Art, Performance, and Aesthetics Timeline

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First published 09:00 GMT 11th March 2011; this version [2.0 - rebuild after file corruption] 09:00 BST 8th July 2018. [BUT UNDER CONSTANT EXTENSION AND CORRECTION, SO CHECK AGAIN SOON]

Towards a Cognitive Science of Aesthetics

This timeline weaves together a number of empirical research traditions and then uses the resulting interdisciplinary narrative to reflect critically upon the often loosely grounded tenets of aesthetic philosophy. Its aim is to identify the most "scientific" theory of beauty, a theory which explains in depth how the emotionally tinged phenomenal experience engendered by artwork or performance emerges from simple nervous activity. The traditions contributing to this narrative, and their relevance to aesthetic theory, are shown in the following table .....

Contributing Discipline	Nature of the Data	Justification for Inclusion
Palaeontology of Art and Adornment	Physical artefacts from the palaeontological record after ca. 40,000BP, subjected to disciplined hypothesis testing.	Cave art is the earliest form of empirical data on the artistic abilities and preferences of prehistoric people, and potentially marks the birth of the "performative exchange".
Archaeology of Art, Architecture, and Adornment	Physical artefacts from the archaeological record after ca. 10,000BP, subjected to disciplined hypothesis testing.	Decoration of the built environment is the next earliest form of empirical data on the artistic abilities and preferences of prehistoric people.
Archaeology of Writing and Number Systems	Physical artefacts from the archaeological record after ca. 10,000BP, subjected to disciplined hypothesis testing.	Everyday symbolic communication presumably shares some cognitive resources with performative communication.
History of Religion	Physical artefacts from the archaeological record after ca. 10,000BP, subjected to disciplined hypothesis testing; surviving narrative.	(1) Ritual creates affective experience. (2) Affective experience inspires performative exchange.
Medicine and Toxicology [dates uncertain]	Physical artefacts from the archaeological record after ca. 10,000BP, subjected to disciplined hypothesis testing; surviving narrative.	Clear kill-or-cure cause and effect. Includes substances given as part of ritual, and therefore relevant to the "altered states of consciousness" aspects of aesthetics.
Neurological Medicine [dates uncertain]	Single-case neurological examination, supplemented in the last 20 years by functional brain scanning.	This type of data has been the main source of insight into the functional architecture of the brain for at least 3000 years.
Performance Studies [from 1000BCE]	Physical artefacts and the illustrations thereon, surviving narrative.	Explores the techniques of live drama as a performative exchange.
Mechanical Engineering [from 250BCE]	Physical artefacts and/or illustrations, surviving instructional and celebratory text.	The construction of automata for public entertainment dates from this period and has a clear run forward to modern robotic art.

The Constituent Threads

To assist keyword-based item-hopping each timeline item is tagged with the thread(s) to which it is most directly relevant. The following threads will commonly be seen .....

HISTORY OF AESTHETICS

THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE

SCIENTIFIC METHOD

AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART

THE UNCONSCIOUS IN ART

ARCHETYPES IN ART (VARIOUS)

DISTURBING ART and EROTIC ART

ABSTRACT ART

SPEECH ACT THEORY

DECODING COMPLEX NARRATIVE

FUNCTIONAL NEUROANATOMY

ART, WARFARE, AND PROPAGANDA

ART, RITUAL, AND BELIEF

ART AS SOCIAL PROTEST

THEORY OF MIND, IMAGINARY FRIENDS, and ANIMISM

CHURCH HISTORY

AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS and ANIMATED MECHANISM

ANIMATION, FROZEN MOTION, and THE UNCANNY

SLOW MOTION

ASSESSING COGNITIVE FUNCTION (VARIOUS)

AKTIONISMUS

THE NATURE OF REALITY

The Timeline

**************** UPPER PALAEOLITHIC PERIOD ***************

** (ALL DATES APPROXIMATE; BP = BEFORE PRESENT) **

** (DATES MAY OVERLAP) **

AURIGNACIAN: The Aurignacian culture dates between 40000BP and 26000BP. Although it gets its name from Aurignac in France, it existed across Southern Europe as far as the Ukraine. The oldest known example of figurative art, the Venus of Hohle Fels [more on which below], dates from early in this period.

40000BP Bednarik (1984) suggests that "parietal finger lines" - fingertip tracings in clay or mud - are the oldest surviving art tradition. He uses the word "psychogram" to describe any form of marking which has an expressive intent, even if only unconsciously and even if only to the creator personally. Yet there was probably no depiction of external shape, merely "subjective images in his own visual cortex" (p28).

35000BP An unknown Cro-Magnon carves what is now known as the Venus of Hohle Fels, a six centimetre tall ivory artefact in the form of a naked woman [image]. In the very first paper to be published in the journal Art History, Collins and Onians (1978) explain that the appearance of "representational images" in the archaeological record may be viewed as having taken place surprisingly late, given the far longer history of hominid tool creation and use. Tools require "the habit of imitative shaping" (p1), a set of cognitive skills which must therefore be as old as tools themselves, and that is over a million years old. They review findings from the main Aurignacian sites and identify three categories of artwork, namely vulvas, female figures, and animals. These three are "the recurrent features of the earliest art" (p11), and "there is no later culture, with one or two very isolated exceptions, which accords such prominence to the vulva [nor] the entire female body in all its full and naked roundness" (p11). The central unknown, however, is as follows .....

"Our problem is why did some individuals in the years before 30,000 b.c. [= before confirmed] start to engrave lines which go beyond the making of patterns, into the imitation of the form of the female genitals and the silhouettes of animals, and why soon afterwards did they start to shape stones not just into tools but into the likeness of female figures. [.....I]t is natural to begin our search for an explanation by concentrating on the main factor which links them. This is the desire - or should we say hunger - which will ensure that the male in a hunting community will have two main centres of attention, women and game animals. [.....] In other words if Aurignacian man ever day-dreamed, it is surely the sight of a nice edible reindeer or the touching of a nice rounded pair of buttocks which must have passed through his mind" (Collins and Onians, 1978, p15).

RESEARCH ISSUE: The assumption that these carved artworks were valued for their ability to stimulate those who beheld them is alluring but difficult to prove scientifically.

Anati (1981) reminds us that what he terms "artistic creativity" may occur in a wide variety of contexts, namely in special places, on special occasions, on social encounters (including marriages, funerals, comings of age, etc.), and at "moments of ecstasy" (p201). For him the central issue is as follows .....

"There are at least two stages to be clarified: the first is the transition from the state of awareness of the meaning of a sign, a footprint or the evidence of some action in the past, to the conscious act of making a sign in order to pass on a message. The second stage is the development from making signs whose shapes are imposed by nature to making man-made signs, whether these be imitations of nature or inventions. Understanding the progress through these stages and the motives behind them would perhaps open up the way to an understanding of the origins of art. We should then realise how arbitrary the distinction is that is often drawn between representational and abstract art. Probably the abstract did not exist for prehistoric man. On the other hand, graphic and figurative art is always an abstraction, even at its most naturalistic, because it is the representation and hence the transformation of reality through the selection of a part, namely what is visible, symbolic, or conceptual. [.....] Art is, by definition, the message that one individual conveys to others" (p209). This fundamental function is not necessarily conscious. But art that does not communicate is not art" (pp205/9; emphasis added).

GRAVETTIAN: The Gravettian culture dates between 28000BP and 22000BP, and is named after the class-defining archaeological site at La Gravette, on the Dordogne. It contributes many more Venuses to the archaeological record [example].

SOLUTREAN: The Solutrean culture dates between 22000BP and 17000BP, and is named after the class-defining archaeological site at Solutré in France [more on this].

MAGDALENIAN: The Magdalenian culture dates between 17000BP and 9000BP, making it the final culture of the Old Stone Age. It is named after the class-defining site at La Madeleine, on the Vezere. It is characterised by numerous examples of "mobile art" - figurines and engraved artefacts - as well as by the world-famous "parietal art" sites at Lascaux [detail] and Altamira [detail].

15000BP Cave art practice and techniques are by now fully established (and survive until the present day in certain aboriginal populations). The signs used may be classified as either figurative, where there is a direct representation of (usually) an animal or (less frequently) a human, or non-figurative, where the markings are more abstract and make no clear reference. Among the most commonly seen figurative signs are bison, horses, deer, and reindeer, and among the most commonly seen non-figurative signs are roughly collarbone-shaped claviforms, roughly oblong quadrilaterals, and roughly house-shaped tectiforms. There are also triangles, ovals, circles, crosses, points. Where a number of signs are used together they may - like the words in a sentence - be delivering a more complex message. Leroi-Gourhan (1968) suggests the term "mythogram" to describe the sort of complex scenes found in cave art. These are conventionally believed to have had some sort of mystic or ritual value to their perpetrators, just as the dove still symbolises the Holy Spirit in Christian iconography. Lawson (1991) explains that much cave art is located deep underground and would therefore have been both difficult and dangerous to get at. "It was obviously not done purely for amusement", he says (p57).

RESEARCH ISSUE: The assumption that mythograms were part of emotionally loaded ritual of some sort is alluring but difficult to prove scientifically. The same goes for any production of ritual experience to order, perhaps by some combination of non-verbal vocalisation (moaning or chanting) with some repetitive hypnotic action (bead telling, stamping).

KEY CONCEPT - SHAMANS AND SHAMANISM: Modern scientific interest in humankind's belief systems may conveniently be dated to an 1866 publication by Edward Tyler entitled "The Religion of Savages" (subsequently enlarged as Tyler, 1871). In the years which follow, three further works deserve particular mention. The first is Sir James Frazer's "The Golden Bough" [see 1890], which argues for a common progression from magic and primitive superstition to religious belief, and then from religious belief to scientific thought. The other classics are Lucien Levy-Bruhl's "How Natives Think" [see 1910] and Emile Durkheim's "Les Formes Élémentaires de la vie Religieuse" [see 1912], both of which emphasise the role played by the social system in producing a set of beliefs characteristic of that social system. The matter is also presented as a matter for psychological analysis in William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience" [see 1902]. These books highlight the role of the tribal "medicine man" as archetypal priest-healer - a role now known generically as the "Shaman", after the Marie Czaplicka's monograph "Aboriginal Siberia" [see 1914]. Note also how the Christian ritual of baptism helps allay the emotional trauma of a monstrous birth [see 1018 (Thietmar) and onward links].

******************** NEOLITHIC PERIOD **********************

** (ALL DATES APPROXIMATE; [B]CE - [BEFORE] CHRISTIAN ERA **

10000BCE The Old Stone Age is conventionally regarded as having ended around 12,000 years ago in a short transitional period known as the Middle Stone (mesolithic) Age, when more and more of our ancestors gave up their hunter-gatherer existence in favour of building permanent shelters, raising crops, and domesticating cattle. Inventions such as the sledge, the canoe, and rope have been dated to this period, and many of the culinary processes we nowadays hold dear - such as the ability to convert grain into bread - may safely be located earlier or later in the Neolithic period, and arose presumably by trial and error. Such chancidental incidents can easily lead to the conversion of milk into butter or cheese, mud into bricks, grapes into wine, ground seeds into gruel, and so on.

ASIDE - CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING: The trial-and-error discoveries which brought pottery, bread, and wine to the Neolithic were not Humankind's first technological breakthroughs. Stone tools, for example, predate not just pottery but H. sapiens itself, the principles of knapping having been discovered by a precursor hominid, H. habilis, around two million years ago [more on this]. The Palaeolithic also saw the emergence of such artefacts as the knife, the hafted axe, pelts, the thrusting and throwing versions of the spear, ligature, the drill, the needle, and eventually the bow and arrow and the portable shelter. It is even possible to hazard a guess at what went through the minds of the original inventors because those minds were perhaps not so different to our own. Creative problem solving has been quite extensively studied by cognitive scientists, both in animals and humans. The classic animal studies were by the Gestalt School's Wolfgang Köhler at the Prussian Anthopological Research Station on Tenerife [see 1917], and gave rise to the "Insight or Trial-and-Error Debate", a debate which remains not totally resolved to the present day. The classic human studies were by John Stuart Mill [see 1832], Sir Francis Galton [see 1869], Graham Wallas [see 1926], and Max Wertheimer [see 1945]. A typical act of insightful invention involves a sustained confrontation with the problem needing to be solved, during which time various pieces of the final jigsaw are accumulated, followed by a final act of mental re-ordering in which certain critical elements are brought together in a new and successful way.

Creative problem solving also presumably underlie the discovery of herbal remedies such as willow (aspirin) and mosses (natural penicillin), as well as of psychoactive agents such as alcohol (decaying fruit), mescalin (from the peyote cactus), opium (poppy), marihuana (hemp), ayahuasca (vines), and the various forms of "magic" mushrooms. The consumption of Mescalin, for example, has recently been archaeologically dated to ca. 3700BCE.

RESEARCH ISSUE - BELIEF, RITUAL, AND ENTHEOGENS: It will eventually be recognised [see, for example, 1957 (Sargant), 1961 (Laski), and 1966 (Ludwig)] that the transliminal experiences which can be brought about by participation in ritual or by the ingestion of psychogenic substances, either alone or (usually more effectively) in combination, might causally interact with our belief system. We believe a,b,c because we feel x,y,z, and a,b,c help explain those feelings. The Mind can bring about both positive or negative Brain and Body states, which can in turn feed back to Mind. Moreover the process can begin at any point. A thought can trigger a chemical change just as easily as a hallucinogenic drug can conjure up a thought out of nowhere. Following the model provided by such terms as "hallucinogen", "pathogen", "mutagen", etc., substances whose psychological effects include a spiritual element are nowadays known as "entheogens" [see, for example, 1988 (Ruck et al)].

6500BCE The pace of change then accelerated again around 8,500 years ago with the New Stone (neolithic) Age. This was the period of the “neolithic revolution”, when homestead life became village life, and thence civilisation itself. Inventions such as bricks and mortar, pottery, weaving, and the bow and arrow all date from this period, and there is visible tribute to the sophistication of neolithic organizations in the archaeological sites at Uruk in modern Iraq, Catal Hüyük in modern Turkey, and Jericho in modern Israel. Organizations such as councils of elders probably date from the beginning of this period, and the first recognizable factory would have been set up towards the end of it - say around 6,000 years ago - as the technology for smelting bronze started to be developed. The defining characteristic of the Neolithic period in human history is the increasing reliance upon fixed places of abode, with concentrations of urbanised population supported logistically by outlying static agriculture. During the Neolithic temporary settlements grow into villages, villages into towns, and towns into cities. In turn this leads to a "division of labour" within society as different people (individuals, families, clans) specialise in different sets of skills.

PRESUMPTIONS - PHARMACOLOGY, TOXICOLOGY, AND POWER: For our present purposes we are going to presume that by the mid-Neolithic - say 8,000 years BP - (a) inventions no longer surprised people, (b) everyday processes were deliberately varied in the hope of doing things more effectively, and (c) the potential utility of chance events was not long in the noting. We are also going to presume that one of the areas where chance events would have been most difficult to overlook was where they included some clear curative or toxic effect, as with the trial-and-error discovery of healing herbs and balms or the accidental ingestion of poisons. We are also going to presume - with Gibson (1999) [see 2000BCE] - that the power to kill or cure was rapidly incorporated into shamanistic practice, where it reinforced the more ancient traditions of ritual. We are also going to presume that as villages grew into towns and towns into cities, so too did shamanism evolve into churchified religion and the shamans themselves into a priesthood such as we would still recognise. We are also going to presume that this new priestly caste kept their secrets very close to their chests, sometimes acting as priest-kings in their own interest, and sometimes as priest-lieutenants in the interests of a king or emperor.

The Neolithic proves to be a major turning point in social, economic, and political history because the growth in settlement size leads automatically to a growth in the size of the unit of administration, exploitation, and control. Instead of tribal councils administering a few hundred nomadic tribesman we end up with static empires of one or more major cities. The "Fertile Crescent" and Nile Valley are two of the areas of easily irrigated fertile land where human civilisation first developed [other foci existed along the Danube and in the Far East]. We also start to see wars of conquest rather than of ethnic necessity. The Fertile Crescent is the arc of land saddling the northern half of the Syrian Desert, and the Nile Valley forms the eastern border of the Sahara Desert [see map]. The western part of the crescent comprises the Levant [modern Lebanon], whilst the northern and eastern parts follow the lands between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates (the famed "Rivers of Babylon"), between which lies the area known as Mesopotamia. The area was originally populated by a nomadic culture known as the Kebarans, but was then settled perhaps 11,500 years ago by an essentially static culture known as the Natufians. The essence of this dramatic change of lifestyle was that the Natufians preferred to cultivate their own crops rather than go foraging for what grew naturally. The individual civilisations have come and gone, of course, and the "juiciest" bits of territory have since changed hands many times. These civilisations emerged in the fourth millenium BCE, flourished in the third, and then exhausted each other squabbling in the second and the first, until Alexander the Great and the Romans brought a whole new dimension to the game of conqueror. And in the middle of all the military comings and goings, smaller tribal peoples such as the Canaanites, the Israelites, and the Philistines managed to maintain a somewhat fragile and repeatedly disrupted presence.

