I'm going to attempt to triangulate a number of ideas about reading [decoding], thinking, and aesthetics that may or may not make for a new hypothesis about viewing art.
I just recently encountered the invention of Bionic Reading a few weeks ago. The link introduces the synthesis of font bolding into the narrative flow of reading material with the effect of increasing the speed of reading the material.
Another category of interest is found in a Lex Fridman podcast with Edward Gibson, psycholinguistics professor at MIT on Morphology - the relationship of words to one another. In the context of words, a morpheme is the smallest unique linguistic unit.
Comparing the Fixation notation of Bionic Reading with Morphology, even at face value gets very interesting. Fixations aren't the same as morphemes, they're simply a visual recognition shorthand for reading faster. So what happens to morphemes either as autonomous units or in more complex configurations?
And before attempting to answer this rather obvious question, also consider that Gibson talks about the belief that assigning meaning to what is read [not just visually processed but what is holistically being cross referenced] is separate from the parsing [e.g. either traditional OR Bionic Reading] of the material. In the case of text or listening, a language network is activated to make it make sense. But this is different for, say, music or art.
And the last piece of this exercise involves the late Daniel Kahneman's ruminations on Thinking Fast [system 1] and Thinking Slow [system 2]. And this has to do with control of attention and confidence in memory recall.
All of that is a lot of information but it all has to do with how we, as humans, comprehend information and we are constantly bombarded with information.
Let's start to unpack all this and, if I'm successful, maybe map reading text to "reading" a piece of art.
The reason Bionic Reading grabbed my attention is that I'm currently reading Suzi Gablik's The ReEnchantment of Art and I usually read when I'm at the Community Center on an exercise bike. Someone walked up to me there and asked what I was reading and I quickly showed them the cover of the book that had the title in embellished lettering. "Oh, so you're reading The Reinvention of Art, how interesting."
The mistake the individual made is an understandable one - we all think we are getting the whole of the material we read quickly but at times its a big fail. I thought about this in the context of Bionic Reading which emphasizes and strongly hints that the whole word is the most familiar word you'll assume. The immediate issue with this is that morphemes, for lack of a better conceptual model, post-process the nuanced meaning of the a priori [Bionic Reading] "Fixation". I can't help but think that, left unchecked, this mismatch of the intended word and the expedited reading of the word may account for a large body of [system 1] memory recall confusion. In other words we internalize information we think is correct based on our own uncorrected misreading of the text.
And if this is the actual cause of misunderstanding, it may be that the cognitive bias that is so often attributed to an individual isn't bias at all - just an untrustworthy cache of immediate gratification, system 1 factoids.
We can re-purpose the concept of fixation from Bionic Reading and invent a speculative aesthetic equivalent to use with artistic material. Morphemes already map to words and biology with a heavy inference of the concept of the form of the thing. Let's add another usage to the term that relates to aesthetics, morpheme as the smallest, unique recognizable unit of sensation experience that includes vision, movement, feeling, and so on. For example, to answer the question of "What is a chair?", we might answer, "Something/anything to sit on.". An aesthetic response might be, "Something/anything comfortable to sit on.". The arrow of additional aesthetic nuance moves in the direction of fine art or fine craft and it is the look or feel of a chair candidate object that becomes the aesthetic morpheme.
What is true about Bionic Reading and aesthetics is that the process can only work if the richness of understanding is already in place. For reading, a large vocabulary is important. For art a rich and sticky exposure to the range of imaginations who have solved the problem at hand, say, "What is a chair?".
And just like the individual misreading the title of my reading book, an individual grazing through an art gallery must also have an aesthetic set of fixation forms. Studies have shown that most gallery attendees spend an average of 5 seconds or less actually looking at a museum painting [obviously high recognition pieces among other objects of interest get more]. It is obvious here that immediate gratification [system 1] memory is kicking in - "I don't [or do] think this object is worth my attention.".
Maybe this is worthwhile information about how art appreciation should be nurtured. What aesthetic fixations are worth cultivating to instrument an individual's taste in art, craft, or performance? This is much different than promoting art history artistic achievements or museum merchandise best-sellers. If an individual is going to rush past a piece of art, shouldn't they be armed with a quick and dirty, drive-by sense of why they ignore it? And is it possible that art students can be armed with sufficient, quick and dirty aesthetic morphemes that enable them to make better personal curatorial choices about what they consume and experience? i think this is worth exploring in greater detail.
If we accept that all sensorial arts are experienced with some kind of a priori aesthetic fixation response then the chronic criticism about Modern Art [and after] is unfairly selective. Every museum object requires a minimal understanding of its reason to exist, Modern or not, abstract or not, beautiful or not.
Back to our original question, what happens to morphemes in the context of being fixated? I think the assumption has to be that is the Bionic Reading results in an accurate interpretation of the text then morphemes maintain their veracity. However, it seems to me, that morphemes can get stepped on by the Bionic Reading notational font enhancement.
Because aesthetic fixation is an invention that starts here, further development of the concept will need to be wary of creating a shorthand of expectation about experiencing art that is illegitimate.
No comments:
Post a Comment