Art & PerceptionPub Date : 2023-11-10DOI: 10.1163/22134913-bja10052
Rachel A. Starr, Jonathan A. Smith
{"title":"Looking at a Painting: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis","authors":"Rachel A. Starr, Jonathan A. Smith","doi":"10.1163/22134913-bja10052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22134913-bja10052","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This research explores the experience of looking at art, specifically that of viewing a single painting. Five participants each selected a previously unseen painting from a selection provided and were interviewed about their experiences as they viewed it. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to explore the idiographic detail of the resulting interviews. Personal Experiential Themes (PETs) were developed independently for each participant and these individual cases were subsequently compared to form a structure of Group Experiential Themes (GETs). Three GETs, Elements of Engagement, Deeper Exploration and Vulnerability and Intimacy resulted. These themes represented in turn, early interactions, subsequent more considered imaginative and interpretative engagements, and the feelings evoked by encountering emotive content or questioning the voracity of one’s reactions. The first GET is reported in detail here and recounts viewers’ initial engagements with their chosen painting such as their experiences of first noticing’s, their curiosities, and the formation of early impressions. The viewers’ accounts of engagement involved senses of dynamism and sometimes physical force shaping the relationship between themselves and the painting. Three subthemes, Groping Out, Attracting Attention and Drawing In, detail the different experiential qualities of these engagements.","PeriodicalId":42649,"journal":{"name":"Art & Perception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135141467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Art & PerceptionPub Date : 2022-01-10DOI: 10.1163/22134913-bja10035
Maarten Coëgnarts, Mario Slugan
{"title":"Embodying Meaning Visually: From Perceptual Dynamics to Motion Kinematics","authors":"Maarten Coëgnarts, Mario Slugan","doi":"10.1163/22134913-bja10035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22134913-bja10035","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This paper adopts an embodied cognitive perspective to review the significance of dynamic patterns in the visual expression of meaning. Drawing upon the work of Rudolf Arnheim we first show how perceptual dynamics of inanimate objects might be extended in order to structure abstract meaning in fixed images such as paintings. Second, we evaluate existing experimental work that shows how simple kinematic structures within a stationary frame might embody such high-level properties as perceptual causality and animacy. Third and last, we take inspiration from these experiments to shed light on the expressiveness of dynamic patterns that unfold once the frame itself becomes a mobile entity (i.e., camera movement). In the latter case we will also present a filmic case study, showing how filmmakers might resort to these dynamic patterns so as to embody a film’s story content, while simultaneously offering a further avenue for film scholars to deepen their engagement with the experimental method.","PeriodicalId":42649,"journal":{"name":"Art & Perception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44452657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Art & PerceptionPub Date : 2021-12-30DOI: 10.1163/22134913-bja10034
Monika Suckfüll
{"title":"Bodies in Cinema: Evaluating Operationalisations of Closeness to Movie Characters","authors":"Monika Suckfüll","doi":"10.1163/22134913-bja10034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22134913-bja10034","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Based on theoretical considerations on embodied affectivity in social life, the feeling of being close is argued to be pivotal for experiencing one-sided interactions with movie characters. Currently, a feasible methodology to be used in order to measure this variable is still missing. A subsample (n = 14) from existing data is used to evaluate three operationalisations of closeness to the main character in two central scenes of the movie Sehnsucht by Valeska Grisebach: (1) Closeness as grades of familiarity is operationalised using a pictorial measure with the participant indicating which of two more or less overlapping circles (one representing the self, one representing the screen character) describes the relationship best. (2) Physical closeness is assessed with recordings of the eye movements which provide a fine-grained measurement of distance to the screen. (3) Closeness as synchronicity could be observed by analysing the facial expressions and movements of the participant in front of the screen simultaneously with the expressions and movements of the movie characters. The results of the study point to limitations of an operationalisation of closeness as familiarity by using a single-item measurement. Furthermore, with synchronicity being rarely observed, this way of being close appears to be a phenomenon of minor relevance for movie reception. The measurement of physical closeness, however, indicates a promising approach due to behavioural patterns being detectable and easily interpretable in accordance with the movie’s content. Ideas for further methodological development of an operationalisation of physical closeness are proposed.","PeriodicalId":42649,"journal":{"name":"Art & Perception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48001302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Art & PerceptionPub Date : 2021-12-24DOI: 10.1163/22134913-bja10033