**** THE DYNASTIC KINGDOMS (ALL DATES APPROXIMATE) ****

3300BCE The Sumerians establish a civilisation in the Tigris-Euphrates basin, south of modern Baghdad. They are an ancient non-Semitic people ["a people of unknown descent" (Coulmas, 1989:72)], and in what Lecours (1995:219) describes as "the Sumerian invention" they develop the world's first writing system, a 1200-sign pictographic system possibly deriving from the use of trading tokens in commerce. It will develop, in turn, into the cuneiform system around 3000BCE.

3100BCE The Pharaonic civilisation arises in the Nile valley. It will survive relatively unchallenged until the first millenium BC when it will fall under a succession of foreign rulers, including the Assyrians, the Persians, the Macedonians, and the Romans. It is famous for developing the world's second important writing system, the hieroglyphic system. The civilisation itself peaked under the pharaoh Amenhotep III (r. 1382-1344BCE).

ASIDE - THE HIEROGLYPHIC SYSTEM: Hieroglyphics: (Greek hieros = "sacred" + glyphos = "sculptured".) This is the earliest and longest lasting of the writing systems used in Ancient Egypt, and consists of a basic consonantal phonetic alphabet, supplemented firstly by a syllabary, and secondly by a rich variety of logograms, determinatives, and ideograms [see examples]. The system appeared around 3100BCE and lasted with natural evolution but no fundamental change until around the fall of the Roman Empire three and a half thousand years later. During this time it gave rise to two other forms of Egyptian - hieratic and demotic - and also heavily influenced the development of systems such as Proto-Canaanite in surrounding lands. The system fell out of use as Greek and Latin flourished and then remained undeciphered until its principles were rediscovered in the nineteenth century. Ideograms are "silent signs" attached to a word's phonetic root, and acting as an incorporated pictogram to convey a general idea. They are presumably a considerable aid to those having to remember what a given word meant. Thus, in Egyptian hieroglyphics "the hawk symbolises [] everything which happens quickly, because this creature is just about the fastest of winged animals and the idea is transferred through the appropriate metaphor to all swift things" (Diodurus Siculus, 1st Century BC; cited in Andrews, 1981:7). Another way to extend one's vocabulary without extending one's basic alphabet is to use a "rebus", a way of making one thing "stand for" another. It uses pictures of things "to indicate certain other entirely different things not easily susceptible of pictorial representation, the names of which chanced to have a similar sound " (Gardiner, 1957:7; italics original). An earlier example was the Egyptian King Narmer, who drew his name as a nar (a type of fish) over a mer (a chisel).

ASIDE - EGYPTIAN WORSHIP: The Egyptians seem to have been polytheistic, that is to say, they worshipped many gods, each with its own sphere of influence. These included .....

Thoth [sometimes Djehuti], the ibis-headed God, a poly-functional deity associated with intelligence, language, writing, and magic. Thoth is worth noting because one of the hieroglyphic inscriptions uses the term "Thoth the great, the great, the great". Given that the Greek equivalent for Thoth is Hermes and the Greek word for "thrice great" is trismegistos, many believe that the name Hermes Trismegistos refers to an abstract being rather than one (or more) actual beings.

Neit(h), a goddess of war, hunting, and weaving with temples at Esna and Sais. [Writing around 370BCE, Plato's Timaeus passes on the rumour that the Temple of Neith at Sais had a secret repository of spells, etc., going back 9000 years!]

Sekhmet, a lion-faced goddess-protector. Also the bringer-or-curer of disease, and hence the emblem of physicians and surgeons. [The priests in the temples of the goddess Sekhmet may have been the first to use biological warfare, there being some suspicion that they smeared valuable statues with anthrax spores to visit a nasty death on anyone daring to steal them!]

3000BCE The cuneiform writing system matures in Sumeria. It is a wedge-shaped script written by pressing the tip of a stylus into clay tablets. It will flourish for some two millennia and then fell suddenly from use after the fall of Assyria (being replaced initially by Phoenician-Aramaic and then by Greek).

2500BCE The Akkadians, a Semitic people, expand their influence in the Tigris-Euphrates basin, north of modern Baghdad. In what Lecours (1995:221) describes as "the Akkadian implement" the Akkadians add a partial syllabary to Sumerian cuneiform to make a more powerful version of this system of their own. They do this using cuneiform-phoneme and phoneme-cuneiform "convertors", thus creating a written language which had a small stock of phonograms. The principal benefit of this device, of course, is that "one who speaks Akkadian and has learned the new code can now read and write words which one does not understand" (Lecours, 1995:222). The Akkadian empire peaked around 1850BCE, after which it is best treated as part of the Babylonian empire. The writing system eventually evolved into Proto-Canaanite.

ASIDE: The term "Babylonian" is a group name for the lesser empires of the Akkadians, Chaldeans, and Sumerians, and, sometimes, the Assyrians, that is to say, any Mesopotamian empire which took Babylon (50 miles south of modern Baghdad) as its common capital city. The Babylonians were therefore an early "United Kingdom", in which the partners, though originally racially distinct enemies, found marginally greater value in cooperation. The empire developed during the third millenium BCE under such emperors as the Akkadian, Sargon I, flourished in the early second millenium BCE under such as Hammurabi, went through a period of Assyrian dominance between 1200BCE and 612BCE, peaked again under Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 605-565BCE), and finally fell to Alexander the Great in 330BCE to become a province of the Macedonian Empire.

2000BCE The Babylonians begin to worship Gula, Goddess of Healing. The Chicago archaeologist McGuire Gibson interprets the physical record as indicating two kinds of medical practise in Mesopotamia, namely "a herbal healer, the asu, who diagnosed illness, concocted remedies, instructed the patient on how to use them, and sometimes predicted the outcome. This person did not include ritual in his practice. The ashipu, in contrast, was a form of magician or exorcist, whose role was to drive demons out of sick people. He did perform of rituals and sometimes also used herbs" (Gibson, 1999, online).

1900BCE The Cretans [a.k.a. Minoans] establish a writing system influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphics. It will evolved by around 1500BCE into the still undeciphered Linear A script, and will die away around 1100BCE as the Cretan civilisation becomes overshadowed by the Mycenean from the north and Phoenician from the east.

1800BCE An unknown team prepares a hieroglyphic medical corpus, the surviving portions of which - known as the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus - record 34 particular diagnoses and treatments.

1550BCE An unknown team prepares a hieroglyphic medical corpus, the surviving portions of which - known as the Ebers Papyrus - present a fair summary of Egyptian medical knowledge as it then stood.

1100BCE Reputedly named after Ashur, grandson of Noah, the Assyrians start to expand the Assyrian Empire under such emperors as Tilgat-Pileser (r. 1116-1090BCE). The peak of their influence will come with the reign of Sennacherib (r. 714-681BCE), and will die away with the fall of Ninevah to the Medes in 612BCE. Assyria was the principal Babylonian power during this period. The spoken language was Aramaic, which had its own Phoenician-derived writing system, but the much older cuneiform was also retained. The 30,000 clay tablets discovered in the ruins of Ashurbanipal's (r. 668-626BCE) library at Ninevah are an untapped archaeological resource of the first importance.

900BCE The Etruscans flourish in Pre-Roman Italy. They use a writing system developed out of Mycenean and Phoenician, which will evolve in turn into Latin by 550BCE. It is also believed to have influenced the runic alphabet adopted by the Germanic peoples of northern Europe.

1055BCE The Babylonian physician Esagil-kin-Apli becomes court physician to King Adad and sets out his knowledge in his "Diagnostic Handbook".

********* CLASSICAL PERIOD (ALL DATES APPROXIMATE) ********

850BCE The Greek poet Homer (or a composite of unknowns now treated by that name) compiles "The Iliad" (the story of the Trojan War), and "The Odyssey" (the story of Odysseus's long and eventful journey home after the war was over). These two works tell us much about what the Ancient Greeks knew, thought, and valued, as well as how they fought, how their society and economy was structured, and how they built and used ships and other technology. As such they are a priceless side-commentary upon the more concrete evidence provided by physical archaeology. On the use of drugs and poisons, for example, we have .....

"He then bade Paeeon heal him, whereon Paeeon spread pain-killing
herbs upon his wound and cured him ....." (Iliad, Book V).

"He was then coming from Ephyra, where he had been to beg poison for his arrows from Ilus, son of Mermerus " (Odyssey, Book I, §259).

"Then Jove's daughter Helen bethought her of another matter. She drugged the wine with an herb that banishes all care, sorrow, and ill humour. Whoever drinks wine thus drugged cannot shed a single tear all the rest of the day, not even though his father and mother both of them drop down dead, or he sees a brother or a son hewn in pieces before his very eyes. This drug, of such sovereign power and virtue, had been given to Helen by Polydamna wife of Thon, a woman of Egypt, where there grow all sorts of herbs, some good to put into the mixing-bowl and others poisonous. Moreover, every one in the whole country is a skilled physician, for they are of the race of Paeeon" (Odyssey, Book IV, §200). [Read (1936, reprinted in Linden, 2003) even notes that the word "alchemy" might derive from the Arabic word for the land of Egypt, namely "Khem".]

Mental philosophers are also fond of Homeric works because the very words used are themselves indicators of how the Greeks thought about the universe and their place within it. This vocabulary is centred around the use of the word psuche to refer to the individual soul or self-defining spirit, and phronesis to indicate the understanding [more on these terms].

BARDISM IN EUROPEAN CLAN SOCIETY: In many of the tribes mentioned there was an ancient bardic tradition. Each royal household retained a resident minstrel, whose job it was to sing the praises of the king and his knights. The songs were typically of epic length and had to be rote memorised, for which reason only a few have survived. The lives and works of the following bards represent highpoints of the craft .....

· The fictional bard Phemius in Homer's Odyssey

· Aneirin

· Taliesin [see 1275, Book of Taliesin, below]

· unknown [see 1350?, White Book of Rhydderch, below]

· unknown [see 1382?, Red Book of Hergest, below]

Bardic references will start to re-emerge in the 18th century following the popular success of James Macpherson's "Ossian" [see 1765 below].

700BCE The poet Hesiod produces "Theogony", one of the most cited versions of the Olympean myths. In it he explains who the gods were, where they came from, and how they were related. Everything, it turns out, is ultimately down to Zeus, for it is he who first turned Chaos into Gaia [Earth] and Eros [Love], and it is he who sired those early patrons of the arts, the Nine Muses .....

KEY CONCEPT - THE NINE MUSES: No account of aesthetics can be complete without mentioning "the Muses" - the nonuplet daughters of Zeus by the goddess Mnemosyne, each one of whom holds gifts of talent in a particular branch of the performing arts to bestow upon the deserving. To the extent that any artist performs, therefore, so has s/he been blessed by one or more of the daughters of Zeus.

One particular phrase from Hesiod will go on to earn him eternal credit, so neatly does it encapsulate the problem of artistic intent. The phrase is this .....

"They, the Muses, once taught Hesiod beautiful song, while he was shepherding his flocks on holy Mount Helicon; these goddesses of Olympus, daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus, first of all spoke this word to me: 'Oh, you shepherds of the fields, base and lowly things, little more than bellies, we know how to tell many falsehoods that seem like truths but we also know, when we so desire, how to utter the absolute truth'."

KEY CONCEPT - ARTISTIC TRUTH: By separating "the absolute truth" in the abstract from the words [or, for that matter, the images, posings, posturings, facial expressions, or whatever] used to convey that truth, the Muses offer an instant mechanism by which the superficial can deceive, whereupon it can never again be totally trusted.

ASIDE - HOW TO RECOGNISE CLASSICAL ALLUSION IN ARTWORK: Over the millennia the Homeric/Hesiodic corpus will prove a major source of inspiration to artists and writers. Classical allusion will typically be by personal or place name, as in James Joyce's "Ulysses", Gleyre's "Odysseus and Nausicaa", Hayer's "Odysseus Overcome", etc., etc., etc.

650BCE One or more unknown poets produce the 33 "Homeric Hymns". These each praise a different Homeric god or goddess, including Apollo, Asclepius, Dionysus, and Hephaestus. Those to Apollo praise his skills both with the bow and the lyre.

ASIDE: The role of sound in attributing mind to external object is borne out by the frequency with which musical instruments such as the lyre are involved in the ancient myths. The Greeks believed that the Lyre was invented by Hermes. This was plucked like a harp, but it also proved susceptible to the physical laws of sympathetic resonance whenever another instrument was played nearby. When that happened, it could sound itself, and in the case of the barbiton, or bass lyre, the resulting murmurings are reputed to have had a distinctly human sound to them. This may or may not account for the fact that lyres occur many times in the Greek myths, and are one of the symbols of Apollo, the god of prophecy. They also used an "Aeolian harp", a wind-blown stringed instrument, with or without a resonance box, which relied on the physics of viscous fluid flow past tensioned wires (the same principle which makes telegraph wires hum when the breeze gets stiff enough). It was given its name because, in the absence of a human musician, the god of winds, Aeolus, was judged the most likely culprit.

One of the Homeric Hymns celebrates a myth believed to go back to around 1450BCE, that of the goddess Demeter. It tells of her quest to Eleusis in search of her daughter Persephone [full legend]. In Demeter's honour the Eleusinian locals dedicated a temple-sanctuary to her, complete with temple attendants and a complex mind-expanding ritual known as "the Eleusinian mysteries". A possible role for hallucinogenic agents in these rituals will eventually be noted by R. Gordon Wasson [see 1978]. The classical theme will get this myth into many later paintings, not least Dante Rossetti's "Persephone" (1874) [image]. The Homeric Hymns also tell the story of Apollo's trip to the place now known as Delphi to build "a glorious temple to be an oracle for men", thus .....

"Apollo spoke through his oracle. The sibyl or priestess of the oracle at Delphi was known as the Pythia; she had to be an older woman of blameless life chosen from among the peasants of the area. She sat on a tripod seat over an opening in the earth. When Apollo slew Python, its body fell into this fissure, according to legend, and fumes arose from its decomposing body. Intoxicated by the vapours, the sibyl would fall into a trance, allowing Apollo to possess her spirit. In this state she [.....] 'raved' - probably a form of ecstatic speech - and her ravings were 'translated' by the priests of the temple" (Wikipedia).

The Homeric works also nicely introduce the topic of automata. The key figure here is Hephaestus, the "blacksmith-god", who at various points is reported as having created female automata, a mechanical owl named Bubo, mobile tripods, and a high-accessibility chariot-wheelchair to compensate for his lameness. [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS] Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith, turns out to be the only physically imperfect Greek God, and his lack of speed and ability meant that he was unable - in Apollodurus' telling of the tale - to force himself with any efficiency upon the goddess Athena. As a result his semen only fell to the ground, where it fertilised the earth-child Erichthonius [sometimes, or by conflation, Erechtheus]. The child, however, was a monstrous birth, and so Athena secreted it in a casket and gave same into the safe keeping of the daughters of Cecrops, king of Athens, with strict instructions not to open it. This legend will eventually be committed to canvas by Jasper van der Laanen [see 1620?].

625BCE The poet Arion begins to use the "dithyramb", an exuberant hymn-dance in praise of Dionysus, God of Fertility.

580BCE Thales of Miletus, one of the "Seven Sages" of Ancient Greece, is one of the first in human history to seek logical explanations of natural phenomena rather than resort to supernatural and mythical explanations.

580BCE Cleisthenes develops the "tragic chorus" dramatic device in which the central action (freeform and non-versified) is interleaved with verses sung or spoken by a small group of sideplayers. This device allows playwrights to guide their audiences' interpretation of their pieces by emphasising, criticising, and otherwise reflecting upon the central action.

560BCE Anaximander of Miletus takes up Thales' search for logical explanations for natural phenomena by applying geometry to the movements of the stars and planets.

550BCE The poet Ibycus mentions a certain Orpheus, but little detail remains of his work. Later authors complete the account of Orpheus, the master of the lyre and musical lyricism, an important one of Jason's Argonauts, and the attributive author of the "Orphic Poems". These latter contain a number of beliefs about the soul, the afterlife, and the underworld.

540BCE The scholar Alcmeon of Croton, student of Pythagoras, uses anatomical dissection to collect data for a number of medical treatises. He is particularly insightful in what he has to say about the layout and operating principles of the cognitive system and deserves to be identified, we submit, as the father of cognitive science. Here is a brief modern assessment of his position .....

"[Alcmaeon] was the first to recognise the brain as the seat of understanding and to distinguish understanding from perception. Alcmaeon thought that the sensory organs were connected to the brain by channels (poroi) and may have discovered the poroi connecting the eyes to the brain (i.e., the optic nerve) by excising the eyeball of an animal [.....] He was the first to develop an argument for the immortality of the soul [..... and] discussed a wide range of topics in physiology including sleep, death, and the development of the embryo" (Huffman, 2008 online, e1).

KEY CONCEPT - PERCEPTUAL STAGES (1): Alcmaeon's poroi clearly imply a separation in space between the external sensory apparatus and a brain waiting to deal with the information passed to it. Henceforth cognitive science can safely regard sensation as an early stage of perception. Of course the Ancients did not use the term "information processing stages", nor do they seem to have discussed how long each subprocess took to carry out its part of the task, but they were moving in the right direction. [This inset topic continues after 1662, Descartes on Neurotransmission.]

534BCE Regular "Dionysia" - festivals to honour Dionysus, the God of Fertility - begin to be held at Athens. A tragedy by the Greek dramatist Thespis wins that season's Dionysia contest and thereby gives the word "thespian" to the English language.

530BCE The Greek philosopher-mathematician Pythagoras of Samos [Wikipedia biography], and a coterie of co-workers, start to accumulate earlier Babylonian and Egyptian knowledge in mathematics, astronomy, and chemistry, but keep most of their findings for private consumption. Our immediate interest with Pythagoras is with the story of the hammers and the anvil .....

