The Aesthetics and Multimodality of Style. Experimental Research on the Edge of Theory (original) (raw)
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The Aesthetics and Multimodality of Style, Chapter V, 2018
This book chapter gives an overview of multimodal style research, where style is considered in its occurrence across various perceptual modes (e.g. visual and auditory perception) and/or semiotic modes (e.g. images and speech). Most contemporary communication is multimodal and demands a description of its stylistic qualities that takes the different modes and their relations to each other into account. Mode-specific styles influence how a multimodal artefact is perceived, but overall stylistic qualities cannot simply be reduced to mode-specific styles. The chapter also discussed the relationship between individual and social style, the importance of style for modern media, and the relationship between the style and the genre of multimodal artefacts. Multimodal approaches to style have to deal with a high degree of complexity, and to integrate style theories that have been developed in different disciplines. Cite as follows: Siefkes, Martin (2018), Style and Multimodality. In. Martin Siefkes und Emanuele Arielli (2018), The Aesthetics and Multimodality of Style: Experimental Research on the Edge of Theory. (Sprache – Medien – Innovationen, Bd. 11.) Frankfurt a.M./New York: Lang, 151–178.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to give a short answer to the question of what style is but how ever one may stress its critical or useful implications, style always concerns the mode of something other than itself, be it a mode of beeing or a mode of acting or representing. This mode is a way of composingating something in a specific manner so that the way something is presented determines how it can be perceived. Style always concerns the way through which we perform something, be this an action or an experience, a depiction or narration, a way of thinking or of perceiving. This "How" of (per-)forming depends on emotions, worldviews, basic interpretations, and other framing/parergonal (?) preconditions. But under these conditions, this How can only become visible through a kind of manifestion, incorporation or representation. The differences in the way of performing, formulating and articulating are what makes two actions or two attitudes different. The particular manner of a depiction makes the depiction what it is. (Es sind die Modi der Darstellung, die das Dargestellte erst zu dem werden lassen, was es ist.)
The experimental aesthetics of style. A research program
ART-Dok. Publikationsplattform Kunstgeschichte, 2018
This paper outlines the author’s research focus in Experimental Aesthetics. Based on an analysis of unsolved problems in Experimental Aesthetics, it sketches promising areas of future research. A thorough analysis of Experimental Aesthetics reveals that some research areas, methods, and types of stimuli have gained much less attention than others. In this paper, a research program for Experimental Aesthetics is outlined that broadens the scope of this relatively young discipline in regard to theoretical problems, and advances the range of available methods. The paper starts with a short history of Experimental Aesthetics, followed by an analysis of its current strengths and weaknesses. It closes with the proposal of two study series, designed to address methodological problems and gaps, and to focus on (comparatively) neglected areas. Specifically, for the area of style, there exists a large gap between various long-standing traditions of thorough research with a mostly theoretical focus, and a small and highly dispersed body of empirical and experimental work, which has been rapidly growing over the last years. Whereas the former tradition of stylistics, while theoretically well-founded and with high analytic quality, has paid little attention to empirical verification, the latter (experimental style research, e.g. in cognitive psychology, design research, and marketing) is often not routed in a stable theoretical basis. The proposed research program intends to bridge this gap. All researchers with an interest in empirical and experimental aesthetics are invited to contact me, and discuss further possibilities. [first published as a research report in 2013]
The Feeling of the Form: Style as Dynamic ‘Textured’ Expression
Art & perception, 2017
Understanding the complexities of how emotions could be implicated in the semantic (subjectmatter) and the syntactic level (form/style) in art might contribute to integrating contrasting approaches regarding emotion experience and meaning. This study explores what happens when we strip away subject matter and only provide expressive information that is embedded in the physicalsensory qualities of 'style' of non-representational forms. What could be, if we ask artists to produce specific emotions-matières (the way in which paint-its materiality-is applied by an artist) intended to communicate specific emotion's states to observers? Could observers share somehow these emotional artistic intentions, yielding some consistency across ratings regarding the intended meanings and the symbolic potential of the drawings? A cross-cultural study was performed (152 Canadians, 48 Greeks, 68 Japanese) using 12 non-representational, emotion-drawing stimuli of the emotion at hand. The results showed a systematic sharing of affective meaning across artists, spectators and cultures. This study serves as an illustrative case for discussion. For spectators to match the bottom up spatiotemporal derived from the syntactic, demands to go all the way down to catch up and match the stimulus impact as an 'as if' reciprocally created homology based on affective predictions. At this interface there is mutuality between perceiving, feeling and imaging, indicating the deep passage from expression/gesture to representation. It is discussed that there is continuity between expression and experience and agency is at its core-yet, shaped by culture it participates differentially in this iterative matching of top-down affective predictions checked against first-level bottom-up sensory-motor affective cues.
