Art History and Visual Culture
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Browsing Art History and Visual Culture by Subject "Aesthetics"
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Item Open Access Moving Through Images: Spectatorship and Meaning-Production in Interdisciplinary Art Environments(2020-08-11) Wilmink, Melanie Thekala; Parsons, SarahThis dissertation establishes a framework for understanding embodied experience within immersive art environments by examining artworks that deploy interdisciplinary conventions to turn attention towards spectatorship itself. To accomplish this, I apply cross-disciplinary theory from John Dewey, Henri Bergson, Brian ODoherty, Gilles Deleuze, Laura U. Marks, Peggy Phelan, and others, to close-readings of select case studies. My methodology articulates how memory, duration, material forms, and the relational dynamics between the spectator and artwork all structure the aesthetic encounter. It is my aim to bring together the rich, but isolated, knowledge sets of the art gallery, cinema, and stage to develop a more nuanced understanding of how attentive spectatorial engagement with artwork is produced. In Chapter One, Robert Lepage and Ex Machinas installation The Library at Night (2016) demonstrates the philosophical framework for how a spectator moves between the virtual and physical within aesthetic encounters. Chapter Two extends these ideas through the spatial conditions of the art gallery in dominique t skoltzs y2o dualits_ (2015) exhibitions. Chapter Three addresses the architecture of the cinema, through Janet Cardiff and George Bures Millers The Paradise Institute (2001), which calls attention to the temporal and social conditions of cinema as an interloper in the gallery. Finally, Chapter Four examines the Situation Rooms (2013/2016) as theatre group Rimini Protokoll disrupts the division between the audience and stage by placing the viewer in the middle of the action as a live participant. Each of these case studies examines how artistic intervention either deploys or disrupts the architecture of the exhibition space in order to produce spectatorship that oscillates between the viewers immediate aesthetic encounter and the structures that construct their experience the work.Item Open Access Repositioning Neuroaesthetics Through Contemporary Art(2014-07-09) Mckay, Sally Jean; Fisher, JenniferNeuroaesthetics has tended to privilege neuroscientific understandings of art, eliding centuries of art historical research on perception and culture. Instead, this dissertation extends neuroaesthetic research to examine the specific social, sensorial and perceptual processes occurring as artworks are encountered in exhibition contexts. How does neuroaesthetic perception operate in contemporary artworks? What modes of cognitive address are involved? How can neuroaesthetic engagement facilitate embodied knowledges? This dissertation first inquires into the neuroaesthetic literature in order to establish its neuroscientific foundations, and then advances a perceptual standpoint stemming from art and art history. Drawing from feminist theories of embodiment, I reposition neuroaesthetics to incorporate art historical inquiries into body and mind through direct engagement with art. I argue that such a revised neuroaesthic perception must take into account post-humanist troublings of nature/culture dichotomies. I also suggest that the paradigm for embodied perception that has emerged from both cognitive neuroscience and affect theory can expand neuroaesthetic understanding. My investigation has led me to first-hand experience as a research subject of neuroscience experiments, which show that current fMRI contexts in fact delimit the perception of art and inhibit possible neuroaesthetic significance. Instead, I undertake neuroaesthetic research in exhibition contexts where self-reflexive awareness facilitates insights into perception and cognition that are inaccessible within the epistemological conditions of neuroscience labs. The first case study examines how an installation by the FASTWÜRMS collective reveals cognitive processes of abduction by inviting navigation through an infinitely complex web of objects and images. Turning from association to visual cognition, I consider how Olafur Eliasson’s immersive light installations manipulate colour perception thereby facilitating critical awareness of techno-mediated environments. Third, my analysis of a conceptual work by Kristin Lucas explores how the performance of digital and legal technology invites embodied transformations. Finally, I examine how the affective tensions produced in a video by Omer Fast activate an awareness of intersubjective communication that corresponds with recent neuroscientific developments in mirror-neuron theory. By taking contemporary artworks as its focus, the dissertation extends neuroaesthetic inquiry to demonstrate contextual understandings of how the cognitive processes of art constitute physiological engagements between body, brain and world.