PREPARATION - THE DIATONIC SCALE: The story we are about to relate requires some familiarity with the standard piano keyboard, and how it can be used to create both good harmonies and bad. This in turn requires familiarity with the notion of the "frequency" of a sound wave. Click here for a beginner's guide to frequency, and then click here for a virtual piano keyboard, and carefully and thoughtfully carry out the following one finger exercises .....

(1) Practice playing the basic "scale of C" by clicking all the white keys C through C1, inclusive. Because you have to press eight keys, the gap between C and C1 is called an "octave". Now strike C and C1 - the octave "chord" - in quick succession, noting how it sounds somehow "sweet". Compare with C and C#1, which sounds discordant. [If you select Chord Mode/Play Chord then you can hear the two notes played simultaneously.]

(2) Play all the white keys C through G, inclusive. Because you have to press five keys, the gap between C and G is called a "fifth". Now strike C and G - the fifth "chord" - in quick succession, noting how it sounds somehow "sweet". Compare with C and G#, which sounds discordant.

(3) Play all the white keys C through F, inclusive. Because you have to press four keys, the gap between C and F is called a "fourth". Now strike C and F - the fourth "chord" - in quick succession, noting how it sounds somehow "sweet". Compare with C and F#, which sounds discordant.

CLASSIC TALE - PYTHAGORAS AT THE FORGE: As later encyclopaedists tell the story, Pythagoras was one day passing a blacksmith at work in his forge and noted that certain of the blacksmith's hammers sounded more pleasing when struck on the anvil in near synchrony than others. He asked the blacksmith to strike his hammers - five of them, of different weights - again in various combinations, carefully noting the "sweet" pairs and the discordant. And as this process of structured observation proceeded so one of Nature's deepest secrets suddenly revealed itself, for the weights of the sweet combinations of hammers had a clear mathematical pattern to them. For example, a pair of hammers where one was twice the weight of the other would strike a full octave apart, and ring sweetly. Similarly, a pair of hammers where one was half as heavy again as the other would sweetly strike a fifth, and a pair in the ratio 4:3 would sweetly strike a fourth.

CAUTION: Superficially the story of Pythagoras and the blacksmith seems to be a triumph of the sort of disciplined enquiry which makes for good science. Unfortunately the physical evidence has been mis-stated because hammers do not - it seems - resound quite so conveniently [see Lloyd (1970) for the details]. The validity of the conclusions, however, has been confirmed by later work on stringed or tube-based musical instruments.

By exposing the role of simple mathematical ratios in making for harmonious sounds, Pythagoras left the way open for a similar analysis to be applied with success to architecture, sculpture, and pictorial art. [See next 465BCE (Phidias)]

500BCE The philosopher Parmenides of Elea collates "On Nature", a philosophy-in-poem of which only fragments have survived. His fundamental point seems to be that because the appearances of things can be deceptive the only way to acquire true knowledge is to use reflective reasoning. He is therefore credited with founding the philosophical perspective known as "Rationalism", the view that the first task of philosophy is to understand the mind's ability to reason. This problem will go on to inspire philosophers all the way from Plato through to Kant's (1781/7) "Critique of Pure Reason".

500BCE The playwright Pratinas of Phlius popularises the "Satyr Play", a drama form which deliberately lightened one of the more serious myths with music, dance, and jocularity [whence the modern words "satire" and "satirical"].

495BCE According to Pliny the Elder [see 79CE], a Roman Consul named Appius Claudius popularises the painting of commemorative portraits on shields (Book 35, §13).

470BCE? According to later reports the Greek painter Agatharchus of Samos [Wikipedia biography] uses a form of perspective rarely seen in pottery or mosaic to create effective stage scenery.

465BCE Greek theatres introduce the skene, a scenery backdrop behind which performers can move into position without being seen.

465BCE The Greek sculptor Phidias [Wikipedia biography] oversees much of the figural decoration of the Parthenon in Athens, in which task he is believed to have consciously applied Pythagorean ratios [see 530BCE]. Phidias is shown at work in Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's painting "Phidias" (1868) [image]. [THREAD = THE NATURE OF BEAUTY]

450BCE The Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea, a student on Parmenides, popularises the paradox as a vehicle for stimulating philosophical analysis. None of Zeno's writings survive in primary form, the major source being Plato's Parmenides dialogue and Aristotle's "Physics" [see below]. By demonstrating that ostensibly straightforward theoretical propositions can sometimes lead to impossible situations, and therefore be rejected, Zeno helped popularise the approach to theoretical evaluation now known as reductio ad absurdam.

450BCE The Greek lyric poet Pindaros [Wikipedia biography] flourishes. In our present context, we note only his Seventh Olympian Ode for its matter-of-fact passing mention of the Greek penchant for animated figures. Here are the lines in question .....

"The animated figures stand,

Adorning every public street,

And seem to breathe in stone,

or move their marble feet."

[THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM and AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

450BCE The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras coins the word nous to refer to knowledge and the ability to use it effectively during reasoning [more on this term].

450BCE The Greek philosopher Empedocles of Agrigentum proposes the reincarnation of souls and publishes "On Nature" of which only fragments survive in the Strasbourg Papyrus. A later reconstruction of his work is given in Diogenes Laertius in 230AD. He proposed four basic elements - fire, air, earth, and water - which can be mixed in various proportions to give various substances. The elements are permanent, but their present form is subject to decay. Empedocles also proposes a theory of visual perception in which particles of light emerge from the eye to touch other particles given out by external objects. However, given that we see only part of any object, it remains for past experience and current thought to provide a fully meaningful current understanding.

440BCE The Greek historian Herodotus visits Egypt to observe the use of medicines there.

KEY VOCABULARY: Graf (1995) notes a number of words touching on the relationship between magic, myth, and religion. The most obvious is magos, a word of Persian origin signifying "priest or religious specialist" (p30), thus .....

"Herodotus is the first to speak about the magoi, as a tribe or secret society [.....] whose members perform the royal sacrifices and the funeral rites and who practise divination and the interpretation of dreams. A generation later, Xenophon calls them 'technicians in matters divine'. [.....] To an Ionian of the late 6th century BCE, a magos was not so much a wizard as a ritual specialist at the margins of society, with wide-ranging functions, ridiculed by some, secretly dreaded by many others" (pp30-31).

Other texts and contexts use the terms mantis [= "seer"], agurtēs [= "craftily begging priest"], and goēs, "a complicated figure combining ecstasy and ritual lament, healing rites and divination" (p32). Another source, Ciraolo (1995), tells us about the character in Greek life known as the paredros - literally a person who sits near at hand and waits to attend upon. In public life little more than a subordinate or assistant, in magic the paredroi were represented as having supernatural powers, and appeared only when called by a magician who knew their name. They were often the daemones [= spirits] of dead people.

435BCE The Greek philosopher Leucippus establishes a school at Abdera and working closely with one of his students, Democritus of Thrace, begins work on "The Great World System" and "On the Mind" [neither of which have survived other than by second-hand report]. The Abderan school are rightly famous nowadays for their clear derivation and statement of the "Atomic Theory" of Matter. Democritus also recorded the basic chemistry of silver, gold, mercury, copper, tin, and lead, although Pliny, assessing the situation some 500 years later, would criticise him for overplaying "the sweets of magic" aspect of the resulting body of knowledge (Linden, 2003, p88).

431BCE The Greek playwright Euripedes stages "Medea", the story of Jason's unfaithfulness to his wife Medea. It includes two poisonings.

430BCE The Greek painter Zeuxis of Heraclea [Wikipedia biography] reputedly draws on the beauties of five separate models to put together a portrait of Helen [of Troy?], no single one of them having all the necessary qualities. According to Pliny the Elder [see 79CE], Zeuxis often gave his works away as gifts, "saying that it was impossible for them to be sold at any price adequate to their value" (Book 35, §62).

492BCE The dramatist Phrynichus stages a play entitled "The Fall of Miletus" to lament the loss of the town of that name to the Persians. So successful is this drama at releasing pent-up emotions that it reduces the audience to tears, for which offence they levied a thousand drachma fine on the author.

430BCE The Greek soldier-academic Socrates [Wikipedia] - of whom surprisingly little is directly known, and much of what others tell you about him is confused and contradictory - conducts a career as a loyal but not uncritical Athenian until, in his 71st year, he is hauled into court on contrived charges and sentenced to death. His life is recorded in many of Plato's dialogues [see below] and will resurface in many later artworks, for example Jacques-Louis David's "Death of Socrates" (1787) [image].

430BCE The Sophist School philosopher Hippias of Elis [Wikipedia] develops a reputation for high-sounding but ultimately shallow oratory, and will be taken to task for this weakness by Plato [see 390BCE (Hippias Major)].

429BCE The playwright Sophocles stages "Oedipus the King", in which Oedipus inadvertently marries his own mother and fathers two further children - his "sister-daughters" - with her. This is the work which the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud famously drew on to illustrate his theory of infantile sexuality [see 1910].

420BCE According to Pliny the Elder [see 79CE], Polygnotus of Thasos is the first to represent women "in transparent draperies". He also "contributed many improvements to the art of painting, as he introduced showing the mouth wide open and displaying the teeth and giving expression to the countenance in place of the primitive rigidity" (Book 35, §58).

416BCE The Athenian tragedian Agathon [Wikipedia biography] is praised for his first production. He will go on to experiment with how best to improve the chorus format in drama [more on this], and his eventual reputation will earn him a posthumous role in Plato's Symposium [see 380BCE].

415BCE The Athenian politician Alcibiades [Wikipedia biography] earns a reputation for Macchiavellian intrigue during the Peloponnesian Wars. As an associate of Socrates, events from Alcibiades' life are recorded in later artworks, for example Jean-Baptiste Regnault's "Socrates Dragging Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sensual Pleasure" (1785) [image].

410BCE The Greek physician Hippocrates of Kos, together with colleagues and students, prepare a comprehensive set of resources setting out not just the medical knowledge of that time but also the proper role of the physician.

408BCE According to Pliny the Elder [see 79CE], the Greek artist Apollodorus of Athens [Wikipedia biography] "was the first to give realistic presentation of objects, and the first to confer glory as of right upon the paintbrush" (Book 35, §60). Amongst the reasons for his success is his pioneering use of shading [Greek = skiagraphia; Italian = chiaroscura] to improve the depiction of volume and depth.

**************** SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY ***************

402BCE As subsequently narrated by Plato, Socrates [and this may or may not have been a real person] is forced to take Hemlock - the "State poison".

400BCE According to Pliny the Elder [see 79CE], Timanthes displays "a very high degree of genius", not least in the depiction of human emotion. He also "is the only artist in whose works more is always implied than is depicted" (Book 35, §74).

390BCE Plato publishes "Ion", a short dialogue between Socrates [see 430BCE] and the rhapsode Ion as to the purpose of professional bards and the popular poetry they purvey.

390BCE Plato publishes "Hippias Major", a dialogue between Socrates [see 430BCE] and Hippias [see 430BCE] on how best to define beauty. They discuss the quality of kalon [= goodness in the abstract, fineness, nobleness], noting that it is no good merely knowing that a particular beautiful girl is beautiful, because the real problem is to explain in detail wherein her beauty lies. He points out that a wooden spoon is no less beautiful than a golden spoon if both are only ever used for humble stirring. He then examines four possibly decisive qualities, as follows: (1) appropriacy, (2) usefulness, (3) favourability, and (4) the ability "to make us feel joy". In the end, however, there are problems with all the definitions. [THREAD = HISTORY OF AESTHETICS]

KEY CONCEPT - BEAUTY AS IDEAL: So the problem, in short, is that if beauty is imitated by reality and reality is imitated by art, then the sort of mimesis seen in painting is not really worthy of discussion because the process of copying a truth inevitably falls short of the original. The usual Greek approach to beauty is to treat it as an ideal towards which mortals can only ever struggle with various degrees of success. Here is how Adajian (2007 online) puts it .....

"Artworks are ontologically dependent on, and inferior to, ordinary physical objects, which in turn are ontologically dependent on, and inferior to, what is most real, the non-physical forms. Grasped perceptually, artworks present only an appearance of an appearance of what is really real" (e3).

380BCE Plato founds the Athenian "Academy" and over the ensuing years produces "The Republic" and other dialogues in which he sets out the class-defining Socratic analysis. Plato also provides one of the most enduring metaphors for memory, namely that of the wax impression. To form a memory, Plato argues, is to allow an experience - otherwise a mere fleeting thing - to leave a permanent mark upon the mind, just as a solid object can be pressed into warm wax (an explanatory proposition which survives to this day in the concept of "neural plasticity"). Also valuable is Plato's "aviary metaphor" of memory. This model equates the mind to a birdcage, and ideas to the birds within it, and is here presented as one of the scripted philosophical dialogues for which the Greeks are so famous; Socrates is here addressing one of his straight men, Theaetetus .....

"SOCRATES: Well, a little while ago we were trying to set up in the soul some kind of waxen block. Now this time let us make in every man's soul a kind of aviary of all kinds of birds; some in flocks separate from the others, some in small groups, and others flying about singly here and there among all the rest. [.....] Then we must say that when we are children this receptacle is empty; and by the birds we must understand pieces of knowledge. When anyone acquires a piece of knowledge and shuts it up in this pen, we say that he has been taught or has discovered the matter of which this knowledge is; and this is what it is to know. [.....] And we call it 'teaching' when a man imparts them to others, and 'learning' when he gets them imparted to him; and when he 'has' them through possessing them in this aviary of ours, we call that 'knowing'" (Plato, Theaetetus; Levett translation, pp107-108) [see more on memory theory].

380BCE Plato publishes "Symposium", a dialogue between Socrates [see 430BCE], Phaedrus, Agathon, Alcibiades, and others. The dialogue is primarily concerned with love, but touches tangentially also on beauty, treating it as an inner truth about the object in question rather than simply an aspect of its outward presentation.

380BCE Plato publishes "The Republic", the longest and best known Socratic dialogue of all. Our present interest in this work extends only to the "Allegory of the Cave", because this sets out Plato's problems explaining visual perception, and has since been accepted as the standard illustration of the ease with which an imperfect view of reality can be taken as reality itself. Here, from the Jowett translation, is how the allegory is presented. Firstly the scene is set .....

"SOCRATES: [Imagine] human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light. [Here] they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them. [.....] Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. [..... And do you see] men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues, and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? [..... The prisoners, of course, ] see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another [.....]. And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows [and] if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them? [.....] To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images" (Book VII, §514).

Plato then explores what would happen were the nature of the deception to be eventually revealed .....

"And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated [.....] he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows. [.....] And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them. Will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him" (Book VII, §515).

KEY CONCEPT - PLATONIC "FORM": The point of the Allegory of the Cave is, of course, that the fire, the cave, and the shadows are all generic; that we all live in a cave of sorts, cursed by a visual system which delivers us only shadows of sorts. The true wisdom - those "primary realities" which are actually casting the shadows - is not (as Socrates puts it somewhat later) the same as that which passes for wisdom. Plato was the first heavy user of the word ειδος [pronounced "eye-doss"] and its variations in a philosophical sense, using it (or its plural ειδε) to represent "any of those primary realities which have come to be known as the Forms" (Novak, 2004, p2). Plato saw forms as idealized external entities, and things as the less-than-ideal instantiations thereof which are actually out there on a given occasion to be perceived. The ειδε are thus objects of perception, as well as specific inputs to the first sub-stage of that process, namely transduction [see 1662 (VISUAL SYSTEM)]; they are "the pure essence" of things (Husserl, 1913/1931, p50). [To study the structures and processes of visual perception rebrowse this document using FIND set to "= VISUAL SYSTEM".]

370BCE?? The Greek painter Parrhasius of Ephesus practises his art in Athens, and, it is said, is not averse to torturing the occasional slave in order to obtain accurate expressions of pain with which to work. According to Pliny the Elder [see 79CE], Parrhasius "was the first to give proportions to painting and the first to give vivacity to the expression of the countenance, elegance of the hair, and beauty of the mouth. [.....Also] the drawing of outlines. This in painting is the high-water mark of refinement; to paint bulk and the surface within the outlines, though no doubt a great achievement, is one in which many have won distinction, but to give the contour of the figures, and make a satisfactory boundary where the painting within finishes, is rarely attained in successful artistry" (Book 35, §67). He also holds the more dubious historical honour of having "painted some smaller pictures of an immodest nature, taking his recreation in this sort of wanton amusement" (Book 35, §72). [See next 370BCE ( Xenophon)]

370BCE?? The Greek soldier-historian Xenophon of Athens publishes "Memorabilia", a series of Socratic dialogues. One of these pits Socrates against the painter Parrhasius [see above] in a discussion of what is involved in painting the emotions. Parrhasius begins by doubting that a mood, for example, could be depicted "when it possesses neither linear proportion nor colour", but is soon convinced that various visible cues - what we would today describe as "body language - can say a lot about what is going on in the subject's mind. Socrates also challenges the sculptor Cleiton to explain how he gives "the magic touch of life" to his creations: "It is, is it not, by faithfully copying the various muscular contractions of the body in obedience to the play of gesture and poise, the wrinklings of the flesh and the sprawl of limbs, the tensions and the relaxations, that you succeed in making your statues like real beings?" Cleiton confirms that this is so, leading Socrates to conclude that sculptors of the ideal form cannot ignore the "workings and energies also of the soul".

