The Senses and Society Synesthesia, transformation and synthesis: toward a multi-sensory pedagogy of the image (original) (raw)
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Synesthesia, transformation and synthesis: toward a multi-sensory pedagogy of the image
The Senses and Society, 2017
Clinical synesthesia is commonly defined as the experience of having perceptions in one sensory modality triggered by a stimulus from another. This paper adopts a particular orientation toward synesthesia, exploring it as a cultural phenomenon common to us all, as an ability that can be learnt instead of an accidental neurological condition. If synesthesia is both a capacity that we are not fully aware of and a way to access what is stored in memory even at the unconscious level, can art help us to bring this awareness back? Bearing upon a close reading of selected artworks created by Johannes Deutsch, a multi-media artist who has been experimenting with synesthesia, the paper argues that synesthesia can become a tool in the hands of contemporary artists to revitalize the Wagnerian ideal of a "total work of art". This is to be understood as a politics of the senses based on communality rather than individualism, not as an ideology of totalitarian tendencies. Ultimately, the transformative potential of certain art resides in its capacity to foster a pedagogy of the image that is based upon multi-sensoriality, memory and history. In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas/corpora ("I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities") Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I, lines 1-2.
Etymologically derived from a combination of the Greek syn, for together, and aisthêsis, for perception through the senses, the term synesthesia (also spelled synaesthesia) denotes a process of inter-sense analogy, whereby one sense modality experiences what usually belongs to one or more of the other senses. This paper explores the distinct approaches that Art, Science, and Philosophy have assumed towards the concept, and discusses how an awareness of synesthetic bodily-mental-sensory processes opens up new perspectives of research that may interrelate the arts with cognitive neuroscience, as well as transform other fields of contemporary knowledge.
Synesthesia and culture: synesthetic experience and the instalation of modernity
The article considers the question of synesthesia taking as a departing point the meaning of the synesthetic experience, both in a synesthete, in a philosopher who experiences drug induced synesthesia and some accounts about synesthesia and culture. It is possible then to pursue a confrontation between the trend towards specialisation of knowledge and senses which is characteristic of Modernity and a history of synesthesia in arts, which, even if negotiating with different aesthetic and semiothic circumstances seems to always follow the opposite direction, always claiming for lost unity. The need for a cultural theory of synesthesia is also suggested. Keywords: synesthesia, digital perception, art, culture, Modernity, meaning, experience.
The perception disorder of synesthesia evokes cross-modal experiences in the synesthete. This condition can either be developmental or acquired. In any case, the bias towards color being the most common concurrent of synesthesia is only one reason, why synesthesia is an interesting research topic in studies about art and artists. This paper gives an outline for the disorder of synesthesia and discusses the advantages and disadvantages artists might have from it, concluding in the relevance of intensity and the environment’s relation to the disease in weighing out the pros and cons. Keywords: synesthesia, artists, cross-modal experience
Synesthesia and Artistic Experimentation
Richard Cytowic has argued that synesthetic experimentation by modern artists was based on deliberate contrivances of sensory fusion and not on involuntary experiences of cross-modal association. He has placed artistic experiments with sensory fusion outside the domain of synesthesia research. Artistic experiments, though historically interesting, are considered irrelevant for the study of synesthesia. Contrary to this view I argue that at least Scriabin's and Kandinsky's artistic experiments were based on involuntary experiences of synesthesia. They were investigating perceptual and emotional mechanisms of involuntary synesthetic experiences that meet Cytowic's criteria of synesthesia. Artistic experiments are not only historically interesting, but may also contribute to present synesthesia research.
Locales of Art: Synaesthesia and the Interruptions of Orientational Aesthetics
Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Social Sciences Institute Journal, 2016
This paper argues that the significance of questions of synaesthesia in relation to modern philosophies of experience and art lies in its challenge to rethink accounts of the localisation of experience in general, and of the locales of experience provided by art in particular. To do this, the paper reviews the history of psychological research into synaesthesia, including recent neurological accounts, pointing to tensions in both biological and techno-socio-cultural informed versions of these. It then draws parallels between these tensions and the history of aesthetic thinking , of music and painting in particular, and with recent accounts of synaesthesia as a model of the technical possibilities of digital media. Borrowing from Levinas' account of the experience of art, the paper then argues that trans-modal sensing and the complexity of corporeal experience it implies upsets Kantian divisions of aesthetic experience. Further, synaesthesia accompanies the Lockean account of the formation of ideas, exposing in particular the exclusionary normativities of this empiricist account of senses of space. The paper then reviews the return of this question in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, and, with reference to work by Massumi and Stiegler, argues that acknowledgement of synaesthesia and trans-modal experience requires both the transcendental and the immanent in accounts of experience, and their implication in questions of memorization. The paper concludes by showing this to be at stake in Sartre's attempt to acknowledge synaesthesia in The Psychology of the Imagination in ways that confirm questions of the significance of the localisation of the experience of art, allowing for a reformulation of Levinas' account of the apprehension of art. There are a number of different currents in what seems to be something of a recent overflowing of interest in synaesthesia, in neurology, psychology, media and cultural theory. This paper will argue that reading this overflow philosophically can serve to reawaken consideration of divisions between aesthetics, ethics and politics on the other side of the complicity in traditions of aesthetic thinking between anthropological and phenomenological normativities. In so doing, the philosophical thinking of art may better acknowledge not only the idioms as well as the hierarchies of the arts of different cultures, but may better formalise questions of the locales of the experience of art as something which opens onto the most pressing of issues, concerning a politics of what survives, in and across the unstable regions of the world today.
2014
La perception synesthésique est la règle, et, si nous ne nous en apercevons pas, c'est parce que le savoir scientifique déplace l'expérience et que nous avons désappris de voir, d'entendre et, en général, de sentir, pour déduire de notre organisation corporelle et du monde tel que le conçoit le physicien ce que nous devons voir, entendre et sentir.
Artistic and Psychological Experiments with Synesthesia
Leonardo, 1999
Artists and psychologists have been experimenting with synesthesia for centuries. The author provides a historical review to show that artists and psychologists have always had great difficulty manipulating and controlling the phenomenon of synesthesia. Within these limits, artistic experiments with color organs, musical paintings and visual music have primarily uncovered perceptual and emotional aspects of synesthesia. Psychological experiments have produced a variety of methodologies to aid the study of synesthesia. Currently, psychologists approach synesthesia foremost as a neurological phenomenon, while artists generally explore digital devices to simulate synesthesia.
Synesthesia, Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, ed. Stephen Ross
Routeledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, 2016
Synaesthesia is the confusion or conflation of sensory modalities, where one sense is experienced or described in terms of another as in Charles Baudelaire's simile "perfumes sweet as oboes, green as prairies." Synaesthesia captures an already existing tendency in language to blend the senses as in "sweet melody," "velvety voice," or "loud colors," and psychologists have conducted studies that show our shared experience of weak audiovisual associations between low pitch and darker colors, or high pitch and lighter colors. In a strictly neurological sense, synaesthesia is a perceptual condition in which the stimulation of one sensory system (for example, hearing) triggers sensations in another sensory system (for example, vision). Cross-sensory associations form one-to-one correspondences that are stable, delicately nuanced, and highly