Life Imagined Week 1 Introduction PDF

Life Imagined Week 1 – Introduction We are going to study art as a structure and understand it from a cognitive perspective • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • A cognitive perspective has to do with how we think about art An important concept for this is the concept of memory The things th...

Life Imagined Week 1 – Introduction We are going to study art as a structure and understand it from a cognitive perspective • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • A cognitive perspective has to do with how we think about art An important concept for this is the concept of memory The things that we remember, our schemes do not much reality Culture is based on the difference between what we have previously experienced and what actually is being perceived at the moment Memories are the material of culture Individual culture implies a collective dimension because we are not isolated from society Memories are individual and collective Sayre’s definition of culture: Culture encompasses a set of values, beliefs, and behavior, passed from one generation to the next (these values are culture and change and they appear in our memory We cannot experience reality without our memories but we are not complied to our memories Culture can be an instrument for change Human culture emerges when memory and perception do not (entirely) coincide. We experience the difference as reality. Humans live in time (actuality). Culture has to do to the ways in which people deal with this difference. We us our individual as well as collective memories to give form and meaning to a changing reality Collective memories are those who are shared by society, like history Culture is not confided to the arts Culture is cumulative so it’s building into what is built before Culture is a continuous, dialectic process of adaptation through accommodation and assimilation Dialectic has to do with a process that has two sides (memory and actuality) Accommodation has to do with us adjusting our thinking to reality (Roman Culture) Assimilation has to do with us adapting the environment to our way of thinking, so we intervene to the environment (adjusting reality to our thinking) Thinking is thus the recycling of memories three cognitive perspectives with dealing with change: perception, imagination, conceptualization, analysis Perception of similarities: has to do with the body and the senses (for example when see a tree we understand that it is a tree because it is similar to past experiences of seeing trees) • • • • • • Imagination of possibilities: has to do with artefacts, making things to solve discrepancy between memory and actuality (an artefact is everything that is made) Conceptualization of meaning: has to do with language, we standardize reality (we said what is a tree) Analysis of structures: we do this analysis using graphic symbols, what is actually the structure of reality (what are the conditions for something to be classified a tree) The graphic signs allow us to make our cognition explicit to the world Four media: body, artefacts, language, graphic symbols The four cumulative dimensions of culture: Sensory(accommodation) Perception Analysis • • • • • • • • • • • Motor(assimilation) Imagination Conceptualization Concrete Memories Abstract Memories Concrete memories are something that you can easily think in terms of its materiality (memories for a situation, for a place, for a person) Abstract memories are not connected to a particular moment in time (language, mathematics) Imagination is assimilative because we create something to make sense of the world Conceptualization is abstract and assimilative because we impose order in the world using language in a way we can diminish the ambiguity between memory and actuality by giving things a name Culture exists in four different types of media: the body(sound, taste, movement), artefacts(drums, clothing, food), spoken language, graphic forms(drawings, written language, schemata, photography, film) You remember what you experienced but also how you experienced it, and that’s what makes culture recursive (how we have dealt with the presence in the past) Perceiving culture: the news, history Imagining culture: the arts, entertainment Conceptualizing culture: ideology, religion Analyzing culture: science Episodic memories are those about our own life • • • • • • • • • • • • Art is a way of reflecting upon our life Art is form of cultural (self-)consciousness, or imaginative reflection because it highlights the difference between memory and actuality which underlies consciousness Consciousness is given form and meaning through artefacts (in movement, sound, objects, language, graphics) Art only exists in the perceiver, because the fact that something is crated as an artwork doesn’t mean that it will function as an artwork The arts thus help us to come to grips with experience and they allow us to reflect on experience, share experiences and, store and remember experiences (which is why people have always made art) Art confronts us with ambiguity which is basic to human experience The arts change because art is always the same; it always has the same identical function The direction of the change is cumulative There is not any progress in the arts, what happens is that art changes because reality changes Art is not necessarily beautiful, because not all experiences are beautiful Cumulative evolution of culture ➢ Human species (7-4.000.000-) ➢ Mimetic cultures: artefacts (2.500.000-) ➢ Mythical cultures: language (800.000-) ➢ Graphic (theoretical) cultures: graphics (30.000-) ▪ First drawings (30.000-) ▪ Origins of agriculture; totems (10.000-) ▪ Cultures of writing-city states (5.000-) ▪ Theoretical cultures (700 BCE)  Greek Antiquity (700 BCE)  Roman Antiquity (300 BCE)  Middle Ages (300-1300)  Modern Times (1400-present) Evolution of graphic culture ➢ Images (perception) ➢ Stylized images (artefacts) ➢ Writing (language) ➢ Models (theory)