated by Adam Wolf, London, United Kingdom: Allen & Unwin.

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Images

figure 8.1 Paul Uhlmann, Aperture of camera obscura tent, 2009.

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figure 8.2 Paul Uhlmann, Make-shift portable camera obscura tent, 2012.

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figure 8.3 Paul Uhlmann, Camera obscura projection with cricket, 2012.

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Index Aesthetics 1, 4–5, 7–8, 11–15, 17–19, 21–27, 31, 33, 40, 43, 45–46, 64, 70–71, 82, 85, 97, 99–100, 104, 107–109, 116, 123–130, 132–133, 135–140, 142, 152, 154 aesthetic stimuli 29, 31 agency 66, 100, 126, 129 Art 7–9, 12, 22–23, 25, 29, 32–33, 43, 47–49, 54, 56, 59–60, 62–63, 69, 71, 73, 76, 82–83, 85–86, 89, 96–97, 100–102, 106, 108, 114, 116, 118, 124, 127, 129–130, 132–133, 135–137, 140, 144, 153–154 Art appreciation 12 Artifacts 30, 38, 42 Berlyne 132–136 Bistable 55, 62 Blind 66, 152 Body 7, 11–12, 27, 29, 49–58, 60–76, 80, 82–99, 101–104, 113, 115–116, 119–120, 122, 124, 126–127, 129–130, 133–137, 139, 140–144 147, 149, 154 Body posture 50–52, 61 Brain region 39, 57 Closure 35, 44 Collative 134 Complex 17, 19–20, 33–35, 52, 124, 129, 132, 142, 152 Consciousness 42, 46–47, 82, 84, 98, 109, 137, 147 Context 15, 22, 41, 46, 49, 76, 87, 94, 102, 126, 137, 150 Cross-cultural 14, 20–22 Culture 2, 14, 46, 98–99, 104, 109, 153–154 Cultural 21, 93, 103, 122 Curves 73, 126 Deleuze 137, 140–143, 148, 150–154 Dewey 17, 25, 103, 116, 136 Dualism 11, 12, 49, 84, 90, 139, 148 Education 11, 12, 25, 108 Embodied 1, 4–5, 8, 11–12, 14, 19, 22, 49, 52, 56, 58, 63, 65, 87, 89, 95, 97–98, 100, 126, 130, 139, 142, 147

Embodiment 7, 11–12, 17, 86, 97–99, 101, 126–127, 129 Enaction 12, 126 Eye movement 54, 65 Facial beauty 47 Film 7, 8, 74, 124–125, 127–133, 135–137, 146, 152 fMRI 16, 28, 43, 45 Gallese 56, 58, 64 Gardens 7, 8, 101–109, 113, 115, 117–123 Gestalt 45 Gibson 50, 64 Hedonic 29, 34, 47, 131, 132 Hokusai 54 Holistic 126, 142 Image 11, 16, 21, 53, 57–58, 61–62, 96, 119, 124, 130, 133, 136, 145–147, 150, 152 Interaction 7, 11–12, 17, 48–49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 85, 95, 124, 125–133, 135–137 James 70, 103, 127, 137–138 Jasper 144–145, 153 Johnson 11–12, 17–19, 22, 26, 45, 85, 99, 116, 139–140, 147, 152, 154 Kawabata 13, 26 Kendall 144, 154 Latent 87, 89–90, 92 Leder 17, 26, 27, 31, 45 Long-term memory 42 Mind-body 12, 127 Mirror neuron 56 Monism 148 Movement 7, 12, 22, 46, 51, 53–60, 62, 64–65, 67, 70, 73–84, 86, 88–89, 91–109, 111, 113, 115–119, 121–125, 127, 131, 133–134, 142, 146, 154 Museum 106, 130

150 Neuro-evolutionary 7, 28–29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47 Neurons 31, 35, 40, 43–44, 46, 64 Oculomotor 50–51, 54–56, 63–65 Optical 52, 129 Optic flow 51–52, 74–76, 111, 113, 123 Oscillation 36, 38, 42 Perception 7, 11–12, 14, 16, 24–26, 33, 35–37, 42–43, 45–46, 48–67, 70, 74, 77, 80, 85, 89, 93–94, 99, 108, 113, 115–116, 126–127, 139–144, 147–148, 150, 154 Phenomenology 7, 28–29, 31, 33–35, 37, 39–43, 45, 47, 86, 89–90, 98–100, 143, 154 Pictorial 7, 25, 48–51, 53–65, 67 Pre-conscious 139, 140, 143 Preference 7, 13–18, 20–27, 32, 38, 45–47, 55, 107 Prefrontal Cortex 25, 40–41, 46 Qualitative research 141, 152, 154 Quantitative research 46, 141, 152 Representation (mental) 60, 61 Rotation (mental)  51, 53, 63–65

index Scruton 142, 148, 150, 154 Self 90, 91, 98, 99, 142, 143, 146, 147 Semiotics 7, 8, 43, 101, 103 Sensations 56, 108, 111–112, 144, 147 Sensorimotor 20, 22, 28, 46, 53, 60, 91 Snow 11 Spinoza 7, 139, 141–143, 145, 147–155, 157 Suspense 133 Technologies 133 Ticini 37, 43 Triadic 117 Vision (inner)  47 Visual 9, 14, 15, 23–25, 28, 33, 39, 42, 43, 48–54, 57, 60–67, 92, 101, 110–113, 116–117, 123, 129, 132 Winkielman 29, 41, 47 Zajonc 30, 47 Zeki 13, 26, 41, 47