Maryamalsadat Mansouri, P. S. Ghazvini
{"title":"Memorial Urban Art as an Aesthetic Experience in the City - An Aesthetical Reading of War Murals in Tehran’s Urban Landscape","authors":"Maryamalsadat Mansouri, P. S. Ghazvini","doi":"10.1163/22134913-bja10033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22134913-bja10033","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In the city of Tehran, a series of war-themed murals, often focused on strengthening the audience’s historical memory, stand out among all types of urban art. These works of art, which are generated by the government’s order and created by different state institutions, all carry political and ideological dimensions. They are considered a source of environmental qualitative assessment and recognised as a kind of ‘urban aestheticisation’; in other words, it is a process leading to the production of value according to the ‘John Dewey’ theory. Knowing that the war artworks contain a major political dimension and are mainly created by the order of the ruling governments to ‘strengthen the audience’s historical memory’, an added quality is inevitably integrated, which in the aesthetic domain is commonly known as kitsch: taking advantage of people’s standard associations and confirming them by employing proven stereotypes and clichés, as Ortlieb and Carbon (2019b) wrote. The urban landscape as an exhibition platform is therefore important as it is the context of social events and daily life that affects the audience’s perception. John Dewey defines this perception as an aesthetic experience which takes place in the field of empirical aesthetics and begins by explaining why specific objects give pleasure or displeasure. These explanations will later be integrated into a set of principles which, in turn, will join a global system of analysis, such as Fechner’s aesthetic valuations. The aesthetic experience of war urban artworks is analysed from the observation that in the creation of these works in Tehran, the government, as the sponsor, focuses on the use of the aesthetic qualities of the kitsch. The article then presents the reading of this aesthetic experience through the analysis of a selection of works, based on evaluation criteria and indicators. The interpretation of this experience is to discover the ‘quiddity’ of the evolutions which have occurred in these works from the beginning of the war until today. The following statement highlights one of the most notable results of the research: the weakening of the art position, from a promotional state that improves the urban landscape quality, into a way of showing government’s positioning concerning the paradigms of the country.","PeriodicalId":42649,"journal":{"name":"Art & Perception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46606752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Art & PerceptionPub Date : 2021-12-13DOI: 10.1163/22134913-bja10032
J. Cutting
{"title":"Three Filmmaking Practices That Guide Our Attention to Popular Cinema","authors":"J. Cutting","doi":"10.1163/22134913-bja10032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22134913-bja10032","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Popular movies are constructed to control our attention and guide our eye movements across the screen. Estimates of fixation locations were made by manually moving a cursor and clicking over frames at the beginnings and ends of more than 30,000 shots in 24 English-language movies. Results provide evidence for three general filmmaking practices in screen composition. The first and overriding practice is that filmmakers generally put the most import content ‒ usually the center of a character’s face ‒ slightly above the center of the screen. The second concerns two-person conversations, which account for about half of popular movie content. Dialogue shots alternate views of the speakers involved, and filmmakers generally place the conversants slightly to opposite sides of the midline. The third concerns all other shots. For those, filmmakers generally follow important content in one shot by similar content in the next shot on the same side of the vertical midline. The horizontal aspect of the first practice seems to follow from the nature of our field of view and vertical aspect from the relationship of heads to bodies depicted. The second practice derives from social norms and an image composition norm called nose room, and the third from the consideration of continuity and the speed of re-engaging attention.","PeriodicalId":42649,"journal":{"name":"Art & Perception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46801600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Art & PerceptionPub Date : 2021-12-08DOI: 10.1163/22134913-bja10031
K. Prendergast, Jair E. Garcia, Scarlett R. Howard, Zongxin Ren, Stuart J. McFarlane, A. Dyer
