Expressing the Unseen: Embodiment, form and Art & Design

Week 1

What about Embodiment?

Embodiment in psychology and philosophy,

• Embodied cognition (or the embodied mind thesis), a position in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind emphasizing the role that the body plays in shaping the mind
• Embodied imagination, a therapeutic and creative form of working with dreams and memories

In the session we looked at quality of lines and the emotions the convey with the movement.

so when you look at different lines and the movement they show different emotions and moods.
Vertical lines simulate height
Horizontal lines generally create relaxation or a calming mood
The majority of curved lines create familiarity and comfort, warmth, they also suggest relaxation, and also nature.
Thick lines suggest power and respect.
Thin lines show fragility
Scruffy lines suggest emotion
General Straight lines show rationality

The word anesthesia means “no sensation”; synesthesia means “joined sensation” (Greek, syn = together + aisthesis = perception). It refers to an involuntary physical experience in which the stimulation of one sense modality reliably causes an additional perception in a different sense or senses. For example, a synesthete might describe the color, shape, and flavor of someone’s voice, or seeing the color red, a synesthete might detect the “scent” of red as well.

We then looked at Mark Johnson the embodied mind. This was about automatic movements and how you don’t think in details about your movements. In a snippet of his book it said about how you don’t pay much attention to when you move to pick up your mug, how your hand eye coordination does it automatically, you don’t sit and think lift had and flex this muscle to open hand enough to put fingers into  handle, you automatically grab and lift. If you sat and thought about every single detail about lifting a finger.

This is a bit from Mark Johnson’s book we had to read for the talk and this part i found it interesting to the point that i sat and thought about it that yes we do smell though our nose but actually we don’t smell our nose in the process and its a way the body hides from everyday view. you almost need to understand the process of actually doing something to understand embodiment.

From this section of the text i kind of understood that the mind does control the body but the body also controls the mind.

A central claim of embodied theory of art: The study of a image (or a line) begins from the gestures and movements of the (multi sensory) body and not upon the study of the final image.

We then looked at Nancy Aiken’s theories and about how art can be perceived by people and make them have an emotional or physical reaction to it. In her studies she looks at pieces of art and deconstructs them down the tracing them to get the main lines from the painting to be able to tell what the response should be.

To back up her work we looked at Charles Darwin’s work of ‘The expression of the emotions in animals and men’

As you can see the distressed cat arches its back making the line angular and ridged and lines expressing emotion and hard angular lines suggest anger, although we know the cat is terrified we also know that those lines provoke a feeling to the viewer.

Then the second cat is calm and affectionate and you can see by its curves and the way it looks more relaxed this defects on the the person who is looking at the images.

Darwins research shows the same lines when looking at peoples faces when happy, sad, angry just to help back up his work.

Then we went back to Nancy Aiken’s work and had a look at two images she deconstructed. One by Cezanne (left) and the other by Picasso(right). as you can see they are both very different in style but they both have the some theme in the way of having the bodies in it, so you can see very clearly what they might be provoking or trying to get across in the art.

You can see a black and white picture that she has traced to get the main lines of the work. as you can see the Cezanne is very flowing and relaxing with the natural smooth, curved and soft visuals, these express affection and comfort. where as when you look at the Picasso they are angular, sharp pointy visual forms that express anger and fear. we don’t know if the artists did this on purpose to create these kinds of emotion in the work but there could of been a chance that is is how they felt when they were painting the images, so subconsciously using the pressure the movement and and the angles to show their emotions rather them trying to provoke a emotion.

A question from the

lecture

We have two views on the ‘anger’ or ‘fear’ of lines. (1) bodily based multi sensory feeling, and experience, (2) biologically determined, innate.
who do you find convincing, Johnson or Aiken? why? how do you think these approaches differ? Which do you find more convincing through your own investigation?

I find that both options perceive their own experiences within the way they do show their expressions within the art. but the problem with Aiken’s theory is that it dosnt work for all movements yes it might work with a few of them but when it comes to pointillism it would be thrown out the window so i don’t really find either of them super convincing. like when you think about the embodiment of movement and the things like that from Mark Johnson are an interesting way to think of things like with all the movements that I do daily, like typing now, i don’t think about every little thing to get me to type I’m just thinking of the words i am typing. so if i had to choose one i would probably choose Mark Johnson’s theories.