370BCE Plato's "Phaedrus" [full text online] presents a dialogue between the characters Socrates and Phaedrus on the general topic of love versus judgement. Plato presents this as a conflict between two major elements of the soul, one "beautiful and good" [the "purely Platonic" of everyday modern English], and the other more unconditionally self-serving. Famously he uses the Charioteer Metaphor to make this distinction [see details]. There is no sustained discussion of visual aesthetics, but a lot of what is said about good versus bad oratory is indirectly relevant, for example, that it should be intellectually shameful to produce less than the best you are capable of.

360BCE Plato publishes "The Sophist", a dialogue between Socrates [see 430BCE], Theaetetus, and a visitor from Elea, on the topic of ontological form, and on the usefulness of the logical processes of division and negation in developing ontological taxonomies. [THREAD = THE NATURE OF REALITY]

360BCE Plato's "Timaeus" [full text online] presents a dialogue between the characters Socrates and Timaeus on the general topic of the origin, nature, and purpose of the Universe. For our present purposes we are concerned with what Plato has to say about the "mortal elements" [in modern parlance, the "functional modules" of cognition] available to the "immortal principle" which is the human soul. Here is one of his several attempts to summarise the relationship ..... 

"[God] made the divine with his own hands, but he ordered his own children to make the generation of mortals. They took over from him an immortal principle of soul, and, imitating him, encased it in a mortal physical globe, with the body as a whole for vehicle. And they built onto it another mortal part, containing terrible and necessary feelings: pleasure, the chief incitement to wrong, pain, which frightens us from good, [etc.]. To this mixture they added irrational sensation and desire which shrinks from nothing, and so gave the mortal element its indispensable equipment" (Plato, Timaeus, §69; Lee translation, p95).

KEY CONCEPT - THE STRUCTURE OF THE SOUL: Plato's notion of a "tripartite" soul with three fundamental facets - reason and knowledge, desire-aversion, and willed self-assertiveness - is troubled by the observation that it can act much of the time as a coherent whole (Ostenfeld, 1982). Following a sustained analysis of Plato's writings, Ostenfeld (1982) resolves this apparent contradiction this way: "While the soul per se seems unitary it is tripartite while in a human body" (p214). Plato's scheme of things was updated by Sir William Hamilton in the nineteenth century as "Hamilton's Triad", a three-headed taxonomy of the "primary classes" of mental phenomena as follows: "Let the mental phenomena, therefore, be distributed under the three heads of phenomena of cognition, or the faculties of knowledge; phenomena of feeling, or the capacities of pleasure and pain; and phenomena of desiring or willing, or the powers of conation" (Sir William Hamilton, p.p. Mansell and Veitch, 1865, p189; emphasis added). The second heading, feeling, is nowadays better known as affect. Hamilton went on to argue, however, that the three primary classes were then all subordinate to "one universal phenomenon - the phenomenon of consciousness" (ibid.).

350BCE Plato's most famous student, Aristotle, establishes the Associationist tradition by pointing out not only that memory was based on the "incidental association" of one idea with another ("De Memoria et Reminiscentia", Paragraph 450.22; Sorabji translation, p49), but also that it had been motivated into these particular associations by the "contiguity" - that is to say, closeness together in time or space - of the elements to be associated. Aristotle even argued that the resulting network of memories needed to be navigated - a term we shall be examining in detail in Section X. "It is possible," he observed, "to move to more than one point from the same starting point" (Ibid., 452.24, p56), and your overall skill at doing this depends on how effectively you use the available connections and avoid getting distracted along the way. Both these traditions live on in modern network models of long-term memory [see more on these]. Aristotle's main work on mental philosophy is De Anima, from which the following theoretical glimpses are taken .....

"Now the soul comprises cognition, perception, and belief-states. It also comprises appetite, wishing, and the desire-states in general" (De Anima, Book 1, Chapter 5; Aristotle, 1986, p152).

"But, if it does have parts, what then can it be that holds it together at any time? It will certainly not be the body at least. For the contrary is more widely accepted, that the soul holds the body together. If then there is some other thing that unifies the soul, then this will be that which in the strictest sense is soul. We will then have to ask in turn of this thing whether it is single or has many parts. And if it is single, why not just make the soul single in the first place? But if it has parts, the argument will pose the question what it is that holds this together and, surely, we will have an infinite regress" (De Anima, Book 1, Chapter 5; Aristotle, 1986, p153; italics original).

"It is quite clear then that the soul is not separable from the body, or that some parts of it are not, if it is its nature to have parts [.....] But it remains unclear whether the soul is the actuality of a body in this way or rather is as the sailor of a boat" (De Anima, p158).

"That part of the soul then that is called intellect (by which I mean that whereby the soul thinks and supposes) is before it thinks in actuality none of the things that exist [..... and] whereas the sense faculty is embodied, the intellect is separate" (De Anima, Book 3, Chapter 4; Aristotle, 1986, p 202).

350BCE? Aristotle's "Poetics" is the earliest surviving "textbook" of literary and dramatic style. While it does not have a lot to say directly about visual aesthetics, the following selections raise interesting questions and open later discussions. The most readily accessible translation is that by S.H. Butcher [full text online], from which the following snippets have been taken .....

"Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type [.....], it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are. It is the same in painting ....." (e2). "Good portrait painters [.....], while reproducing the distinctive form of the original, make a likeness which is true to life and yet more beautiful" (e12).

"Reversal of the Situation is a change by which the action veers round to its opposite [..... as when] in the Oedipus the messenger comes to cheer Oedipus and free him from his alarms about his mother, but by revealing who he is he produces the opposite effect. [.....] Recognition, as the name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge [.....] The best form of Recognition is coincident with a Reversal of the Situation [.....] Two parts, then, of the Plot - Reversal of the Situation and Recognition - turn upon surprises" (e8-9).

Insofar as disturbing art is concerned, what Aristotle has to say about tragedy is also tangentially relevant, thus .....

"Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions. [..... However,] the tragedies of most of our poets fail in the rendering of character [.....] It is the same in painting [where] Polygnotus delineates character well [but] the style of Zeuxis is devoid of ethical quality" (e4-5). [THREADS = DISTURBING ART and AKTIONISMUS]

350BCE Aristotle now publishes "Peri Hermeneias" [= "On Interpretation"][full text online], in which he sets down his understanding of what we nowadays refer to as propositional thought, and of the role played therein by the sentential grammar by which it is expressed. This is the source work for the modern academic discipline known as "hermeneutics" [see 1960 (Gadamer)], and the question as to whether there is a limit to what can be achieved in this way lies at the root of the Entscheidungsproblem as discussed by Turing (1936 [q.v.]).

343BCE Aristotle becomes tutor to Alexander, the son of Philip II of Macedonia. In 336BCE, Alexander inherits his father's throne and sets about expanding Greek influence.

340BCE? The Greek painter Apelles of Kos [Wikipedia biography] is appointed court painter to King Philip II of Macedonia. Of his works none have survived; of his style we are told he attached great store to precision of outline. According to Pliny the Elder [see 79CE], Apelles "singly contributed almost more to painting than all the other artists put together, also publishing volumes containing the principles of painting" (Book 35, §79).

************* IMPERIAL GREECE AND ROME *************

331BCE Alexander the Great visits the Oracle of Amon at Siwa where (it may reasonably be assumed) he pays generously to be reassured how great a king he is going to be.

330BCE According to Pliny the Elder [see 79CE], Aristides of Thebes is "the first of all painters who depicted the mind and expressed the feelings of a human being, what the Greeks term ethe, and also the emotions" (Book 35, §98).

300BCE The painter-philosopher Pyrrho develops the doctrine of "Skepticism", the central tenet of which - following Parmenides - is the belief that our cognitions are rarely to be trusted. As a result all things which depend even indirectly upon our cognitions are also rarely to be trusted. This includes, of course, knowledge and scientific certainty. In due course this issue will inspire Hume's philosophy.

300BCE The "Cult of Asclepius" becomes popular as a combination temple-cum-medical centre. A typical visit to an Asclepieion consisted of a little devout worship of Asclepius, the Greek God of Healing and Medicine, the giving of gifts to the attendant priest-physicians, rest and ritual purification, and whatever herbals and potions were in fashion at the time.

300BCE The Alexandrian Greek mathematician Euclid [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Elements", the standard textbook of geometry for the ensuing two thousand years. This work includes an explicit definition of the golden ratio in a straight line, as follows .....

"A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater segment to the lesser." [THREAD = THE NATURE OF BEAUTY]

290BCE Probably late in his reign, Egypt's King Ptolemy I establishes the Great Library at Alexandria, as a repository for all human knowledge at the time, and a research base from which to find out more.

270BCE The physicians Erasistratus and Herophilus found a School of Anatomy at Alexandria, and propose that a "nervous spirit" of some sort carries information to and from the brain in sensory and motor nerves provided for that purpose [compare Descartes (1662) and Bell (1811) on this].

255BCE Apollonius of Rhodes compiles "Argonautica", the story of Jason, the Argo, the Argonauts, and the Golden Fleece.

250BCE Perhaps working at the Great Library, the Alexandrian inventor Ctesibius develops a range of pneumatic, hydraulic, and mechanical "automata" [see dedicated subfile].

200BCE The Egyptian alchemist Bolos of Mendes compiles a corpus of chemical and metallurgical recipes.

125BCE An unknown Greek engineer builds a clockwork device nowadays identified as "the oldest known complex scientific calculator". The remains of the mechanism will be recovered in 1900 from a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera, and will be subject to detailed scientific analysis and interpretation [full story and images] in the late 20th century. [THREAD = THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING]

50BCE The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus publishes "Historical Library", an encyclopaedia of current knowledge.

50BCE The Roman poet Lucretius publishes "On the Nature of Things" in which he collates and expands upon the earlier Greek Atomic Theory of Matter, setting these into didactic verse.

35BCE The Roman architect and military engineer Vitruvius [Wikipedia biography] rounds off a career under the eagle by publishing "On Architecture", a ten-book treatise on civil engineering. The work includes the statement that one of the three qualities of a successful building is that it should be beautiful. [THREAD = THE NATURE OF BEAUTY]

20BCE [date and author still debated] An obscure Greek scholar now conventionally referred to as Longinus [Wikipedia biography] collates "Peri Hypsous" [= "On the Sublime"], a critical analysis of the most important classical writings in a search for the secrets of their success. The manuscript will come back to light in the mid-16th century and modern interest in the work will begin with translations by H.L. Havell in 1890 (as used below) [full text online], William Rhys Roberts in 1899 [buy], and Russell in 1964 [buy]. Longinus identifies five "principal sources [...] from which almost all sublimity is derived", namely (1) "grandeur of thought", (2) "a vigorous and spirited treatment of the passions", (3) "a certain artifice in the employment of figures", (4) "dignified expression", and (5) "majesty and elevation of structure" (§VIII.1). Longinus' analysis is historically significant because it is the starting point for all subsequent discussion of aesthetics [see next 1735, Baumgarten]. [THREAD = AESTHETIC THEORY]

8 CE The Roman poet Ovid publishes "Metamorphoses", a collection of 15 folios retelling many of the older Greek myths for the Imperial Roman audience. The transformations in question are generally from states of awkwardness and ignorance to states of enlightenment and wisdom, and take place under the influence of the power of love and strong counsel. In Book 10 [full text online] he includes the tale of the Cypriot sculptor Pygmalion, who famously falls so much in love with a female statue he has created that the goddess Venus turns it into a living her for him [see 1786 (Regnault)]. [THREAD = ARTIFICIAL LIFE]

9CE The legion-trained German tribal leader Irmin [Latin = Arminius; Modern = Hermann] leads a revolt against Rome's territorial ambitions north of the Rhine and is rewarded with a crushing victory in the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest [fuller story]. This victory will not be forgotten when, in the 19th century, the German nationalists seek to be remind their fellows of their former glories [see 1808, die Hermannschlacht, and 1812, Old Heroes' Graves].

14CE Caesar Augustus dies, rumoured poisoned by his wife Livia to advance her son Tiberius to the imperial throne.

30CE An obscure Hebrew poet now known as John the Baptist develops a populist ministry based upon the message that God would soon punish the Herodian puppet government in Roman Judea, and supported by the physical ritual of river baptism. His outspoken political stance soon gets him beheaded, but not before he had baptised Jesus of Nazareth [hence the alternative epithet "John the Forerunner"]. John's main relic, of course, is his head [claimed by Rome, Amiens, Antioch, Damascus, and Munich]. Istanbul has fragments of bone in the Topkapi Museum, and his right hand - the one he baptised Jesus with - is claimed by the Serbian Orthodox Monastery at Cetinje in Montenegro.

33CE Christ is crucified and those who follow him go underground in order to avoid persecution. Christ's memory is kept alive by a number of small sects in Judea, Egypt [the Copts], Syria, Asia Minor, and - increasingly - beyond. The Apostles do their best to coordinate the new church, such as it is. Unfortunately, different branches of the church rely on different historical personages and support their beliefs with different textual corpora some of which evolve into the modern Bible. Among the stories told is that of Longinus [see 586] and Joseph of Arimathea, the rich Judean [tin trader??] who is allowed by Pontius Pilate to take Christ's body from the cross and immure it in its burial cave. It is he who provides the wrappings later identified as the Turin Shroud and the Sudarium. Relics from Christ's birth and early childhood include .....

The Holy Gifts (the famous Nativity gifts of the Magi) [St. Paul's Monastery, Mount Athos, Greece), the Holy Swaddling (the infant wrappings) [Dubrovnik Cathedral], the Holy Foreskins [several].

Relics from the Last Supper .....

The Holy Grail [a.k.a. The Holy Chalice] [many claimants and an awful lot of mythology] and the Judas Cup (the drinking vessels used by Christ and Judas at the Last Supper), the Holy Knife (cutlery at same) [Venice].

Relics from the betrayal and the trial include .....

The pieces of silver; The Holy Stairs

Relics from the crucifixion and resurrection include .....

The Crown of Thorns [many], the Veil of Veronica (as used to wipe the sweat from Jesus' brow) [several], the Holy Sponge, the Holy Tunic (that which the Roman soldiers cast lots for) [fragments in Trier and Argenteuil], the Holy Blood [Bruges], the Holy Nails [many], and even the Holy Cross itself [fragments in Roma], the Holy Lance [a.k.a. The Spear of Destiny] (the spear used by the Centurion Longinus), the Turin Shroud [image] and the Sudarium (as used to wrap Jesus' dead body) [Turin/Oviedo respectively].

40CE The Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides publishes "Materia Medica", the backbone of pharmacological knowledge for the next 1500 years. It collates information on some 600 herbal sources.

42CE The Apostle St Mark founds a Christian School in Alexandria, whose reputation will help the Egyptian Christian Coptic Church develop over the ensuing centuries [see next 325AD]. The Coptic script, Greek with seven additional characters derived from hieroglyphics (Gardiner, 1957) remains to this day the ritual language of the Orthodox Coptic Church. Many early sources assert that the Apostle Simon Peter, so-called because Jesus had described him as "the rock" upon whom his church would be built, becomes leader of the new church. The Apostle James went to Spain ca. 40CE, where he received a vision of the Virgin Mary. He was executed when he returned to Judaea four years later. His remains were then somehow returned to Spain and buried in Santiago [Sant Iago = Saint James], from where he later became the rallying spirit amongst the Christian Spaniards in their fight against the Moors. The Apostle Thomas is believed to have preached initially at Edessa, Syria, and then along the Malabar Coast of India, where he founded churches in Kerala, Mylapore, and Goa. This ministry is documented in the Acts of Judas Thomas, an important apocryphal resource. Further background comes from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, another apocryphal resource. The travels and teachings of the Apostle Paul are well documented in the Bible. He may also have particularly influenced Valentinus, and, through him, the development of Gnosticism. The Apostle Matthias [Judas' replacement on the team] seems to have preached around (and been martyred in) Colchis, in modern Georgia [different sources give wildly different accounts and may conflate different persons]. Matthias' remains are claimed by St. Matthias Abbey, Trier, having been brought to safety there by St. Helena [see 326 below].

50CE? The historically obscure Simon Magus [= "Simon the Sorcerer"] is reported in the Acts of the Apostles as trying to buy influence in the early church, and is duly cautioned against. Later (but apocryphal) sources place Simon as a native of Gitta in Samaria, and chronicle his use of magic and intrigue in promoting the Simonian sect. He is then reported as having transferred to Rome where his magic seems to have greatly impressed the residents there.

50CE Hero of Alexandria extends and republishes Ctesibius' work on automata, adding steam-powered turbines and primitive pre-programming of response.

50CE? Led possibly by the Apostles Paul and Luke, the early leaders of the slowly expanding Christian church convene the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem to debate how best to reconcile their beliefs with those of their native Judaism. Were they Christian Jews, for example, or no longer Jews at all? And were non-Jewish converts to Christianity therefore subject to the rules of Judaism, not least the requirement for male circumcision? The resulting Apostolic Decree imposed a watered down version of the Mosaic Law, and left circumcision as a decision of the individual concerned.

54CE Claudius Caesar dies, rumoured poisoned by his wife Agrippina to advance her son Nero to the imperial throne.

