Art & Technology

We use digital techniques and other technologies for the measurement of artistic experiences. Via these technologies, we intend to measure and interpret behaviour, physiological responses, and subjective feelings about art. These technologies will afford us the opportunity to make non-dogmatic insights about both the ‘meaning’ of artworks and the significance of those artworks to different artworld publics.

Key to the success of this project is the proper conceptualisation of these categories. We need not only useful and conceptually robust definitions of ‘art’, ‘experience’, ‘meaning’, and ‘technology’ (along with related and subordinate concepts), but also a rich understanding of the ways in which those categories overlap and interact. This philosophical apparatus will serve as both the philosophical infrastructure and the common language for the broader iMEMA project.

This philosophical infrastructure is premised upon the assumption that artworks can express what philosophers call ‘cognitive value’ or ‘cognitive function’. This view, known as ‘aesthetic cognitivism’, refers to a cluster of positions that all hinge upon the assumption that art can, as Gordon Graham claims, “at its best” constitute a form of understanding, and is thus deserving of the “same evaluative status as science”.  We, as cognitivists, argue that artworks mean things in a straightforward way.

Affordances provide the mechanism of action for this particular conception of artistic meaning. Drawing from recent scholarship in philosophy of technology, we argue that when we talk about artistic meaning, we're really talking about the fact that exposure to artworks can make certain insights possible. This is because artworks are a tool—a technology—for reflecting upon the world and its features in a scaffolded and orderly way. In furnishing us with this opportunity for what we call ‘structured attention’, artworks can, under the right circumstances, afford experiences, reflections, and realisations that we would not otherwise have. This is what, and how, artworks mean things.

This sub-project has two aims. The first aim is to further develop the identified conceptual infrastructure. Although a preliminary formulation is outlined in team member Ryan Wittingslow’s forthcoming monograph What Art Does (Rowman & Littlefield International, under contract), this formulation must properly integrate the insights of other disciplines, such as psychology, anthropology, and the visual arts, before it can serve as a full-blown model of artistic meaning. The second aim is to explicitly build the conceptual machinery that ties our philosophical infrastructure to the empirical and applied sub-projects within iMEMA. This will ensure that the empirical richness of iMEMA is both well motivated and philosophically robust.