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Hanna Brinkmann, Laura Commare: Aesthetic Echoes in the Beholder’s Eye?
Aesthetic Echoes in the Beholder’s Eye?
(p. 221 – 234)

Hanna Brinkmann, Laura Commare

Aesthetic Echoes in the Beholder’s Eye?
Empirical Evidence for the Divergence of Theory and Practice in the Perception of Abstract Art

PDF, 14 pages

  • history of science
  • gaze
  • physiology

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Hanna Brinkmann

is a DOC-team fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the Department of Art History, University of Vienna, and staff member of the Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History (Labor für empirische Bildwissenschaften). Currently she is working on her PhD thesis, “The Cultural Eye.” In 2014 she was a guest PhD at the DFG Research Training Centre’s “Visibility and Visualisation—Hybrid Forms of Pictorial Knowledge” at the University of Potsdam and a visiting researcher at Waseda University in Tokyo.

Laura Commare

is a fellow at the Department of Art History and the Cognitive Science Research Platform, University of Vienna, and a staff member at the Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History (Labor für empirische Bildwissenschaften). Currently she is working on her interdisciplinary PhD thesis, “More Than the Sum of Its Parts: Conceptual and Visual Complexity in Painting.”
Michael F. Zimmermann (ed.): Vision in Motion

Vision is not mere registration of what enters, via the gateway of our eyes, from the outside world into our inner consciousness. Understanding the act of seeing as mirroring the outside world in mental images overlooks its temporal aspect. From Berkeley to Helmholtz, from Goethe to Cézanne, new discourses based on the physiology of the sense organs lead to new conceptions of vision not only conceived of as a mental process, but as a cognitive activity. Even before Freud interpreted dreams, seeing was conceived of as accompanying our life even when we sleep. However, to understand even the stream of the sensations, we have to configure them in pictures. Since the 19th century, the media reflect about the confrontation of seeing as a diachronic activity and of perception as coded in synchronic images. The contributions to the volume investigate the opposition of the stream of sensations and the configuration of time – from early illustrations of plants to the avant-gardes, from gesture to cinema, from decapitation to dance, from David Hume to Bergson and Deleuze. The main objective is a critical examination of images rendering vision in motion, without reducing them to the temporality of narrative.

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