64CE A great fire destroys large areas of Rome. The Emperor Nero coordinates the rebuild, and takes advantage of a prime piece of the freed-up real estate to begin work on a new palace complex, the Domus Aurea. It is richly decorated with gold leaf, marble, and ivory, and sumptuously decorated with complex colourful mosaics and frescoes. These latter were completed at no little speed by a team of artisans led by Famulus, and including "a grave and serious personage" named Amulius, "a painter in the florid style" (Pliny, Natural History). However the project was so costly that as soon as Nero died everybody tut-tutted at the waste of state resources. The moveable riches were soon removed, and the site was built over by the more politically acceptable Trajan Baths and Flavian Amphitheatre. The ruins would remain forgotten until the late 15th century when a passer-by fell through into one of the covered voids, whereupon interesting things start to happen .....

77CE The Roman encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Natural History", the Wikipedia of its age. In it he collates information on agriculture, botany, zoology, etc., and lists some 7000 known poisons. Our present interest in this work is restricted to the practical chemistry contained in Book 33, because this includes the development of pigments, Book 34 on the art of statuary, and the biographies of artists contained in Book 35. The following extracts will give a flavour of what was common knowledge in first century Rome. Firstly on birth defects and deformities .....

"Persons are also born of both sexes combined - what we call Hermaphrodites, formally called androgyni and considered as portents, but now as entertainments. Pompey the Great among the decorations of his theatre placed images of celebrated marvels [like this]; among them we read of [.....] Alcippe who gave birth to an elephant. [.....] Claudius Caesar writes that a hippocentaur was born in Thessaly and died the same day; and in his reign we actually saw one that was brought here for him from Egypt preserved in honey" (Book 7, §3.34). [See next 600? (Isidore of Seville)] [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

Then on the derivation of painters' pigments .....

"In gold and silver mines also are formed the pigments yellow ochre and blue. [..... The darkest] they use for the shadows of a painting, price two sesterces a pound, while that called clear ochre [.....] they use for painting different kinds of light. [.....] The custom of using yellow ochre for painting was first introduced by Polygnotus and Micon [.....] From blue is made the substance called blue wash, which is produced by washing and grinding it" (Book 33, §159-162).

Then on the history of statues .....

"The first portrait statues officially erected at Athens were those of the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton [in 510BCE]. The practice of erecting statues from a most civilised sense of rivalry was afterwards taken up by the whole of the world, and the custom proceeded to arise of having statues adorning the public places of all municipal towns ....." (Book 34, §17).

And then on the history of two-dimensional art .....

"The question as to the origin of the art of painting is uncertain [.....] The Egyptians declare that it was invented among themselves six thousand years ago before it passed over into Greece - which is clearly an idle assertion. As to the Greeks, some of them say it was discovered at Sicyon, others in Corinth, but all agree that it began by tracing an outline around a man's shadow [.....] Line drawing was invented by the Egyptian Philocles or by the Corinthian Cleanthes [.....] Ecphantus of Corinth is said to have been the first to daub these drawings with a pigment made of powdered earthenware" (Book 35, §15-16). "Eventually art differentiated itself, and discovered light and shade, contrast of colours heightened their effect reciprocally. Then came the final adjunct of shine, quite a different thing from light. [.....] Some colours are sombre and some brilliant, the difference being due to the nature of the substances or to their mixture. The brilliant colours, which the patron supplies at his own expense to the painter, are cinnabar, Armenium, dragon's blood, gold-solder, indigo, bright purple; the rest are sombre" (Book 35, §30).

He also notes the power of the shrewd art dealer to inflate prices artificially, thus .....

"Protogenes was held in low esteem by his fellow-countrymen, as is usual with home products, and, when Apelles asked him what price he set on some works he had finished, he had mentioned some small sum, but Apelles made him an offer of fifty talents for them, and spread it about that he was buying them with the intention of selling them as works of his own. This device aroused the people of Rhodes to appreciate the artist, and Apelles only parted with the pictures to them at an enhanced price" (Book 35, §88).

125? Possibly a disciple of Simon Magus, the preacher Basilides of Alexandria founds the Basilidian Gnostic School, a blend of Paganism, Platonism, and "orthodox" Christianity [insofar as any of its beliefs are then orthodox], supported by a corpus of writings now mostly lost. Basilidean Gnosticism had particular views on such theological issues as creation, the soul, faith, sin, hell, baptism, etc. The school seems also to have encouraged the carrying of stone charms engraved with the word "ABRAXAS", presumably for good luck or protection, and in all likelihood the root of the modern word "abracadabra".

153? Inspired perhaps by secret wisdoms derived from the Apostle Paul, the Egyptian cleric Valentinus turns from the Roman version of Christianity to a home-grown and seriously non-traditional variant now known as Valentinian Gnosticism. Based in Cyprus towards the end of his life, Valentinus may have been the author of the Gospel of Truth discovered in the Nag Hammadi Library in Egypt in 1945.

170 The Roman physician Galen publishes a body of writings on medicine and how to practise it. The surviving writings - "The Galenic Corpus" - runs to some three million words and would remain a primary source of learning for more than a thousand years.

200 The Mandaean Gnostic School starts to gain a following in areas of modern Iraq and Iran. Led by the Persian cleric Prophet Mani the Manichaeian Gnostic School starts to compete with the Mandaean School.

200? Both Hippolytus and Tertullian list Joseph of Arimathea as a disciple who reached Britain. [THREAD = POPULAR MYTH]

203? Based initially at the Christian School at Alexandria, the comparative theologian Origen starts to compile a large body of annotated translations of religious sources, many fragments of which either survive or are comprehensively cited by later authors. Many of Origen's teachings, however, would be declared heretical in the sixth century.

230 An obscure biographer now known as Diogenes Laertius publishes "Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers". This, by surviving when the primary works did not, is one of today's main sources of information about them.

300? Eusebius confirms Tertullian's reports of Christian enclaves in Britain.

300? According to fragmentary later reports, the Egyptian alchemist Agathodaimon discovers how to synthesise his "fiery poison", now believed to be arsenic trioxide. Symptoms of arsenic trioxide poisoning include vomiting, cramps, and bloody diarrhoea.

313 The Emperors Constantine and Licinius [of the Western and Eastern divisions of the Roman Empire, respectively] sign the Edict of Milan, bringing state persecution of Christians to an end.

325 The Council of Nicaea is convened by Constantine the Great to create a definitive version of Christianity, its core beliefs, and - more importantly - its role alongside politicians and the military in maintaining the Roman Empire. Out of the 1800 or so bishops scattered around the empire, 300 or so attended. Constantine himself opened the proceedings. One of the most important votes [in which only two delegates demurred] was that Bishop Arius of Alexandria was wrong to argue that Jesus was only figuratively the "Son of God", a position known as the "Arian Heresy" or "Arianism". The approved truth - namely that God and Christ "are of the same substance and are co-eternal" - is henceforth known as the "Nicene Creed".

326 Helena Augusta, possibly a daughter of the British King Coel Hen, but definitely wife of the Roman Emperor Constantius and mother of Constantine the Great sets off on a mission to the Holy Land to bring back as many Christian relics as can be found. For this she was elevated to the sainthood as Saint Helena, patron saint of new discoveries. Amongst the relics successfully recovered were "The True Cross", several "Holy Nails", "The Holy Tunic", the remains of the Apostle Matthias, and lesser artefacts. Many later artworks celebrate these discoveries [e.g., 1745 below].

330 The Egyptian alchemist-mystic Zosimos of Panopolis prepares a number of treatises on alchemy for closed circulation. Each is typically a work partly of science and partly of religious mysticism and imagery. We may presume that the chemistry was from more ancient sources, and we know that later works drew on them in their turn.

336 Bishop Arius [see 325 above] conveniently dies from sudden bloody diarrhoea [see 300 above]. [THREAD = CHURCH HISTORY]

350 Hilary of Poitiers outlines the distribution of the early church.

357 Basil of Cappadocia [nowadays better known as St. Basil] visits Egypt and promotes the Eastern Orthodox Church.

360 The Greek physician Oribasius publishes "The Collections", a collation of earlier medical writings. This, too, by surviving when the primary works did not, is one of today's main sources of information about them.

381 Pope Timothy I convenes the Council of Constantinople to address a range of issues not covered by the Nicaean Creed.

400? Jerome visits Egypt. Conscious of the problems of diversity of texts, Jerome compiles and translates into Latin the set of sources which provides the basis of the modern Bible.

410 Alaric the Visigoth loots "Solomon's Treasure" from Rome to Carcassone.

431 Council of Ephesus.

451 Council of Chalcedon.

476 Final collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The burden of safeguarding the accumulated Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman knowledge is now taken over by successive Arabian dynasties, with centres of influence moving between Baghdad, Istanbul, Damascus, Cairo, and Alexandria. The Eastern Roman Empire continues to administer Eastern Europe and the Christian Near East from Constantinople.

580?? The Welsh bard Taliesin [external biography] practises his craft in the courts of the Welsh princes during their struggles against the Saxon invaders. He is believed by some to have been the bard to King Arthur, although the estimated dates do not support this possibility. [See next 1275 (Book of Taliesin)]

************** DARK AGES to RENAISSANCE **************

600? Taking the Egyptian system as model, Benedict [later St. Benedict] founds the Benedictine Monastic Order.

600? It being the task of the Celtic court bards to witness and render as poetry the heroic deeds of their tribal kings, the Romano-British bard Aneirin accompanies the army of the Wotadini - the tribe in question - on a fateful mission against the invading Saxons at a place called Cattraeth, from which he is one of the very few to survive. He fulfils his role in the epic eulogy "Y Gododdin" [= "the Wotadini"]. The tragedy will be repeated, mutatis mutandis, by the 38th (Welsh) Division at Mametz Wood on the Somme in July 1916 [story], the bard on this occasion being the artist-poet David Jones [see 1916].

600? The Spanish cleric [later beatified] Isidore of Seville [Wikipedia biography] publishes his "Etymologiae" [= "Of all Knowledge"], an encyclopedia of all the things then known to scholars. As with Pliny [see 77CE] before him, this work includes a section on monsters. [See next 1018 (Thietmar)] [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

680? Khalid of Damascus [Khalid ibn Yazid] compiles "The Secrets of Alchemy", an introduction to the main areas of knowledge. One of the basic propositions is as follows .....

"Beginning now to speak of the Great Work, which they call Alchymie, I shall open the matter without concealing ought, or keeping back any thing, save that which is not fit to be declared: We say then, that the great work contains four Operations, viz. to Dissolve, to Congeal, to make White, and to make Red" (in Linden, 2003, p73).

725? Stephanos of Alexandria publishes "The Great and Sacred Art of the Making of Gold".

760 The Arabian hakeem [= wise man in many sciences] Jabir ibn Hayyan ["Jabir" or "Geber"] becomes court physician to the Abbasid caliphate and accumulates some 3000 technical treatises - "the Jabirian Corpus" - on the full range of sciences [Kraus (1935) suggests that as with many ancient writings several separate persons may be conflated into one in Geber's case]. These writings assemble the surviving ancient knowledge and keep it safely until the Christian world starts to see its value in the 10th century [see, for example, Gerbert d'Aurillac, 967]. Central themes within the volumes on alchemy are the transmutation of metals and "the Takwin", the artificial creation of life. It is popularly believed that the modern word "gibberish" was coined by non-chemists to express their confusion at the technical terms used by chemists. For a quick introduction to the legends concerning oracular statues and automata, see Lagrandeur (1999).

847 After 30 years rising through the ranks of the priesthood, during which time he had written copious scholarly histories, Rabanus Maurus becomes Archbishop of Mainz, publishes "Life of Mary Magdalene".

880 The French Benedictine monk Hucbald of St. Amand publishes "Musica".

TECHNICAL ASIDE - THE ORGANISTRUM: "The word organistrum is derived from organum and instrumentum; the former term was applied to the primitive harmonies, consisting of octaves accompanied by fourths or fifths, first practised by Hucbald" (Wikipedia). An "organistrum" is a stringed instrument, at first sight much like a modern cello, but with only three strings. Unlike the cello, however, it is droned using a wheel coated with rosined leather mounted beneath the strings, rather than bowed or plucked from above. Later versions will become better known by the name "hurdy-gurdy". Because it relies on continuous action of the underlying wheel the organistrum can easily be mechanised using any of the methods by now common in mills or automata. Moreover, the overlying sequence of string fingering can also be pre-programmed, using cam-following techniques similar to those already commonplace by the time of Hero of Alexandria [see 50AD].

967 The young French monk Gerbert d'Aurillac takes time off in Spain to study Arabic science. His reputation soon gets him appointed tutor to the son of Emperor Otto I in Rome. [See next 991]

991 By now a career cleric and amateur scientist, and having produced a number of works on mathematics, astronomy, etc, in order to bring the Christian world up to speed in such subjects, Gerbert [see 967] is made Archbishop of Reims. During his residency there he has constructed a hydraulically powered cathedral organ. He is also rumoured to have constructed a brazen head which would answer his questions "yes" or "no". [See next 999]

999 Aided by his mastery of the hermetic arts, perhaps used as showmanship, perhaps for intrigue [his enemies referred to him as a sorcerer in league with the devil], Gerbert [see 991] is elected Pope Sylvester II.

1018 [See firstly 600? (Isidore)] The German cleric Thietmar of Merseburg [Wikipedia biography] leaves behind him when he dies the "Chronicon" [= chronicle], a memoir of his times. This work includes a description of a monstrous birth, half human half goose, which although living only four days managed to curse the district with "a great pestilence". [See next 1520 (Luther)] [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

ASIDE - MONSTERS AND BAPTISM: Two of the main TOPIC THREADS within this resource are THE UNCANNY and DISTURBING ART. In the specific technical debate with which we are concerned, the Uncanny is the feeling which pervades us when we are confronted with something whose status as fully human is not quite certain. This debate begins with the exchange between Ernst Jentsch [see 1906] and Sigmund Freud [see 1919], but the general topic has been in the public consciousness since works such as Ernst Hoffmann's "The Sandman"[see 1816] and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" [see 1818] challenged us to recognise the monster within ourselves. Such stories raise many questions, but we need firstly to recognise that vertebrate nervous systems - our own included - are constantly on the look out for possible predators; they have subsystems dedicated to what the military call "IFF" [= Identification, Friend or Foe], and these subsystems are constantly asking survival-sensitive questions such as "What is that thing there, and what do I need to do about it?" It is not surprising, therefore, that this is also the question of the hour whenever the miracle of birth goes awry in some way and delivers a birth defect. Specifically, the parents need to know whether they are faced with a baby or a demon, and in Mediaeval times this decision was made for them by their priest, thus .....

"The officiating priest was enjoined to examine the monster to ascertain that its principal part, namely the head and chest, had a human configuration. If they did, the infant was baptised, but if the head was that of an animal and the limbs those of a human, the creature was baptised sub conditione si es homo ego te baptizo" (Savona-Ventura, 1995, p25). [See next 1520 (CHANGELINGS AND KILLCROPS)]

1025 The Persian hakeem Abu Ali Sina ["Avicenna"] publishes the first of several hundred treatises on medicine, philosophy, and other sciences. These works include "The Book of Healing" and "The Canon of Medicine", a blend of the early Hippocratic and Galenic corpora which will remain in university use for a further 500 years.

???? William of Malmesbury asserts that Apostle Philip sent a party of 12 to Britain, including Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene, and that they founded Glastonbury Abbey.

1118 Alfonso I frees Saragossa from the Moors and establishes the capital of Aragon there. His son Alfonso II will merge Aragon with Catalonia and Roussillon to create a single kingdom astride the Pyrenees.

1135 The French sculptor Gislebertus [Wikipedia biography] completes "The Last Judgement" [image in bio], a dramatic relief in the West Tympanum of Autun Cathedral. The work will eventually be named by Sullivan (2001) as one of the first to associate deformity with damnation. [Compare 1500 (Bosch)]

1137 The abbot of Saint-Denis [now in the Parisian suburb of that name], Abbot Suger, begins to extend his abbey complex. The work incorporates three recent architectural innovations, namely the pointed arch, the ribbed vault, and the flying buttress. These improvements are finished in 1144 and are so visually striking that they become the model for abbeys and cathedrals throughout France, soon replacing the older stuctures at Chartres, Reims, Notre Dame de Paris, etc., etc. The style is eventually dubbed "Gothic" by Giorgio Vasari in the 1530s, because it was essentially non-Romanesque and therefore less than perfect [Sir Christopher Wren would say much the same when designing the columns and dome of the new St Paul's Cathedral, London in the late 1600s].

1143 The doctrine of "Catharism" starts to emerge around Cologne. This Christian sect involves a body of beliefs seriously at odds with those of the Church of Rome, and perhaps deriving from earlier Eastern European Gnostic sects. They see themselves as Katharoi [Greek = "pure ones" (cf. "catharsis")], but because other centres of Catharism soon grow up around Albi in South West France the name "Albigensian" is also common. Their disagreements with Catholicism are fundamental. They reject church sacraments such as the eucharist, baptism, confession, and the cross, and their heresy will shortly be murderously suppressed [see 1198 below].

1144 Robert of Chester translates "The Book of the Composition of Alchemy" from the Arabic.

1190? Drawing in part from older Welsh sources, the poet Chrétien de Troyes publishes "Perceval, the Story of the Grail", one of the half-dozen or so subthreads of what are known today as the Arthurian legends.

