Embodied Vision

Merleau-Ponty argues that the 3rd dimension is not seen but calculated in the mind... Here are a few interesting quotations from 'Eye and Mind'....

'The fact that things overlap or are hidden does not enter into their definition, and expresses only my incomprehensible solidarity with one of them - my body.'

'There is no vision without thought... Vision is a conditioned thought; it is born as "occasioned" by what happens in the body; it is "incited" to think by the body.'

I have been coming to the conclusion that if it is thought that defines our world, the world outside our body can only be conceived of as a product of our own thought. Nothing is separate from our each unique view of the outside as our minds codify the sense data from our sense organs into our very own programmed language that is supposedly different in everyone. In other words, everything we know and sense is just an extension of ourselves. Degressing slightly, going from this theory, is this the reason that babies and young children cannot form (narrative) memories.... They are still learning how to place sense data into an ordered structure, the mind still learning how to successfully programme sensed information into anything meaningful and so with the lack of structure memories cannot now be placed into anything meaningful to us now, considering we probably think in code as to our surroundings.

Anyway, when exploring perception and a further reality beyond what we can sense (we know its there, science tells us!) this is something to consider, when visualising information in infra-red or ultraviolet (like the recent visualisations of the galaxy) the way we see plays an important part in how we address material characters. How will we learn from placing extra information about the world on top of our own senses? how can we get past how our mind has tailored the programming of sense data into a normal unextended vision of the world? will it affect our sense of identity?

Codified existense within a Medium

Is it weird that so much of identity is superficial?..... The worlds of fashions and beauty define ourselves as our bodies. An exterior medium that houses us, grounds us to the earth and equates to our conscious reality.... What would it be like to be without our body? Without sight, sound, touch.... just pure thought. Is pure thought even possible.... the only explanation I can think of is emotions. However, emotions always have a humanly context. Emotion is not a sense... it is an earthly phenomenon that occurs internally. It is culturally learnt but unpredictably dependent on personality. Personality is a strange term to think of... It materialises itself through gestures and words. But where does it come from? Ideas? Are the matrixing together of memories codified by cultural/genetic processing. Intelligence is a reaction of the cells within our body, linking of knowledge- The act of creation--- an ethereal scenario occuring deep within our consciousness completely out of conscious control and beyond our empirical exterior world. We are placed in this world, we define it and are defined by it, encased and conditioned. What is it to imagine an experience outside of this body, without earthly desires, ailments or sensation. Inconceivable. What interests me is how music appears to communicate a pure sort of energy, it moves in a language intuitively formed within. Aesthetically appealing to our corporeality and magicly transcending emotions and pure ideas to our inner, enclosed realm of uncoded thought. Energy flows throughout all matter, spreading and sucking from one physical presence to another. It is my opinion that music is the medium that describes this sense of action and movement best and translates it to pure thought. The earthly translation that loses nothing to coding.

Technology and Embodied Experience

Technology can induce an artificial embodied experience which could potentially physicalise hidden material realities beyond human senses..... If we live it, is it real? Can technology place scientific theory into context by means of embodied experience?

Embodied Experience = a global consciousness of the spatiality and identity of ones own body + the gestalt of all senses. We thus place ourselves within the world, grounded by our empirical beliefs. 'Embodied Experience is the result of human percept'.

Is it learnt...... possibly human reality starts off disorganised and through the processing of empirical sense data, patterns and rules are formed, matter is remembered and body schema is developed within the motor-neural system of brain to muscle. This is achieved not just automatically but in accordance to the context of intention/environment. Or to put it simply.... on lower levels of consciousness (but not unconciously).

'Virtuality and the veryday reality of body transcendence, presses us to think the corporal.'

Foucaults 'Le corps Utopique' describes reality as 'one continuous landscape' which increasingly becomes 'punctured by mulitple screens and messages from times and places other than where we nominally are.'

So the question is 'What sort of subject are we becoming?' Now more than ever we need to embody our thoughts - now when that convern and the thick sensory envelope that provides us with consciousness is studded with earphones, zooming in psychopharmaceuticals (self help?), extended with protheses, dazzled by odourless tastes and tasteless odours (artificial?), transported by new media, and buzzing with ideas (surely good?).

On media art........ Do these artforms offer an escape from the channelled sensory portals codified at mid-century, or are we merely reinstating the hierarchies of that past in more comfortable prosthetic ways?

Sensorium- the subjects way of co-ordinating the bodies perceptual and proprioceptive signals, and the changing sensory envelope that constitutes the self. the sensorium should be seen at any historical moment as shifting, contingentm dynamic and alive. It lives only through us, enhanced by our technologies and extended prosthetically, but always subject to our consciousness (itself dependent on sensory formations).

form ------ experience

pattern of art since fluxus

a recent shift in Art tastes caused by technology? on a material and pyschological level? through synaesthetic and kinesthetic scenarios.

I am concerned about this lack of feeling!

Inner Content

The field of our sense-perceptions and sensations of which we are not conscious, though we undoubtedly can infer that we possess them, that is, the dark ideas of man, is immeasurable. The clear ones in contrast cover infinitely few points which lie open to consciousness; so that in fact on the great map of our spirit only a few points are illustrated.

