Academic literature on the topic 'Visual perception ; art practice ; neuroaesthetics'

The authors reflect on their own experience of developing a specific form of multimedia live performance: the visual concert. The various video projects they realized for works by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho serve as examples illustrating a more general aesthetic question: what can video art bring to music within the concert ritual? Answers are suggested first in a general assessment of the scientific (perception and cognition research) and cultural roots and parameters of cross-media art forms, and second in an analysis of the contemporary technological tools that allow the visual concert

The aesthetic experience has been discussed throughout the history of mankind by philosophers and art historians, becoming a universal part of human experience, which leads us to some great interdisciplinary questions. It has been the subject of study by neuroscientists and neuro-psychologists since the 2000s. This recent evolution of neurology studies in the field of art, is due to in vivo brain imaging techniques, especially functional neuroimaging. Furthermore, recent research has provided evidence of cognitive interaction during the perception of an artwork indicating that the perceptual experience of art is not merely a passive one. This article reviews important studies in neuroaesthectics of visual art that point out that the aesthetic experience is related to the distribution in the neural architecture, suggesting the involvement of sensory-motor areas, emotional centers, reward system, memory and language.

The early twentieth-century revolution in visual art that came to be known in England as post-impressionism emphasized the view that artistic creativity resides not only in the making of the artwork, but also in the interaction between the artwork and the spectator, an orientation which the contemporary discipline of neuroaesthetics holds in our time. Clive Bell’s theory of “significant form” provided an approachable way for the British public to integrate their understanding of the new art into existing notions of art history and led to a severely diminished role for representation in visual art. Bell’s theory is identifiable as one manifestation of pervasive changes in the understanding of creativity and perception that were sweeping through Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bell could not say why certain combinations of lines and colors led to the experience of an “aesthetic emotion,” only that they did. Contemporary researchers in neuroaesthetics, such as Semir Zeki, have returned to Bell’s notion to ask whether the experience of aesthetic emotion might be due to some common neural organization. This chapter points to commonalities between the speculations of Bell and other members of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry, and those of contemporary researchers into brain processes.