1198 One of Pope Innocent III's objectives when he succeeded to the Papacy in 1198 was to stamp out the long-running Albigensian Heresy [see 1143]. When peaceful appeals were rejected force was resorted to instead in the form of the "Albigensian Crusade". Following massacre after massacre at cities like Bézieres, Carcassone, Termés, and Lavaur, the remaining Cathars were driven back to the mountain top fortress of Montsegur, which itself fell in March 1244. Thereafter the scattered and disorganised remnants of Catharism were systematically hunted down by the Inquisition, the last being executed in 1321. This ruthless repression has been described as "the first genocide of modern history" (Jones, 2006, viii). It is a matter of conjecture what treasures the Cathars had at Montsegur, what might have been rescued before the fortress's capture, and their whereabouts now.

ASIDE: What happened at Montsegur is no dry and dusty scholarly debate. Drawing on persistent rumours over the centuries, Rahn's (1933) "Crusade Against the Grail" asserts in the strongest terms that the Holy Grail was amongst the Cathar treasures, and that it was secreted away.

1206 The Arabian engineer Al-Jaziri produces a textbook of "Ingenious Mechanical Devices", including (and thereby helping to preserve) the earlier works of Ctesibius and Hero of Alexandria.

1220 Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln and amateur scientist, begins to publish a number of tracts on astronomy, mathematics, and the like. He is also typical of a movement within Northern Europe to use the classical and Arabian works on alchemy to acquire practical scientific knowledge for the commercial, political and other benefits it might bring.

1225? Wolfram von Eschenbeck updates Chrétien de Troyes' "Perceval" as "Parzival", turning it from a straightforward Arthurian legend into "a lightly allegorised" fictification of the Montsegur story [see above], set now in a mountain fortress named Montsalvat. [See next 1882 below.]

1228 The British monk-historian Roger of Wendover publishes "Flores Historiarum", a collation of myths and legends. One of the best known of these is the story of "The Wandering Jew", a certain Cartaphilus [in later works the name Asahuerus is more commonly seen], allegedly cursed by Christ to wander the world until Judgement Day in return for some unsympathetic heckling from the sidelines during Christ's final struggle up to Calvary. The character appears under a number of names in literature during the ensuing centuries [see next 1796 below].

1230 Rabbi Simon of Narbonne takes issue with a separatist Judaic sect known as Kabbalah, whose complex cosmology seems to have survived underground at least from the time of Christ, and probably significantly earlier [see next 1278 below].

1248 Albertus Magnus, the German Dominican Archbishop of Cologne, publishes "Libellus de Alchimia", in which he details how metals, including gold, "arise". His work includes the following general advice .....

"The first precept is that the worker in this art must be silent and secretive and reveal his secret to no one, knowing full well that if many know, the secret in no way will be kept, and that when it is divulged, it will be repeated with error. Thus it will be lost, and the work will remain imperfect" (in Linden, 2003, p103).

1256 The British classics scholar Roger Bacon is accepted as a Franciscan friar at Paris and there becomes acquainted with Cardinal Foulques. When Foulques is elected Pope Clement IV in 1265 Bacon is asked to examine how the teachings of the Ancients might best be incorporated into Christian doctrine. He suggested that Aristotle's mental philosophy was not that far removed from the teachings of the Catholic Church on the immortal soul.

1265? The writings of the bard Aneirin [see 600?] are compiled into the "Book of Aneirin".

1275 The writings of the bard Taliesin [see 580] are compiled into the "Book of Taliesin" [full text online, courtesy of the National Library of Wales].

1278 Moses de Leon publishes "Zohar", asserting it to be the work of the 2nd century rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, who had himself merely committed older oral tradition to writing. The work will not be accepted by orthodox Judaism, but is the inspiration for subsequent Kabbalists.

1300? By specifying reproducible practical procedures, the "Sum of Perfection" (attrib. Geber) made alchemy a science rather than magic and mysticism.

1350? Rhydderch ab Ieuan Llwyd organises the compilation of a corpus of Welsh legends (including the Mabinogion) and religious texts into what becomes known as the "White Book of Rhydderch".

1382? A team of scribes led by Hywel Fychan compiles a corpus of Welsh legends (including the Mabinogion) and folklore (including the Myddfai herbal remedies) into what becomes known as the "Red Book of Hergest".

1466 The Florentine painter Verrocchio takes on 14-year-old Leonardo da Vinci [Wikipedia biography] as his apprentice. Part of the young man's training is to assist his master with his "Baptism of Christ" (1475) [image], reportedly executing one of the angels. [See next 1482]

1482 [See firstly 1466] Leonardo da Vinci becomes artist to the court of the Dukes of Milan, where over the ensuring two decades he undertakes diverse projects including the paintings "Virgin of the Rocks" (1486) [image] and "The Last Supper" (1498) [image]. He also sketches "The Knight", a mechanical man (1495). This is one of many sketches discovered in the Madrid Manuscripts in 1965 (now referred to as the "Book of Mechanics"). For details of this prototypical robot, see Rosheim (2006) [buy]. [See next 1507] [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1495 Around this time a passer-by discovers the buried corridors and salons of Nero's Domus Aurea [see 64CE above]. The frescoes are still in excellent condition and so "tours of the grotto" are soon a popular Roman pastime.

1500 Working to a commission by Engelbrecht II of Nassau, the Dutch painter Hieronymous Bosch [Wikipedia biography] completes the oil-on-wood tryptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights" [image and analysis], one of the most instantly recognisable works of art ever painted. The three panels, from left to right, show the Garden of Eden, the sinful, sexualised, world at large, and Hell. The scenes of Hell are those of apocalyptic destruction and fully deserved retribution, presided over by the "Prince of Hell" himself. Such "hellscapes will remain popular in the hands of Peter Breugel [see 1562].

1502 The Italian Renaissance painter Raffaelo Sanzio [henceforth "Raphael"] pays a visit to the newly discovered Domus Aurea [his autographed initials, together with those of Michelangelo and many others, are still visible]. He is so impressed with the brightly coloured curlicued style that he adopts it in his own work. The style is soon named "grottesche" [Anglicised as "grotesque"] in allusion to the grotto in which it had been preserved.

RESEARCH ISSUE: The visual scanning of complex scenes can take many seconds as each individual element is serially brought into focal attention, identified, conceptually assessed, and considered alongside what has already been found out. The end result is what Kant called a "manifold" perception, an understanding of what elements are out there and what each is up to. Perception, in other words, addresses the world's everyday dramas, and therefore involves just about every cognitive and affective subfunction in the mental repertoire. Scanning is greatly assisted by the Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organisation [see 1923, Wertheimer and 1954, Arnheim] and can nowadays be studied using gaze scanning systems [see typical provider]. Indeed using this latter technology two simultaneous but complementary systems have recently been identified [see 2009, Locher et al]. The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] provides a detailed working model of both the scanning process and the dramatic analysis which guides it.

1503 The Flemish painter Jan Gossaert [a.k.a. Mabuse] [Wikipedia biography] becomes a member of the Painters' Guild in Antwerp, and enters on a period of renown and royal patronage. Gossaert will be the subject of a 2011 exhibition at London's National Gallery [see publicity].

1507 [See firstly 1482] After four years working on it, Leonardo da Vinci completes his famous "Mona Lisa" [image], a source of scholarly debate ever since, and widely regarded as "the most famous painting in history". Our present interest in the work is that it will be used by Sigmund Freud to test the hypothesis that beneath the surface it has a lot to tell us about Leonardo's unconscious sexual hang-ups [See 1910 (Freud)]

1508 The Italian sculptor-painter Michelangelo [Wikipedia biography] begins work on the ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel. It will take four years to complete. [See next 1513]

1508 Raphael begins a 12-year practice executing frescos for the Vatican, and making extensive use of the grottesche style.

ASIDE - HOW TO RECOGNISE "GROTESQUES" IN ART: "In art, grotesques are ornamental arrangements of arabesques with interlaced garlands and small and fantastic human and animal figures, usually set out in a symmetrical pattern around some form of architectural framework" (Wikipedia). Because some of the decorative figures were demons, imps, and chimerae, the word soon acquired the everyday connotation of bizarre and disturbing. Consider .....

"In fiction, characters are usually considered grotesque if they induce both empathy and disgust (a character who inspires disgust alone is simply a villain or a monster). [.....] Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of the most celebrated grotesques in literature. Dr. Frankenstein's monster [likewise], as well as the Phantom of the Opera and the Beast in Beauty and the Beast" (Wikipedia).

1509 The German cleric Johann Faust obtains a degree in divinity at Heidelberg University. Little else is known about this man, but he is one of several Fausts considered over the years as having been the model for the Faust, the archetypal seller of his soul to the Devil. [See next 1587]

1509 [See firstly 530BCE (Pythagoras)] The Italian mathematician-friar Luca Pacioli [Wikipedia biography] publishes "De Divina Proportione" [in English as "On the Divine Proportion"], in which he discusses the Golden Ratio in some detail and shows how to apply it to the human face and body as well as to buildings. [See next 1835 (Ohm)] [THREAD = THE NATURE OF BEAUTY]

1513 [See firstly 1508] Michelangelo moves from Rome to Florence to carry out a succession of contracts for the Medicis in San Lorenzo Cathedral. He develops a reputation for meticulous planning and attention to detail.

ASIDE: After Raphael's death in 1520 a group of Italian painters including Giorgio Vasari began to produce work in "la bella maniera" - the beautiful manner. This meant emulating Raphael in his systematic production of well-executed tributes to earlier exemplars and Michelangelo's creative "agonising" for perfection. In 1842 Burckhardt popularised the term "Manierismus" [= "Mannerism"] to describe this style, but because it required supreme craftsmanship many saw it as soulless. It was eventually reacted against by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 [q.v.], whose criticism, in essence, was that Raphael was too good by half: Ruskin, for example, complains that after Raphael "execution was looked for rather than thought, and beauty rather than veracity".

ASIDE - HOW TO RECOGNISE MANNERIST ARTWORKS: (1) They date to the period between High Renaissance and Baroque style. (2) There is an artificiality to the composition (hence they are frequently contrasted with "Naturalism"). (3) The human form is often elongated. (4) The works are perhaps conceited and technically overblown. (5) The subject(s) rarely display emotion, merely their superficial beauty.

1513 The German painter Albrecht Dürer completes "Knight, Death, and the Devil" [image] in the Gothic style then prevailing in architecture and architectural adornment.

ASIDE - HOW TO RECOGNISE GOTHIC ARTWORKS: (1) Many overlaid figures, arranged upwards in order of relevance to the story. (2) Use of stock templates from artwork to artwork for complex figures like horses.

1520 [See firstly 1018 (Thietmar)] The driving force behind the Protestant Reformation, the German cleric Martin Luther [Wikipedia biography] records in his journal as follows [from Ashliman (2005 online)] .....

"Eight years ago at Dessau I, Dr. Martin Luther, saw and touched a changeling. It was twelve years old, and from its eyes and the fact that it had all of its senses, one could have thought that it was a real child. [.....] It ate, shit, and pissed, and whenever someone touched it, it cried. When bad things happened in the house, it laughed and was happy, but when things went well, it cried. It had these two virtues. I said to the Princes of Anhalt: 'If I were the prince or the ruler here, I would throw this child into the water - into the Molda that flows by Dessau. I would dare commit homicidium on him!' But the Elector of Saxony, who was with me at Dessau, and the Princes of Anhalt did not want to follow my advice. Therefore I said: 'Then you should have all Christians repeat the Lord's Prayer in church that God may exorcise the devil.' They did this daily at Dessau, and the changeling child died in the following year. Such a changeling child is only a piece of flesh, a massa carnis, because it has no soul."

"Changelings and killcrops are laid in the place of legitimate children by Satan in order to plague mankind. He often pulls certain girls into the water, impregnates them, and keeps them with him until they deliver their children; afterward he places these children in cradles, taking the legitimate children away. But such changelings, it is said, do not live more than eighteen or nineteen years."

[.....] It happens often that babies are exchanged during their first six weeks, and that devils lay themselves in their place, making themselves detestable by shitting, eating, and crying more than any ten other children. The parents get no rest from such filthy beasts. The mothers are sucked dry and are no longer able to nurse. However, changeling children should be baptised, because they cannot always be recognised as such during their first year." [See next 1573 (Paré)] [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

KEY CONCEPT - CHANGELINGS AND KILLCROPS: The Changeling legends outlined above provide a convenient example of how a religious belief system and popular folklore can co-evolve when they both have to deal with matters of high emotion such as birth defects. [To study this issue in isolation, rebrowse the document using FIND set to "= THE UNCANNY".]

1532 The Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Orlando Furioso", a collection of chivalric tales, including that of the Knight Roger freeing the damsel Angelica from a fearsome dragon. In his search for inspirational themes, this tale will eventually be taken to canvas at the beginning of the Romantic Period by Ingres [see 1819].

1545 Commissioned by Duke Cosimo de Medici, the Italian sculptor Francesco Ubertini paints a grotesque for the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. It includes many small animals and plants woven into the filigree.

1545 The first meeting takes place of the Council of Trento, marking the beginning of an 18-year period of soul-searching within the Roman Catholic church, on the defensive in the face of the rise of Protestantism in Northern Europe. One of the outcomes is a carefully considered lightening of artistic, architectural, and musical style designed to appeal more to the masses. Because some Mannerist [see 1513] perfection was thereby sacrificed, the new movement became known as "Baroque" [= "in imperfect pearl"]. Baroque musicians include Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi, and Baroque artists include Rubens, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt.

1562 The Dutch artist Peter Bruegel [Wikipedia biography] continues in the "hellwork" tradition of Hieronymous Bosch [see 1500] with his "The Triumph of Death" [image], complete with armies of skeletons and wagon loads of skulls.

1570 The Italian carnival impresario Andrea Calmo creates a carnival character called Il Magnifico, later to evolve into Pantaleone in Commedia dell'arte productions.

1573 [See firstly 1540 (Luther)] The French physician Ambroise Paré [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Des Monstres et Prodigues" [buy], a treatise on birth defects. Amongst the possible causes thereof he identified the wrath of God, the quality and quantity of the semen involved, and the work of demons and witches. [See next 1580 (Montaigne)] [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

1580 [See firstly 1573 (Paré)] The French writer Michel Eyquem de Montaigne [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Essays" [buy], a collection of insights into the ways and ways of thinking of sixteenth century France. Essay #2.30 is entitled "Of a Monstrous Child" and includes the following .....

"I saw two days since a child [.....] carried about with intent to get some money with the sight of him, by reason of his strangenesse. [.....] Under his paps [= nipples] he was fastned and joyned to another childe, but had no head, and who had the conduit of his back stopped; the rest whole [etc., etc.]" (p362). [See next 1616 (Liceti)] [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

ASIDE: Bates (2000) identifies 21 Elizabethan ballads touching upon birth defects in the period 1552 to 1584, the analysis of which suggests as follows .....

"One notable difference from accounts of birth defects originating from mainland Europe is that in the English ballad literature they are never attributed to the actions of evil spirits or to the results of bestiality, theories that were espoused in Europe by even the most scholarly of authors up to the seventeenth century. In post-Reformation England, the idea of birth defects as a punishment for personal sin was substituted [..... and some ballads] attributed deformities to a child's illegitimacy and interpreted birth defects as an indirect punishment for those with weak morals" (p203).

1587 An unnamed author has published "The Story of Dr. Johann Faust", possibly a deliberate allusion to the German alchemist of the same name. This work spawns a number of rewrites between 1593 and 1725. The last of these linking works happens to be read by the young Goethe, who models his masterpiece "Faust" upon it.

1589 The English playwright Robert Greene stages "The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay".

1600 The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II [Wikipedia biography] creates a Wunderkammer [= "wonder room"], a private Natural History Museum, an Art Gallery, and a Chamber of Horrors, all rolled into one. This Wunderkammer arouses so much interest that rival collections spring up across Europe in palaces and stately homes. Collections soon include such things as stuffed alligators, corals, shells, crystals, and preserved anatomical specimens (or their images).

1604 Working from previous works in German, and perhaps further inspired by the work in Britain of the alchemist John Dee, the playwright Christopher Marlowe produces "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus".

***** THE AGE OF (NORTHERN EUROPEAN) REASON *****

1605 The Elizabethan politician-courtier-philosopher Sir Francis Bacon produces "The Advancement of Learning", in which he challenged the classical approach to the advancement of knowledge on the grounds that it relied too much on talk and too little on systematised observation and the critical avoidance of fallacy.

1609 The British playwright Ben Jonson [Wikipedia biography] performs the comedy "Epicoene", the tale of a young man "suppos'd the silent woman". The plot involves an elaborate scheme to ensure a just inheritance [full details]. Epicoene - the young man - plays a young bride until "her" secret is eventually revealed. Epicoene speaks so little in the opening scenes that her silence requires other characters to be constantly remarking on her, assessing her behaviours, and generally "interpreting that silence" (Skantze, 2003). [THREAD = FROZEN MOTION]

1616 [See firstly 1580 (Montaigne)] The Italian physician Fortunio Liceti [Wikipedia biography] publishes "De Monstruorum", the first properly scientific treatise on birth defects. [THREADS = THE UNCANNY and SCIENTIFIC METHOD]

1617 The Italian painter Giovanni Francesco Barbieri [informally, Il Guercino] paints "Susanna and the Elders" [image] and begins a period of fame producing works with a biblical theme. One exception is the sketch "Monster Animal and Peasant" (ca. 1640) which depicts a fabulous creature, part chicken, part human foot [check it out]. [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

1620 Sir Francis Bacon's subsequent "Novum Organum" [buy] shows how inductive reasoning can be the basis for scientific method. He laments four classes of common fallacy, which he calls "idols of the human mind" (1620/1901, p16). The first class of fallacy - "idols of the tribe" - includes our species' tendency to interpret things from its own perspective; the second class of fallacy - "idols of the den" - includes each individual's tendency to interpret things from his/her own experience and understanding; the third class of fallacy - "idols of the market" - includes misunderstandings in broad debate arising from "a bad and unappropriate formation of words" (p21); the fourth class of fallacy - "idols of the theatre" - includes dogmatism resulting from following particular philosophical schools.