Kant

Gesaltian Theory concludes that the observing minds tendency to perceive only articulate form causes a serious epistomological limitation that barred direct insight into our inarticulate form experiences. (Experience beyond form and language..... boundless thoughts).

Could it be possible that the unconscious part of the mind as limitless as infinity as it requires no order or measure?

On Form

If an idea is really new, the artist can never predict how it is to be realised in a medium. A new idea will inevitably be modified through its impact on the resisting media and conversely impose entirely new uses on the medium. In the end, by the mutual impact both idea and medium will be realised in a more profound manner. The idea will be purified of preconceived and manneristic elements unrelated to the rest of the personality and become enriched by unconscious phantases that were excluded from the initial conception.

Anton Ehrenzweig

How we see has been a crucial aspect of art since its beginning. Cavemen knew that painterly gestures depicting a head, four legs and a tail would mean 'horse' if they were put together in a specific way. The invention of one point perspective in the renaissance provided illusions of depth for the first time. Three hundred years later the impressionists application of scientific colour theories yielded new sensations of colour and movement. The cubists sought to convey an even more sophisticated visual concept; the simultaneous representation of multiple facets of an object from different points of view. In out time, changes in attitudes about time and space brought about by new physics have radically altered our thinking yet again. These expanded attitude has resulted in an expanded notion of art; it is no longer an art of illusion of even abstraction but one that is possibly more human, because it takes shape only through the viewers directed perception.

Jan Butterfield

Sensibility = Art

Cranz begins by explaing that before the twelfth century, the soul, the seat within the human body in which all sensation and intellection takes place was believed by philosophers to be a complete world onto intself (the locus of "all beings" as Aristotle expressed it). For the ancients, Cranz emphasizees the soul did not just reflect reality in some symbolic fashion, as we assume today, but was understood to receive the true form and substance of whatever was sensed or intellected in the external world. When a thing was perceived by the senses, its form and substance actually entered the soul.

Argument - Art is intellectual or sensory?
For - the occurance of poetry, language denotes art in a transformative quality.
Against - Abstract works- yet.... form is the outer expression of inner content. Is art based on human experience or a further intelligence of the mind? In other words does the transformation lie in the process of empirical senses.

Would Art representing existence beyond human reality have any relevance, if art is grounded in human experience only?

'We relate to the world through what one might regard as a single sense organ, our bodies. and it is only with the advent of conscious reflection that we try to divide our experience into five separate sectors each patrolled by its own sensory modality. We are originally connected to the world, in short, not through separate channels of sensation but through integrated networks of perception.'

The most skeptical philosophers have accepted uncritically the sense data theory, which considers the data conveyed by perception as a secure unquestionable basis for our understanding of objective reality.

If we insist on defining experience in terms of the worlds effect on our senses as opposed to our perceptual explorations of the world, then we will obliterate the space in which Art is able to do its work - its probing, disturbing, challenging and rearranging of the terms of our shared engagements with reality. Works of Art exist to surprise, refresh and retune our perceptions and our relation to our fellow perceivers.

Art = A pleasure of the senses, in a cognitively expanded interpretation- which exceeds and ruptures the fixity of determinate judgement, in a singular but logically indeterminate manner.

Lyotards Moralites Postmodernes make an interesting point about art and the senses: 'Style does no separate the soul from an existence enslaved to the sensible; it casts doubt on the latters existence. It contrasts the sensibly with itself and thus it contrasts the soul that consents to mere seeming... with the soul that awakens to appearance and trembles.'

The pure sensible is in no way the impressionists play of appearances. How we feel is the sensible that is behind words, that is the point of identity between the sensible and thought, or the point of their reciprocal annihilation; the point of identity of the sensible with the non-sensible, of thought with non-thought.

Therefore does this agree that if Art doesn't arouse feeling or cross the barrier from sensible to thought, it is not relevant to us as humans. It cannot transform us because the concept has no actual meaning.

Is it all in my head?

It could be disputed, that we will never know whether we know a truth or not. Poppers theory of conjecture and refutations agrees with this. The analogy of the shining Holy Grail, I found best described this. A truth is only a truth because is hasn't been disproved yet. So if you hold a shining grail long enough is will stop shining once it has been falsified, only the truth will never be disproved and so only the holy grail will never stop shining, yet we will never live long enough to find out. Imponderables of pure science better be left to the philosophers and theologians.

Todd Siler argues that there more to human awareness than empirical evidence, 'the combination of art, neuro-science and cosmology attempts to illustrate the integrated relationship between the mind, life and the universe, and to break the barriers that separate culture, knowledge and experience in re-examining and stressing the role of nature itself and our collective mind'.

Assumption throughout the centuries had been that there was a logic underlying the apparent chaos of creation, but that human perception was too clouded or fallacious to discern it. A discouraging point. It has been said that 'the real centre of knowledge is the inner consciousness' Which I equate to - inner consiousness = imagination beyond sense. It is my opinion that it is the role of the artist is to imagine reality beyond perception and physically represent it.