Re: art, shape, and symmetry

mess. received from jcogs@umich.edu.
(Prof. of Art at The Univ. of Michigan)
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I am working my way through a brilliant book, SYMMETRY, CAUSALITY, AND
MIND. Michael Leyton. MIT Press. 1992

I wish it made for smoother reading, but he is intent on establishing
theorems and principles that he can prove so the book plods a bit. However,
his ideas are very useful.

For example, "The meaning of an art-work is the process-history inferred
from it. The experience of an art-work is the experience of inferring that
history, i.e., the experience of solving its history-recovery problem. "

"There is a primary drive to seek causal explanantion; i.e. a drive
independent of, and not subservient to, any other goal. In other words,
the history-recovery problem is a primary drive."

"(1) Each individual has a preferred amount of environmental asymmetry, an
amount that the individual seeks, and finds extremely appetitive. (2) As
the amount of environmental asymmetry is raised or lowered from this level,
the environment becomes more and more aversive."

"The Representation-is-Explanation principle states that any cognitive
representation is a causal explanation. Thus, since aesthetics is the
intrinsic evaluation of causal explanation, aesthetics is the intrinsic
evaluation of cognitive representation. ...this makes aesthetics
intertwined with the very substance of cognition. That is,
since,...causality is the content of all cognition, we conclude that
aesthetics is the evaluation of cognitive content. "

A lot here I have skipped but one can get the general idea.

I am attracted to the connection he makes.."an important means by which the
mind recovers the past is by shape. Shape forms the basis for memory. The
mind assignes to any shape a causal history explaining how the shape was
formed. It is by doing this that the mind converts shape into memory."
These are principles that I have always worked with in making paintings,
and tried to express to students of painting. Here we have a cognitive
psychologist going at the problem of and connecting it to basic cognitive
drives in the species.

greetings to all

Jim

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Jim Cogswell
Associate Professor and Director of the Visitors Program
The University of Michigan School of Art & Design
2000 Bonisteel Boulevard, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2069
telephone (734) 764-6460
fax (734) 936-0469
jcogs@umich.edu
Received on Mon Apr 8 10:13:33 2002