1620? [See firstly 650BCE (Erichthoneus)] The painter Jasper van der Laanen exhibits "The Daughters of Cecrops Free Erechtheos" [image], depicting the myth of the monstrously deformed son of Hephaestus and the earth-goddess Gaia. [See next 1812 (Grimm)] [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

1630 The French painter Claude Lorraine [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Landscape with Merchants", at the beginning of a 30-year productive period. His work will later puzzle the art critic Roger Fry [see 1904], who found no shortage of technical faults in Lorraine's work, but an undiminished beauty nonetheless. Fry's personal conclusion was that Lorraine contrived to concentrate "all the far-reaching resources" at his disposal onto one point "so that a single and apparently effortless expression rejoices the aesthetic imagination at the moment when it is most expectant and exacting" (Fry 1907/1920, p156). His work, by lacking "any ostentation of cleverness", attains "the beauty of a whole" (ibid.).

1633 Worried about punitive sanctions from the Vatican, the French soldier-scholar Rene Descartes shelves four years' work on the manuscript of "Treatise on Man", arguably the first coherent monograph on neuropsychology. It would not finally become available until 1662, , in Latin, 12 years after his death.

1637 Rene Descartes' next work, "Discourse on the Method" [buy], derives his famous "I think therefore I am".

1642 The 19-year-old French mathematician Blaise Pascal developed a mechanical calculator consisting of a set of geared counter wheels with a "tens carry" system. A number was inserted by rotating the appropriate "column" wheel (units, tens, hundreds, etc.) with a stylus, and then added to by onward rotation by cognate column from right to left.

1649 Rene Descartes [see 1633] now publishes "Passions of the Soul" [buy], the last of his works to be published in his lifetime. In it he famously identifies the pineal gland as the central point of interaction between body and soul.

1651 The British philosopher Thomas Hobbes [Wikipedia biography] opens his "Leviathan" with the blatant assertion that the human mind is in essence just a material mechanism.

1659 The Irish scholar-alchemist Robert Boyle uses a vacuum chamber constructed by Robert Hooke to apply Francis Bacon's method of science to investigations of the physical properties of air. These culminate in the formulation of Boyle's Law. [THREAD = SCIENTIFIC METHOD]

1661 Robert Boyle publishes "The Sceptical Chymist", an attempt to rewrite the rather primitive beliefs of the alchemists in the light of results of practical experimentation, and thereby to determine the irreducible elements and the rules of their combination. [THREAD = SCIENTIFIC METHOD]

1662 Rene Descartes' "Treatise on Man" [buy] is finally published, posthumously, and in Latin in order to restrict the availability of the ideas it contained to the population at large. The neuropsychology it contains is basically mechanistic, but with a dualistic soul resident in amongst all the mechanisms.

KEY CONCEPT - PERCEPTUAL STAGES (2): [Continued from 540BCE (Alcmaeon)] Descartes' nascent neuropsychology follows the tradition established more than two millennia previously by Alcmaeon of Croton [see 540BCE], namely that sensory information is conducted into the brain along poroi provided for that purpose. Descartes now completed the cognitive cycle by explicitly allowing for the brain to generate the necessary muscle output instructions in response. He did not use the term "neurotransmission", but the sense of movement comes out clearly in the following extract. [This inset topic continues after 1668, Donders.]

"Now in the same measure that spirits enter the cavities of the brain they also leave them and enter the pores or conduits in its substance, and from these conduits they proceed to the nerves. And depending on their entering [.....] some nerves rather than others, they are able to change the shapes of the muscles into which these nerves are inserted ....." (p21).

The extract continues by clearly equating the muscle activation process to the workings of hydraulic automata .....

"Similarly you may have observed in the grottoes and fountains in the gardens of our kings that the force that makes the water leap from its source is able of itself to move divers machines ....." (p21).

Descartes' analysis of visual scanning is also refreshingly modern, thus .....

"..... It comes about also that the soul will only be able to see very clearly a single point on the object at a time, namely that on which all the parts of the eye are trained at that time, other points appearing as much more confused as they are further from that one. [.....] But the muscles [reference to Figure] turning the eye very quickly in every direction serve to remedy this defect: because in no time at all they can apply the eye successively to all points of the object and thus permit the soul to see all points distinctly one after the other" (p58).

1663 The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge receives its Charter of Incorporation from King Charles II. Among its founder members are Boyle, Willis, and Wren.

1666 The Dutch artist Willem van de Velde [the Elder] [Wikipedia biography], official fleet artist to Admiral De Ruyter, sketches the naval engagements with the Royal Navy in June and July. [ART, WARFARE, AND PROPAGANDA]

1664-1672 The physician Thomas Willis publishes a number of treatises on brain anatomy in which he makes breakthrough discoveries relating to cerebral blood flow and the layout of the cranial nerves.

1684 The German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz [Wikipedia biography] publishes an essay entitled "Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas" in which he offers a useful two-by-two dimensionalisation of knowledge according (a) to its clarity and (b) to its adequacy, thus [using the Wiener edition] .....

"Knowledge is either obscure or clear; clear ideas again are either indistinct or distinct; distinct ideas are either adequate or inadequate, symbolic or intuitive; perfect knowledge, finally, is that which is both adequate and intuitive. An idea is obscure when it does not suffice for the recognition of things after they have been experienced. [.....] Knowledge is clear when it is sufficient to enable me to recognise the things represented [..... but] it is indistinct as soon as I am not able to enumerate separately the characteristics required to distinguish the thing from others" (pp283-284).

Leibniz's proposed structure is relevant to aesthetic theory because .....

"In similar fashion, we often observe that painters and other artists judge quite correctly what is good or defective in works of art, but are frequently not able to account for their judgement ....." (p284).

Leibniz's system will be much discussed over the years which follow. [See now 1719 (Wolff)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF AESTHETICS]

1690 John Locke's "On the Human Understanding" takes a class-defining British Empiricist position on the nature-nurture debate, and a strongly Associationist position on the structure of biological memory. Locke makes his position clear in what we nowadays refer to as "the Molyneux Question". Here is the background to the Question .....

"..... To which purpose I shall here insert a problem of that very ingenious and studious promoter of real knowledge, the learned and worthy Mr. Molyneux, which he has pleased to send me in a letter some months since: and it is this: 'Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere" (Locke, 1690, Book II, IX.8).

Here is the Question itself .....

"Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table, and the blind man to be made to see; query, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?'" (Ibid.)

Here is Molyneux's own suggested answer .....

"To which the acute and judicious proposer answers: 'Not. For though he has obtained the experience of how a globe, how a cube, affects his touch; yet he has not yet attained the experience that what affects his touch so or so must affect his sight so or so; or that a protuberant angle in the cube, that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye as it does in the cube.'" (Ibid).

And here is Locke's .....

"I agree with this thinking gentleman, whom I am proud to call my friend, in his answer to this his problem; and am of opinion that the blind man, at first sight, would not be able with certainty to say which was the globe, which the cube, whilst he only saw them; though he could unerringly name them by his touch ....." (Ibid.).

In agreeing that the newly sighted blind man would not be immediately capable of visual perception, Locke was arguing that this ability needs to be learned empirically - that is to say from one's experience of the world. No prior experience, no perception; as simple as that. Humans are born with effectively an empty mind and their experiences gradually develop it and fill it up. Locke called this empty mind upon which experience "writes" a tabula rasa (Latin = "blank slate"), and this type of explanation subsequently became known as empiricism. [THREAD = THE VISUAL SYSTEM (THE MOLYNEUX QUESTION)]

1693 [THREAD = THEORY OF AESTHETICS] The British dramatist John Dennis [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Miscellanies", an account of a Grand Tour through the Alps in which the harsh grandeur - the sheer sublimity - of natural phenomena was as striking as its beauty.

1697 Having enjoyed a presence in the city since the beginning of the century, Paris's Italian Theatre is banished to the provinces by Louis XIV for the "impudence" of its latest offering. [See next 1716 (Riccoboni)]

1703 The French painter Claude Gillot [Wikipedia biography] apprentices Jean-Antoine Watteau [Wikipedia biography] to his workshop and imbues him with a love of Italian theatre [see 1697] and its iconography. Watteau also gets the opportunity to study Marie de Medici's Rubens collection at Paris's Luxembourg Palace before crystalising a light Baroque - soon to be known as "Rococo" - style of his own. Amongst his early works are "The Island of Cythera" (1709) [image]. [See next 1712]

1709 [THREAD = THEORY OF AESTHETICS] The British philosopher Anthony Ashley Cooper [Stanford University biography], Third Earl of Shaftesbury, publishes "The Moralists", an account of his travels in the Alps in which the natural world's ability to inspire awe made sublimity "a quality of a grander and higher importance than beauty" (Wikipedia). In 1711 he will incorporate this material into a larger work entitled "Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times", in which he develops (amongst other things) a broader theory of aesthetics and moral philosophy. His system has recently been summarised as follows .....

"Shaftesbury's aesthetic theory was one of the first and most influential produced by an English-speaking philosopher. Beauty, for Shaftesbury, is a kind of harmony, proportion, or order. [.....] Shaftesbury sometimes maintained that virtue is a species of beauty, or that virtue and beauty are 'one and the same'. He suggested that the positive reaction we have when observing a moral action or character is the same as (or one example of) the positive reaction we have when observing the beauty of nature or works of art. [..... He maintained nevertheless] that one needed training in order to make correct aesthetic judgements" (Shelley, 2010 online, e10-11).

1709-1713 George Berkeley's "Immaterialist" Theory of Reality brings together ontological and phenomenological considerations into a single higher-order debate. Berkeley's central point is that everything we know about reality is what we have perceived about it, which means in turn that that knowledge is doomed always to be subjective rather than objective.

HOW TO RECOGNISE ROCOCO PERIOD ARTWORKS: Firstly check the date and country of origin, because the Rococo style is closely associated with the reign of Louis XV in pre-revolutionary France. Then look for delicacy of curve and no little finishing ornamentation and detail. This will be obvious in ceramics and architecture but more subtle in two-dimensional art. In painting, for example, Watteau's late works (1717-1721) are considered typical of the movement, combining delicacy and glow with a new freedom of theme. Because the fêtes galantes content was of necessity aristocrat-friendly, the style fell rapidly out of favour as the guillotine ushered in its bloody egalitarianism in the 1790s. Because Britain was roundly Francophobe at this time the Rococo style tended to be regarded as a French excess, and its implementation was patchy.

1716 [See firstly 1697] Under the direction of Luigi Riccoboni [Wayne S. Turney biography], and at the invitation of Philippe II, Duc d'Orleans, the newly declared Regent of France, the Italian Theatre is re-established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, and is allowed once again to influence the artworks of the moment [e.g., 1716 (Watteau)].

1716 Still only in his 30th year, Jean-Antoine Watteau [see 1703] completes "The Shepherds" [image], an early example on a "fêtes galantes" [French = "gallant festivities"] theme, in which upper class patrons are posed into scenes drawn from the classics and the like. The following year he will exhibit "The Pleasures of the Ball" (1717) [image], and "Pierrot" (1717-1719) [image], works which are nowadays identified as "Rococo".

1719 The German philosopher Christian Wolff [Wikipedia biography] publishes an essay entitled "Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of Man" in which he follows Leibniz [see 1684] in approaching perfection as the harmonious coming together of parts. Here is Guyer (2007 online) on this .....

"In the case of the visual arts of painting and sculpture, Wolff locates their perfection in imitation or veridical representation, while other arts find their perfections in the fulfilment of intended uses. [.....] Pleasure arises from the imitation of perfection" (Guyer, 2007 online, e7).

1725 The French weaver Basile Bouchon uses continuous punched paper to precode the pattern of the weave in advance [Bouchon was the son of an organ maker, and may well have inherited some of the old Greek automatic control skills from his father's workshop].

1725 The British philosopher Francis Hutcheson [Wikipedia biography] publishes an essay entitled "An Inquiry concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, and Design", in which he argues that humankind is blessed with an "internal sense" which triggers feelings of pleasure whenever the "external senses" (vision and hearing) chance upon that class of things which we describe as beautiful.

1728 [See firstly 1725, Bouchon] The French weaver Jean Philippe Falcon uses punched slats for the same purpose. The mass production of any repeating woven pattern thus became simple once the appropriate slats had been produced. [See next 1745 (Vaucanson)]

1728 In that it invites one to consider what it might be like to undo a lifetime of visual experience and see the world through the eyes of an infant, John Locke's "Molyneux Question" [see 1690] generated considerable scholarly interest. However for a long time it looked as if it could never actually be answered, because it was impossible to construct to order an experiment wherein a person blind from birth could be given sight for the first time. Nevertheless this is exactly what happens when congenital cataracts are surgically removed, and so surgeons were soon taking advantage of this form of "natural experiment" to put the Molyneux Question to the test. The British physician William Cheselden [Wikipedia biography] publishes the first significant academic report of sight renewal, and refers to a 13 year old male .....

"He knew not the shape of anything nor any one thing from another, however different in shape or magnitude [.....] but upon being told what things were, whose form he knew before from feeling, he would carefully observe, that he might know them again." (Cheselden, 1728, cited in Von Senden, 1960, p129 and pp182-183.) [See next 1932 (Von Senden)] [THREAD = THE VISUAL SYSTEM (THE MOLYNEUX QUESTION)]

1730?? A young French scholar, Jacques de Vaucanson joins the Order of Minims.

1735 The German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten [Wikipedia biography] submits his Masters' thesis under the title "Philosophical Meditations", in which he used the Greek word aisthetike to refer to "that which is sensed or imagined". Over the ensuing years he accumulates material for a more mature work on the broader explanatory philosophy of sensing and imagining. He will call this work "Aesthetica", publishing Volume 1 in 1750 and Volume 2 in 1758, and it is now recognised as the work which pioneered use of the term "aesthetics" to refer to the philosophy of artistic appreciation as a whole. [See next 1757, Burke] [THREAD = HISTORY OF AESTHETICS]

1738 Now earning his living as an engineer, Vaucanson demonstrates the mechanism for a flute-playing automaton to the French National Academy. This is followed by a tambourine player and an anally unretentive clockwork duck. [See next 1745]

1739 The Scottish philosopher David Hume publishes "A Treatise on Human Nature" in which he promotes the empiricist position on the Nature-Nurture Debate and argues that our understanding of Self is automatically limited by the fragmentary experience we have of the operation of our own individual selves. He also helped argue the need for peer-verification to be included in the loop of scientific development. Fodor (2003) suggests that cognitive science as a discrete area of intellectual endeavour dates from this work.

1741 Moving on from his work with theatrical automata Vaucanson becomes advisor to the French government on mechanising the silk industry [see next 1745].

1744 The German philosopher Georg Friedrich Meier [Wikipedia biography] draws on his time as a student of Baumgarten [see 1735] to establish a critical position of his own on the relationship between the intellectual and the emotional sides of aesthetic experience. He sets his system out in "Theoretical Doctrine of the Emotions" (1744), which has recently been assessed as follows [note the interesting proposal concerning the power of disagreeable emotions to gratify nonetheless] .....

"His position is not just that the passions have influence on sensible cognition, but that they are themselves a great source of sensible pleasure, and that it is therefore part of the aim of art to arouse them. Meier analyses the passions [.....] as a form of mental activity: they are 'efforts or strivings of the soul' that result in a desire or an aversion. [.....] This might lead one to expect that desires or aversions can be sources of great pleasure or displeasure, depending upon whether they are realised or not, but Meier goes on to argue that 'all emotions, the disagreeable ones not excluded, produce a gratification', because they are active states or perfections of the soul, and 'whenever the soul feels a perfection in itself, it is sensitive of a gratification'. And because they are so strong, the passions, whether desires or aversions, are those among our mental states that make us most aware of our own mental activity, and therefore are actually the strongest source of pleasure for us: 'in the passions almost the entire lower power of cognition and desire is engaged, that is, almost the entire lower part of our soul'" Guyer, 2007 online, e22; emphasis added).

KEY CONCEPT - THE JAMES-LANGE THEORY OF EMOTION: This is the name given to the particular theoretical position as to the relationship between overt behaviour and the experience of the emotions, which holds that we feel the emotion after the behaviour has firstly been instinctively triggered, and not that we feel the emotion first and then behave in accordance with that feeling. The interpretation was published independently in Europe by Carl Lange [see 1885] and in America by William James [see 1884]. The James-Lange Theory is frequently encountered in aesthetics, albeit it is not always referenced as such.

1745 Tiepolo's "Discovery of the True Cross" [image] depicts St. Helena's archaeological success [see 326 above].

1745 [See firstly 1741] Vaucanson combines techniques from his theatrical automata with the pre-programming systems developed by Bouchon and Falcon [see 1725 and 1728, respectively] to produce a fully automatic loom, although the design will not be widely available until mass produced as the Jacquard Loom in 1805 [q.v.].