With a Call for Essays, the special issue Multimodality sought contributions that accept not only the material but also the body-bound dependence of media perception and understanding. To this end, contributions were included that shed light on both the structural and signifying potential of artistic works through multimodal analysis. Particular attention was paid to contributions that clarify how the structural features - the modes - of the arts, their perception, and their signifying potential in terms of content are interrelated and how they are to be understood in communicative and thus socioculturally relevant terms. Thus, in addition to neuroscientific contributions, those from cultural anthropology, art history, image and art studies, and literary studies were included.
2021
Marks individually or in combination constitute images that represent objects. How do those images represent those objects? Marks vary in style, both between and within images. Images also vary in style. How do those styles relate to each other and to the objects that those images represent? Referencing a diverse range of images, we answer the first question with a response-dependence theory of image representation derived from Mark Johnston, differentiating Lockean primary qualities of marks from secondary qualities of images. We answer the second question with a perceptual theory of style derived from Paul Grice, differentiating physical style from image style, and representing conventionally from representing conversationally.
Art, meaning, and aesthetics: The case for a cognitive neuroscience of art
2020
It is important to note that I am not suggesting that we should directly import the results of empirical psychology to aesthetics. The direct application of empirical results in aesthetics can, and very often does, go terribly wrong. What I suggest is that aesthetics should take some new paradigms of philosophy of perception seriously. The specific paradigm I am interested in here, the paradigm of multimodality, is based on a large body of empirical research. However, my aim is not to urge an empirical turn in aesthetics, but to urge a turn in aesthetics towards philosophy of perception, and this sometimes entails a turn towards empirically informed philosophy of perception.
THE AESTHETIC WORLD IN THE DIGITAL ERA. A CALL TO ARMS FOR EXPERIMENTAL AESTHETICS.
Reti Saperi Linguaggi, 2020
The main gist of the present article consists in a call to arms for experimental aesthetics, motivated by the conviction that aesthetics is the still poorly investigated key entry point to a deeper understanding of how digital technologies shape our identity, our social relationships and the world where we are living. Aesthetics, as normally conceived, deals with art and beauty. Neuroscience in the last two decades started investigating the neurobiological basis of the appreciation of beauty and art. Aesthetics, however, pervades all forms of social cognition, even more so in the present digital age. The digital disintermediation of perception and meaning-making operated by the new mediascape has literally aestheticized the world. Interconnected mobile digital devices are changing the style of our interaction with images and words, multiplying our «province of meaning», projecting it into multiple dimensions beyond the reach of our naked eye. Our ontology is ever less confined to what we can directly experience through the factual bodily interaction with the «real world». Our present digitally-mediated reality moves our take on the world into novel and poorly explored dimensions, requiring a new empirical understanding and conceptualization of aesthetics. We must investigate the impact that the new digital technologies and related social practices have upon social life. Capitalizing upon the results obtained by experimental aesthetics, and privileging embodiment and the performative quality of perception and cognition, preliminary suggestions for a future research agenda can be outlined. Embodied simulation, a model of perception and cognition, can provide a new take on these issues, fostering a newly based dialogue between neuroscience and the humanities.