Viewing artworks: Contributions of cognitive control and perceptual facilitation to aesthetic experience

When we view visual images in everyday life, our perception is oriented toward object identification. In contrast, when viewing visual images as artworks, we also tend to experience subjective reactions to their stylistic and structural properties. This experiment sought to determine how cognitive control and perceptual facilitation contribute to aesthetic perception along with the experience of emotion. Using functional MRI, we show that aesthetic perception activated bilateral insula which we attribute to the experience of emotion. Moreover, while adopting the aesthetic orientation activated the left lateral prefrontal cortex, paintings that facilitated visuospatial exploration activated the left superior parietal lobule. The results suggest that aesthetic experience is a function of the interaction between top-down orienting of attention and bottom-up perceptual facilitation.     

Community, Communication and Multiplicity in Proust

The essay examines the relation between the explicit aesthetic ideology of Proust’s Recherche and the structure of the “involuntary memory” that is supposed to serve as that ideology’s empirical basis. I challenge the apparent solipsism and idealism of the narrator’s aesthetics by focusing on the one experience of involuntary memory that he omits from his final reflections, in Time Regained, on the relation between memory and art: this is the involuntary memory, in the earlier volume Sodom and Gomorrah, of his dead grandmother, a memory that he describes there as an experience of true otherness. Through a close reading of this passage, I argue that Proust’s interest in involuntary memory implies a concept of literary art as above all ethical in nature, in so far as it is the only means by which individuals can emerge from the solitude to which they are otherwise existentially condemned. In both the Sodom and Gomorrah passage and a later passage from Time Regained this emergence is cast in terms of a rhetoric of multiplicity that emphasizes both the disturbing and the productive dimensions connecting literature with life.

Totalitarianism and the problem of Soviet art evaluation: the Lithuanian case

By taking into account dissident/political and art historical interpretations of Soviet art, I analyze how polemics about totalitarianism in the West, which generally corresponded with Cold War debates and Eastern European dissident thought, shaped the post-Soviet evaluations of national artistic legacies. It is argued that the political relationship with the totalitarian past, like in many post-socialist areas where the immediate past was subjected to radical re-evaluation, affected Lithuanian artists’ and critics’ attitude towards local Soviet art. Because of an obvious lack of underground art in Soviet Lithuania, however, the retrospective usage of political categories here became problematic. Especially in international representations, the complexities of artists’ relationship with officialdom came to be routinely assigned to the phenomenon of non-conformism; this eventually obfuscated the differences between the Lithuanian Soviet art context as somewhat different from the Russian case.

Local processing enhancements associated with superior observational drawing are due to enhanced perceptual functioning,not weak central coherence

Individuals with drawing talent have previously been shown to exhibit enhanced local visual processing ability. The aim of the current study was to assess whether local processing biases associated with drawing ability result from a reduced ability to cohere local stimuli into global forms, or an increased ability to disregard global aspects of an image. Local and global visual processing ability was assessed in art students and controls using the Group Embedded Figures Task, Navon shape stimuli, the Block Design Task and the Autism Spectrum Quotient, whilst controlling for nonverbal IQ and artistic ability. Local processing biases associated with drawing appear to arise from an enhancement of local processing alongside successful filtering of global information, rather than a reduction in global processing. The relationship between local processing and drawing ability is independent of individual differences in nonverbal IQ and artistic ability. These findings have implications for bottom-up and attentional theories of observational drawing, as well as explanations of special skills in autism.     

Rule-governed activity vs. rule-creating activity

Questioning the usual understanding of Native American religions as supernaturalistic, this study re-examines the ritual system of the Yaqui people of Arizona. First, it evaluates assumptions about the nature of religion—including God, grace, and prayer—which inform the ethnographical interpretation of Yaqui religion. Second, it reconstructs the Yaqui cosmological system and relates their complex cosmos to the traditional religious actors, the Deer Dancer and the Pascola clowns. Third it examines the master symbol, Sewa or Flower, to demonstrate that Yaqui religious logic does not correspond to the grace theory of Catholicism. Fourth, it demonstrates that flower embodies a causal system in which all religious actors, human and transcendent beings alike, achieve ritual efficacy in mutual, reciprocal acts of witnessing. Finally, the essay observes that ‘conversion’ fails to make sense of Yaqui syncretism for two related reasons. In the first place, the Yaqui neither rejected the world nor embraced a monotheism which assigns a privileged, vertical superiority to God. In the second, the Yaqui applied traditional insights deriving from the most basic realm of myth to reach an understanding that Jesus and Deer are alike powerful innocents who sacrifice themselves so that others might live. In all these ways, the essay demonstrates that the concept of the supernatural fails to explain either the traditional or the Christian sides of Yaqui religion and suggests that the same may be true for other Native American religions as well.     

