And Umberto Eco On Beauty! Not to mention the book that you should be writing —
Hope all is well at OCADU these days.Best wishes,Heidi

      From: Doreen Balabanoff <[log in to unmask]>
 To: [log in to unmask]
 Sent: Friday, June 30, 2017 3:28 AM
 Subject: Re: Design and aesthetics
   
Dear Heidi

I very much appreciate your comments and thoughts.
I'll just add two last specific references who I find important on the
topics of aesthetics and beauty (and which address some of the issues
raised in this thread):

Elaine Scarry *On Beauty and Being Just *(2001)

*and*
Lars Spuybroek
*The Ages of Beauty: Revisiting Hartshorne's Diagram of Aesthetic Values*
in
* Vital Beauty: Reclaiming Aesthetics in the Tangle of Technlogy and
Nature  (2012)*
eds. Brouwer, Mulder, Spuybroek

cheers
Doreen

On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 11:15 PM, Heidi Overhill <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Dear Doreen,
> I'm afraid that my personal art practice appears to be far more cynical
> than yours; probably falling into the area of "institutional critique" (see
> Legge, Canadian Art, Summer 2010, pps. 50-52, for a review). Terry's timely
> correction of the erroneous conflation of "beauty" with "aesthetics"
> applies to contemporary art as well — for example, see: Our Aesthetic
> Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Ngai, Harvard University Press, 2012).
>
> However, I share your passion for James J. Gibson, whose work during WWII
> for the American military directly addressed the way in which living beings
> extract meaning from changing environments. His description of how the
> pilots of small aircraft are able to land on moving aircraft carriers
> demonstrates that real-world action operates with a speed that refutes
> Cartesian mind/body duality and its associated computational theories of
> perception (The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, 1966). This is of
> course entirely resonant with the earlier insights of Merleau-Ponty
> (translated 1962), though Merleau-Ponty's aim was to find "a philosophy
> that puts essence back into existence" (The Phenomenology of Perception,
>  p. xi), rather than to seek strategies to take action upon existence.
> The accuracy of a Gibsonian definition of meaning — seeing it as an
> emergent or relational phenomenon arising out of the interaction between
> perceiver and environment — is substantiated by the pragmatic success of
> the engineering field of "ecological design" based on his insights. This
> specializes in problems such as how to design critical controls for complex
> installations like nuclear power plants. The Human Factor (2004), by
> retired University of Toronto engineering professor Kim Vincente, offers a
> popular introduction to the subject, the importance of which is not least
> demonstrated by the unfolding disaster at Fukushima.
> Radiation poisoning is a phenomenon which it is probably not appropriate
> to "measure from your own intuition." It might be helpful here to recall
> Alex Manu's 1995 reiteration of Abraham Maslov's 1943 "hierarchy of needs,"
> because the worthy self-actualization projects you describe rest on an
> unspoken substrata of well-satisfied "lower" needs for food and safety. It
> is difficult to imagine Robert Irwin's 1980 Market Street project, in which
> he temporarily replaced a structural building wall with a semi-transparent
> fabric scrim (Wikipedia) being just as successful in, say, the Zaatari
> Syrian refugee camp, where everyone essentially lives full-time inside a
> semi-transparent scrim tent.
> This brings us back, of course, to Gibson's relativism, and to Terry's
> point about the essence of aesthetics lying in the experience of reality.
> If either perceiver or environment changes, so does the meaning. It also
> suggests a reason for the success of design overall, in which the
> collective impact of our work derives from the fact that we are all so
> different. It is this variety that affords such a delightful confusion of
> opportunities to do what we all want: make the world better.
> Onwards,Heidi
>      From: Doreen Balabanoff <[log in to unmask]>
>  To: [log in to unmask]
>  Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2017 11:40 PM
>  Subject: Re: Design and aesthetics
>
> Dear Keith
>
> I think we agree. Experience...different for each creature, person, due to
> so many factors including previous experience and context...is what we have
> to work with, and what gives meaning... Gibson and Merleau-Ponty both
> follow on from biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1926/2011). His concept of
> 'Umwelt' (the surrounding world) actually includes the animal; that is, the
> body is not separate from (is itself a part of) the Umwelt. What a shark
> sees (electrical fields, used to navigate and find prey) is not visible to
> a human. The Umwelt of a shark is not something we can know fully, and
> there are many kinds of sharks, in many different parts of the world. But a
> shark's being and becoming is intimately connected to what it perceives,
> and how it can understand/use visual and sensory information...and a shark
> is distinguishable from a goldfish (however essentialist that may be). I
> agree with Gibson and Merleau-Ponty that we (and other creatures) are made
> for perception in motion, moving with intent in the world, and finding the
> world directly comprehensible in many ways. And that we and the
> environments we have inhabited in the past have developed in synchronous
> engagement over millenia, and that therefore our perceptual systems are
> tuned to the world...certain things are directly meaningful to us (and
> change their meanings with intentionality and context. This is not to say
> that we are some kind of fixed 'essential' formulaic creatures that are
> predictable and fixed, and that our world has been the same for
> millenia...I am interested in the notions of the universe espoused by David
> Bohm and Whitehead - the universe is organic and ecological and
> ever-changing...process and change are somehow at the core of who we are
> and what the universe is and does.
>
> Having just been to the Venice Biennale, the Münster Skulptur Projekt and
> Documental in Kassel, I can say that artists and designers cannot be
> separated out as completely different sorts of people, with different
> 'methodologies'  or 'aims (that would be essentialist).  Many artists at
> these events offered architectural work, graphic design work, traditional
> 'craft' work and every kind of design work was represented... these works
> feed the imagination of designers as well as artists, and also people who
> are neither. I am both an artist and a designer (as are many others) – I am
> free to set my own agendas and terms of engagement in either role. I ask
> questions in both roles. I consider and respond to problems in both roles.
> I use visual and sensory language.
>
> I like many of Robert Irwin's thoughts, here are a few I think I relevant
> to the conversation:
>
> 'Name all the events in a moment of perceptual experience. Do we have
> enough words to adequately reflect such a moment's real complexity?' (2011
> p.?)
>
> 'Art capable of real social meaning – change – is art capable of
> manifesting a new set of values. New perceptions breed new values. They
> breed them tacitly, by implication… So while the art of pure inquiry is
> uniquely individual, it does not take place in isolation.' (2011, p. 15)
>
> 'At one level, the only difference between the scientist and the artist is
> one of method: the scientist tends to keep an ongoing record of his
> decisions while for the artist, the art object exists as the inclusive
> record of his decisions. But in both cases, simply put, we witness a
> sequence of yes-no decisions weighted in contest. Each yes-no, whether
> intellectual or intuititive, is derived through a counterpoint of induction
> and deduction.'  (2011, p. 176)
>
> 'Let’s say at a particular point, the scientist gets what he set out to
> get. I mean, he arrives at what he projected might happen... But the same
> thing is true of the artist: when he finally gets the right combination,
> and then someone asks... ‘Well why did you stop there?’ The artist says
> ‘Well, because it felt right.’ Which from a logical perspective does not
> seem to be acceptable... The critical difference is that you measure from
> your own intuition, your feeling. In other words, you are the
> measure.'(2011, pp. 123–124)
>
> He wrote, while working with James Turrell and NASA scientists on the NASA
> space capsule:
>
> 'Think very carefully about the idea TO PLAN. It could be to take all of
> our prejudices and design them into our future.'
>
>
> Best
> Doreen
>
>
>
>
>
>
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