{"title":"Bee Representations in Human Art and Culture through the Ages","authors":"K. Prendergast, Jair E. Garcia, Scarlett R. Howard, Zongxin Ren, Stuart J. McFarlane, A. Dyer","doi":"10.1163/22134913-bja10031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22134913-bja10031","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The field of bioaesthetics seeks to understand how modern humans may have first developed art appreciation and is informed by considering a broad range of fields including painting, sculpture, music and the built environment. In recent times there has been a diverse range of art and communication media representing bees, and such work is often linked to growing concerns about potential bee declines due to a variety of factors including natural habitat fragmentation, climate change, and pesticide use in agriculture. We take a broad view of human art representations of bees to ask if the current interest in artistic representations of bees is evidenced throughout history, and in different regions of the world prior to globalisation. We observe from the earliest records of human representations in cave art over 8,000 years old through to ancient Egyptian carvings of bees and hieroglyphics, that humans have had a long-term relationship with bees especially due to the benefits of honey, wax, and crop pollination. The relationship between humans and bees frequently links to religious and spiritual representations in different parts of the world from Australia to Europe, South America and Asia. Art mediums have frequently included the visual and musical, thus showing evidence of being deeply rooted in how different people around the world perceive and relate to bees in nature through creative practice. In modern times, artistic representations extend to installation arts, mixed-media, and the moving image. Through the examination of the diverse inclusion of bees in human culture and art, we show that there are links between the functional benefits of associating with bees, including sourcing sweet-tasting nutritious food that could have acted, we suggest, to condition positive responses in the brain, leading to the development of an aesthetic appreciation of work representing bees.","PeriodicalId":42649,"journal":{"name":"Art & Perception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49347456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Art & PerceptionPub Date : 2021-11-30DOI: 10.1163/22134913-bja10030
J. Koenderink, D. Braun, A. van Doorn
{"title":"Affective Responses to Image Color Combinations","authors":"J. Koenderink, D. Braun, A. van Doorn","doi":"10.1163/22134913-bja10030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22134913-bja10030","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Responses to colored patterns were collected for a group of 60 naive participants. We explicitly aimed at affective responses, rather than aesthetic judgments, so this is not ‘color harmony’ proper. Patterns were mainly spatially highly structured compositions, the color palettes reminiscent of what is found in generic ‘colorist’ art. Color combinations systematically cover mono-, di-, and trichromatic chromatic chords, whereas there was always an additional achromatic component. This sets the research apart from the bulk of the mainstream literature on ‘color harmony.’ Various ways of analysis are compared. Clustering methods reveal that the responses are highly structured through the teal–orange (cool–warm) dimension. Clustering reveals a large group of mutually concordant participants and various small, idiosyncratic groups. When the data is coarse-grained, retaining only a limited red–blue–yellow palette, the group as a whole appears quite concordant. It is evident that responses are systematic, thus the notion of a universal affective response to color combinations gains some credibility. The precise affective responses are specific because constrained by the seven categories used in the experiment. Thus, the systematic structure is perhaps to be understood as the generic result. We discuss tangencies with various traits found with ‘colorist’ art styles.","PeriodicalId":42649,"journal":{"name":"Art & Perception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45086863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Art & PerceptionPub Date : 2021-11-03DOI: 10.1163/22134913-bja10028
Arefe Sarami, R. Afhami, J. Wagemans
{"title":"Perceptual Organisation Affects Perception and Appreciation of Abstract Art: A Case Study with Black Square and Red Square by Kazimir Malevich","authors":"Arefe Sarami, R. Afhami, J. Wagemans","doi":"10.1163/22134913-bja10028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22134913-bja10028","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Perceptual organisation is hypothesised as a key in the perception and appreciation of abstract art. Here, we investigated how relational and compositional features affected the perception and aesthetic appreciation of Black Square and Red Square by Kazimir Malevich (1915). We studied how (i) the presence and obliquity of the red square and (ii) the relative configuration of the black and red square affected the detectability of the obliquity of the black square in this artwork. Results showed that the simultaneous presence and obliquity of the red square masked the obliquity of the original black square. The likelihood of the black square being incorrectly perceived as an exact square was always maximum in the original configuration and even slight alterations in the original configuration of the work resulted in the obliquity of the black square to be noticed. The original artwork was more aesthetically preferred compared to its alternatives. We argue that the artist may have intentionally set the configuration to mask the obliquity of the black square and maximise the aesthetic preference.","PeriodicalId":42649,"journal":{"name":"Art & Perception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42632481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}