Personality traits in people with synaesthesia: Do synaesthetes have an atypical personality profile?

People with synaesthesia not only have – by definition – unusual experiences (e.g., numbers triggering colour), they also have a different cognitive profile (e.g., in terms of their memory and perceptual abilities) and a bias towards certain interests and activities (e.g., towards the arts). However, virtually nothing is known about whether synaesthetes have an atypical personality profile. In this study, a standard measure of personality was administered (Big Five Inventory) along with two questionnaire measures of empathy. Synaesthetes, relative to demographically matched controls, reported higher levels of ‘Openness to Experience’ which is known to be related to imagination and artistic tendencies. They also reported higher levels of ‘Fantasizing’ on one of the empathy measures, which is conceptually related to Openness, although their self-reported empathy did not differ in other respects. In addition, synaesthetes reported lower levels of Agreeableness which we did not predict in advance.     

Everything I make is a sinkhole

Written in the form of a travelogue, this paper looks at the holes created by the implosions of casinos and the holes in the desert created by atomic bomb testing to cull psychogeographic meaning. It explores holes through the prism of Las Vegas and its surrounding atomic testing site and relates them to my use in my artwork: drawings and sculptures. It suggests that a darker tourism to Las Vegas is most elucidating. It contributes to understanding of holes in urbanism and its changing contours, the exploitative economy and loss, as well as the degradation of the surrounding landscape for military purposes.     

应对癌：需要的不仅仅是科技，更是智慧

今天人类应对癌有很多方法,然效果不太佳。重要的不是高科技的缺失,而是智慧的离场。只是迷信科技,而令智慧虚化,以至于陷入癌症控制不佳的尴尬境地。从癌本身的特别之处、临床实际案例、正反经验教训等探讨了这一问题,指出既要认识癌的错综性,某些惰性癌无需大动干戈,又提出性质不明朗时的几种富含智慧之对策。并且,强调治癌既需向前探究高科技,也需不时向后寻求历史智慧照耀,包括可吸取《孙子兵法》中的很多真知卓见,诸如不战而胜、慎战等在防范癌症中都有意义。着重指出,需要时“观察,未尝不是积极的诊疗措施”。

     

The dirtying of David: Transgression, affect, and the potential space of art

Transgression assumes the crossing of a boundary, a broken line which is either shored-up or redrawn in response; it thus marks an in-between state signalling danger, a pollution of the established order. Calling on the work of Bataille I investigate a two-fold instance of transgression by school students and their art and design teacher in which the sexualisation and violence perpetrated on the human figure through, respectively, drawing and sculpture signals one such breach. I examine the affective states that surround this transgression, in particular the self-censoring mechanism of shame. This is followed by an examination of the dichotomies that transgression may potentially provoke in pedagogic situations, and a consideration of the role of art in mediating the oppositional forces at play. With reference to psychoanalytical, object relations theory (Klein and Winnicott) I argue that the in-between spaces established by transgressive acts, destabilising and disorientating as they may be, should not be categorised as pathological but rather affective territories of potentiality necessary for creative education.     

Promoting narrative competence through adult–child joint pretense: Lessons from the Scandinavian educational practice of playworld

This paper examines the effects of the playworld educational practice on the development of narrative competence in 5- to 7-year-old children. The playworld educational practice is derived from play pedagogy and the theory of narrative learning, both developed and implemented in Scandinavia. The playworld practice consists of joint adult–child pretense based in a work of children's literature, discussion, free play, and visual art production. When compared to children under a control intervention (conventional school practices without pretend play), children who participated in the playworld practice show significant improvements in narrative length, coherence, and comprehension, although not in linguistic complexity. These findings provide further evidence concerning the role of pretense in the narrative development of young children.