The basic idea for this project came from my earlier work based on the principle of camera obscura. Similarly to transparency, the Ciba chrome paper produces a direct, positive picture in color. By contrast, the direct exposure of black-and-white photographic paper yields a negative image. On black-and-white paper the only way to circumvent this and to make sure that the resulting picture is in positive, reality should be transformed to negative.
The investigation of mind is closely related to the field of epistemology, the part of philosophy that deals with knowledge and whose principal question is: “What can we know?” Epistemology is not so much preoccupied with the process of accumulating knowledge, but with the validity of knowledge and how we can achieve certainty about it. It includes the branch of philosophy that the ancients called logic, which deals with language and thought. Bertrand Russell once remarked tellingly that the theory of knowledge is a product of doubt. Things seem to speak in favour of Russell’s view – most philosophers find it easier to determine what we cannot know rather than what we can know. Perhaps the theory of knowledge should then be called “theory of ignorance.”The other question about knowledge is: “How do we know?” This question pertains to the mechanics of sensation, perception, cognition, memory, and physical brain processes. It also touches upon language and thought, but it takes a more scientific approach to these issues. The latter question is primarily asked by psychologists and neuroscientists, although philosophers recently took a renewed interest in the workings of the brain. Since both approaches are beneficial in their own way, we shall not limit ourselves to a particular one.
via Introduction to Mind and Consciousness.
… As an alternative, Benjamin provides architecture as an artistic medium through which one might locate a means of modifying the prevailing aesthetic by modifying the human apparatus of perception. However, even architecture falls into the aesthetic of war as long as it is deemed valuable and is appropriated by the economic system, so in The Arcades Project, he turns his attention to a peculiar architectural construction—the Parisian passages—as a means of locating a structural guide for a kind of generative thought that “is totally useless for fascism” “Work of Art” 218. In The Arcades Project, this apparatus is to be identified with what Benjamin refers to as “the structure of awakening” The Arcades Project 389 [K1,3].
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of aspect perception in the latter part of the Philosophical Investigations is generally credited with inspiring an important strand in contemporary explanations of depiction in which the visual experience of perceivers of pictures has a key role in the explanation. Although theorists working in this tradition have modified his concept of ‘seeing-as’, perceptual concepts related to seeing-as continue to have an important role in visual experience theories of depiction. A close examination of Wittgenstein’s scattered remarks on perceptual concepts and experience, however, shows that he had far more to offer to those seeking a perceptual theory of depiction. The central aim of this paper is to bring these neglected features of his thought to the fore, and to indicate in outline how they might be developed into a theory of depiction.
via Wittgenstein and the Visual Experience of Depiction | Esthetica.
We see colours, hear sounds and feel textures. Some aspects of the world, it seems, are perceived through a particular sense. Others, like shape, are perceived through more than one sense. But what sense or senses do we use when perceiving time? It is certainly not associated with one particular sense. In fact, it seems odd to say that we see, hear or touch time passing. And indeed, even if all our senses were prevented from functioning for a while, we could still notice the passing of time through the changing pattern of our thought. Perhaps, then, we have a special faculty, distinct from the five senses, for detecting time. Or perhaps, as seems more likely, we notice time through perception of other things. But how?
Time perception raises a number of intriguing puzzles, including what it means to say we perceive time. In this article, we shall explore the various processes through which we are made aware of time, and which influence the way we think time really is. Inevitably, we shall be concerned with the psychology of time perception, but the purpose of the article is to draw out the philosophical issues, and in particular whether and how aspects of our experience can be accommodated within certain metaphysical theories concerning the nature of time and causation.
via The Experience and Perception of Time (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
The artist Carsten Höller has wide interests. He conducted biological research into how plants and insects communicate with one another. He put on Congolese music festivals and he pored over the hallucinatory effects of mushrooms. In a conversation with Ranti Tjan, director of the European Ceramic Work Centre, he tells about his fascination for the distance between humans and animals and about his aim to ‘synchronise moods’ with his exhibition Divided Divided in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
link to video: http://arttube.boijmans.nl/video/carsten-holler-NL/