1746 The French philosopher Charles Batteux [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Les Beaux Arts Réduits à une Même Principe" [In English as "The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle"], in which he defends the points (a) that the fine arts exist only to the extent that they imitate the beauties of nature, and (b) that no little practical skill and personal élan is needed to make it so. [THREAD = THE NATURE OF BEAUTY]

1747 The French philosopher Julien La Mettrie [Wikipedia biography] publishes "L'Homme Machine" [buy], in which he further develops the materialist explanation of the mind.

1748 The Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi [Wikipedia biography] opens a workshop in Rome specialising in veduti [= "views"], photographically detailed etchings of that city's imperial ruins. He also produces the carceri d'invenzione [= "imaginary prisons"], a series of 16 prints depicting imaginary underground vaults crammed with archwork, stairways, balconies, and the like, and pervaded by an atmosphere of darkly troubled whimsy [example]. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1749 The German painter Anton Mengs is appointed to the court of Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony. Over the coming decades he produces a number of formative Neoclassical works such as "The Triumph of Trajan" and "Temple of Glory". He has been assessed as sitting on the stylistic cusp between Baroque and Neoclassicism.

1750 The Austrian engineer Lorenz Rosenegger founds the Heilbrunn Palace Mechanical Theatre [organise a tour], and, in the spirit of Vaucanson, exhibits some 200 water-driven automata.

1751 The scholars Jean Le Rond D'Alembert and Denis Diderot publish the first volume of "Encyclopedia". The work was intended to grow by volumes and to serve as a definitive account of all things important [a sort of 18th century Wikipedia]. It will turn out, however, that the editors had underestimated just how much there would be to include, and by 1780 the thing had grown to 35 volumes containing some 20 million words. The work has since been assessed as a high point [or low, depending on which direction you come from] of the Enlightenment.

1753 The British painter and social satirist William Hogarth [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Analysis of Beauty" [buy], a methodical and exhaustive review of the various tricks of the artist's trade, with conjecture as to why each should be as effective as it is. He covers, for example, the need for "fitness", "variety", "uniformity", "regularity", and "symmetry" in an object, also "simplicity", "distinctness", "intricacy", and an appropriate degree of "quantity". He also examines the use of lines, distinguishing carefully between the straight and the circular, as well as the "art of composing well" a complex scene. He says far less, however, about the derivation of an understanding of any depicted drama, be it straightforward or figurative. [THREAD = HISTORY OF AESTHETICS]

1755 A young Immanuel Kant, newly graduated in philosophy from the University of Königsberg, joins the faculty there as lecturer in metaphysics.

1755 The German art historian Johann Winckelmann publishes "Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture", in which he espoused the view that "the one way for us [= Germany] to become great, perhaps inimitable, is by imitating the ancients [.....] What is imitated, if handled with reason, may assume another nature".

1757 [See firstly 1735, Baumgarten] The British philosopher Edmund Burke publishes "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" [buy] in which he distinguishes between beauty, that which is merely aesthetically pleasing, and the sublime, whose perfection has the added ability to haunt us, perhaps even to the point that it destroys us in the process. This issue would be taken up again by Goethe (1774) and Kant (1790) [q.v.].

1757 The German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Foundations of the Fine Arts and Sciences", in which he generally follows Wolff [see 1719] and Meier [see 1744], but with a greater emphasis on the need to explain the enjoyability of art. Here is how the University of Pennsylvania's Paul Guyer now explains it .....

"But Mendelssohn adds a critical point here, leading to a fundamental revision in the significance of artistic imitation: in order for us to enjoy the mixed emotions in a pleasing representation of something that is objectively displeasing, our sense of the difference between the represented content and our act of representing it cannot be allowed to collapse, and the role of artistic imitation is precisely to create enough distance between our representation and its object to allow us to enjoy the representation rather than to collapse that space by creating the illusion that we are in the actual presence of the depicted object. [.....] Thus contrary to Wolff, Mendelssohn does not suppose that what we enjoy in imitation is accuracy of representation taken to the point of illusion, but rather the room for the experience of our own mental activity that the knowledge that the depicted object is only being imitated allows" (Guyer, 2007 online, e28-29).

1757 The French writer Charles de Brosses [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches", the first academic account of "fetishism", the use of small human figures and artefacts in primitive religious ritual [fuller definition]. In so doing he opened up the intriguing possibility that Humankind's far from monogamous love affair with its religions might be a combination of superstition and ignorance and nothing more [THREADS = CHURCH HISTORY, FROZEN MOTION, and THE UNCANNY]. The two key notions here are "anthropomorphism" and "animism", as now further explored .....

KEY CONCEPT - ANTHROPOMORPHISM: Anthropomorphism (literally man-form-ism) is an assertion of human characteristics in inanimate objects or subhuman species. Thus if you talk deeply and meaningfully to your canary or swear at your car when it fails to start, then you are elevating those objects to humanlike status. Similarly, if you conceive of animals as feeling human emotions such as love, regret, compassion, etc.

KEY CONCEPT - ANIMISM: Animism is "the attribution of a living soul to inanimate objects and natural phenomena" (O.E.D.). The term was popularised by the anthropologist E.B. Tyler following detailed study of primitive religions (Tyler, 1863), but has been frequently revisited thanks to humankind's liking for anthropomorphic explanation. Piaget (1926/1973) devotes an entire chapter to the developmental aspects of animism, seeing it as an entirely "spontaneous" (p236) property of immature cognition. Young children "simply talk about things in the terms used for human beings, thus endowing them with will, desire, and conscious activity" (p239). In fact, he identified two distinct developmental periods, as follows .....

"..... we noted two periods in the spontaneous animism of children. The first, lasting until the ages of four to five, is characterised by an animism which is both integral and implicit; anything may be endowed with both purpose and conscious activity [..... but] this animism sets no problem to the child. It is taken for granted. After the ages of four to six, however, questions are asked on the subject, showing that this implicit animism is about to disappear" (p242).

1759 The Scottish philosopher Alexander Gerard [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Essay on Taste", in which he attempts to demonstrate the reducibility of the faculty of taste to component processes, rather than accepting its inherent irreducibility. His position has recently been summarised as follows .....

"The idea, roughly, is this. The reducibility of taste implies that the perceptions of taste, which are pleasures, are not natural to their objects in the way Hutcheson, for example, supposed. Thus objects of taste must acquire their pleasurability. They do so by association. [.....] It seems that the mind forges very strong associations between its own processes and their objects, such that any pleasure natural to a mental process will transfer to its object. It seems also that any process that requires the mind 'to exert its activity, and put forth its strength, in order to surmount any difficulty' is naturally pleasurable, as is the mind's consciousness of its success in surmounting any difficulty" (Shelley, 2010 online, e17-18).

1760 The German writer and amateur philosopher Johann Hamann begins to publish short treatises on philosophy and literature. In the later ones he applies a Kantian analysis to language, an area Kant largely ignored. He successfully teases apart the lexical and the semantic aspects of word use, arguing that "one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves" (Hamann, Collected Works, Vol. 5, p264). [This is precisely the argument subsequently put forward in Lichtheim (1885) and Freud (1891), as well as in Ellis (1982) and the body of cognitive science which derives therefrom. The idea that the processing of words and concepts needs to be kept separate has been incorporated into the Konrad artificial consciousness software.]

1761 The French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "The Village Betrothal" [image] to sufficient popular acclaim for the Italian actor Carlo Bertinazzi [Wikipedia biography] to stages the depicted scene as a tableau vivant. [See next 1781 (Genlis)] [THREADS = FROZEN MOTION and THE UNCANNY]

1762 A young German scholar named Johann Herder enrols to study medicine at the University of Königsberg. It turns out that he cannot cope with the messiness of the dissections, and so switches to theology instead, attending Kant's classes in metaphysics and becoming acquainted with the Königsberg-based Hamann. After graduating he begins work on "How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People [zum Besten des Volkes]" (1765) and "Fragments on Recent German Literature" (1767-8).

1763 Winckelmann follows up his 1755 work with "Essay on the Beautiful in Art",

1764 Winckelmann completes "History of Ancient Art", "a thorough, comprehensive, and lucid chronological account of all antique art" (Wikipedia), which, with its detailed treatment of the Greek world, becomes a major resource for the Neoclassical movement.

1764 The British novelist Horace Walpole publishes "The Castle of Otranto", a darkly atmospheric novel in which ancient prophecies seem to be coming true, mysterious knights and unlikely coincidences abound, and only a few live happily ever after. The work is now conventionally accepted as the first "Gothic novel", starting a tradition which would go on to include the authors Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, and Daphne du Maurier.

ASIDE - HOW TO RECOGNISE GOTHIC FICTION: "Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets, and hereditary curses. The stock characters of Gothic fiction include tyrants, villains, bandits, maniacs, Byronic heroes, persecuted maidens, femmes fatales, monks, nuns, madwomen, magicians, vampires, werewolves, demons, angels, fallen angels, revenants, ghosts, perambulating skeletons, the Wandering Jew, and the Devil himself" [Wikipedia].

1765 The Scottish writer James Macpherson publishes "The Works of Ossian" in which he claims to have collected and translated the poems of a Dark Age Irish prince named Oisin ["Ossian"]. For reasons which still need to be fully investigated, "Ossian" receives a very mixed reception. Many were entranced by its being a record of the past travails of people who might just have been the reader's own ancestors [precisely why this should appeal is one of the outstanding psychological puzzles]; others doubted both its historical accuracy or its literary worth [Samuel Johnson would famously dismiss it as "a gross imposition" upon the intellect]. It inspired paintings by Gérard, Girodet (1805), and Ingres (1813).

1765 The Swiss physician Philippe Curtius [Wikipedia biography], having developed a profitable sideline making anatomically precise wax models, gives up medicine in favour of wax modelling as commercial sculpture. When he dies in 1794 he will leave his collection to his housekeeper's daughter, one Madame Tussaud, who uses it well. [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

1768 The German philosopher Gotthold Lessing publishes "Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry" in which he argues that (contrary to some classical opinion) art and literature obey different rules of goodness.

1768 The Danish author Heinrich Gerstenberg [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Ugolino", a stage tragedy based on characters from Dante's "Divine Comedy". The work is nowadays identified within the Sturm und Drang idiom.

1768 The society-favourite portrait painter Joshua Reynolds helps found the Royal Academy of Art and becomes its first President. This provides him with the opportunity to promote the "Grand Style" of painting, a genre in which subjects are depicted at their best by minimising or ignoring their known imperfections.

1768 The Swiss watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz [Wikipedia biography] and his son Henri-Louis start work on a series of high-specification clockwork automata, including "The Writer" (6000 components), "The Musician" (2500 components), and "The Draughtsman" (2000 components) [see images]. [THREADS = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS and THE UNCANNY]

1769 The Hungarian inventor Johann Von Kempelen [Wikipedia biography] attempts to go one better than Jaquet-Droz [above] by constructing his "Turk", a life-sized chess-playing automaton [image]. No record of the inner workings of this contraption will ever be published, and the eventual verdict will be that the machine's "central processor" (as it were) is nothing more complicated than a human accomplice hidden within the structure. [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

1770 A young German lawyer named Johann Goethe publishes "Annette", his first collection of poems. He also makes the acquaintance of Herder [see next].

1770 The Swiss author Paul Henri Mallet publishes a collection of North European legends under the title "Northern Antiquities", including, in English for the first time, the Icelandic epic "The Edda". One of the encounters described therein - that of Thor fighting the Midgard Serpent - will be taken by Henry Fuseli [see 1780] for his diploma work [image].

1770 Johann Herder [see 1762], with a growing personal reputation, leaves Hamann and Kant in Königsberg and makes the acquaintance of Goethe - five years his junior - in Strasbourg, and in so doing passes on his respect for Rousseau and his liking for the Ossian fables. This meeting is often assessed as marking the birth of the "Sturm und Drang" movement in German literature and popular thought.

1771 The Italian physician Luigi Galvani discovers that he can make the muscles of recently killed frogs twitch when stimulated by a spark. These discoveries set the scene for the modern theory of excitable tissues.

1771 [See firstly 1744 (Meier)] The Swiss philosopher-mathematician Johann Georg Sulzer [Wikipedia biography] publishes the first instalment of "General Theory of the Fine Arts", a magnus opus encyclopaedia of aesthetic theory and practice. Sulzer's own aesthetic will later be summarised as follows .....

"[Sulzer] departs from the purely Wolffian conception that the experience of beauty consists simply in a clear but obscure recognition of the perfection of an object relative to a conception of its purpose because he holds that the experience of the beauty of an object is an awareness of its effect on our representational faculty rather than an awareness of the cause of that effect in the object. Thus the experience of beauty becomes the sensation or sentiment (Empfindung) caused by the perfection of the object, rather than a clear but indistinct cognition of that perfection. The real object of pleasure then becomes the activity of one's own representational state, manifested in the form of sentiment, that is caused by the perfection of the beautiful object. [.....] On Sulzer's account, a beauty that appeals to the full range of our cognitive and emotional capacities through its purposiveness as well as its form is a 'higher species' of beauty than one that appeals to our sense of form alone" (Guyer, 2007 online, e53-54).

KEY CONCEPT - THE JAMES-LANGE THEORY OF EMOTION (2): Note Sulzer's admirably clear position on the sequence of emotional cognition. Specifically it is consistent with the conceptualisation of emotion proposed a hundred years later by the James-Lange Theory of Emotion [see insets, 1744 and 1884].

1772 The German writer-philosopher Christoph Wieland publishes "The Golden Mirror", a collection of oriental stories with a moral. This comes to the attention of Duchess Anna of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach at Weimar. The term "Weimar Classicism" is now used to describe the brief popularity of the poetical-romance movement in Germany as expressed by the writers Wieland, Herder [who worked at Weimar from 1776], Goethe, and Schiller..

1772 Johann Herder [see 1762] publishes "On the Origin of Language" in which he promotes German over French as the proper language for German society.

1773 Goethe publishes "Götz von Berlichingen", a tragic play.

1773 Johann Herder [see 1762] publishes "Correspondence Concerning Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples" [Lieder alter Völker]. He argues that "a poet is the creator of the nation around him; he gives his people a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world", and, noting the part played by the ancient Celtic bard Ossian in the history of Scotland, begins to seek out similar virtues in ancient German and Norse Volkspoesie [literally "peoples' poetry", especially when elevated to the status of ethnocentric mythology]. Herder's intense patriotism, especially in popularising the use of the term Das Volk to encompass a nation's true identity, would return to haunt the world in the 1930s. Garland (1952) will eventually comment as follows .....

"Herder's essay on Ossian ... derives from his acceptance of the views of Rousseau. He writes in praise of the folk-song ... and asserts the superiority of folk-song as poetry over the elegant verse of the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, however, for his argument, his finest example of folk-poetry is Macpherson's Ossian, a sophisticated travesty of primitive strength in which sentimentality masquerades as powerful emotion. Herder ..... quite failed to realise that Ossian's stormy romanticism is not genuine, but a product of modern romantic longing for supposedly lost simplicity and strength" (pp16-17).

1774 The British poet Thomas Warton publishes a treatise on "The Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe" in which he distinguishes between "Romantic" and "Classical".

ASIDE - HOW TO RECOGNISE ROMANTICISM IN ART AND LITERATURE: "By its nature, romanticism does not lend itself to precise definition, exegesis, and analysis" (Blanning, 2010, p6). That said, it is characterised by no little heroic struggle against the odds, no little genius, and - ominously - no little appeal to the mythical former glories of one's tribe.

1774 Goethe publishes "The Sorrows of Young Werther", his first novel. The novel includes quotations from Macpherson's "Ossian" and was a commercial success.

ASIDE: Werther dwells continually upon the painfulness of youth's passions, upon infatuation, rejection, and suicide. In 1818 Mary Shelley had Frankenstein's monster read a copy of the book, and be reduced to tears because it, too, had been rejected by the world. Werther is currently assessed as one of Goethe's few contributions to the Sturm und Drang movement. Later works are classified as Weimar Classicist.

Goethe's position on aesthetics comes out in the following .....

"Beauty is a primeval phenomenon [Urphänomen], which itself never makes an appearance, but the reflection of which is visible in a thousand different utterances of the creative mind".

1776 The German playwright Friedrich Klinger publishes the play "Sturm und Drang" [= "Storm and Urge"], in which he allows free dramatic rein to the violent emotions of the American Revolution. This title catches on and soon becomes used to describe any artform which sets out to explore the emotional extremes of human existence. The main exponents of this style will be Hamann.

ASIDE - HOW TO RECOGNISE STURM UND DRANG LITERATURE: "The protagonist in a typical Sturrn und Drang stage work, poem, or novel is driven to action - often violent action - [..... by] revenge and greed. [Such literature] features an anti-aristocratic slant while seeking to elevate all things humble, natural, or intensely real (especially whatever is painful, tormenting, or frightening) [.....] The parallel movement in the visual arts can be witnessed in paintings of storms and shipwrecks showing the terror and irrational destruction wrought by nature. These pre-romantic works were fashionable in Germany from the 1760s on through the 1780s" (Wikipedia).

1777 The German sculptor Franz X. Messerschmidt (a.k.a. "the psychotic artist") [Wikipedia biography] takes early retirement in Bratislava suffering from "a confusion in the head". There he works on a series of character heads, each intended to show a different "canonical grimace" modelled on his own reflection [specimen]

1778 Herder now publishes "On Cognition" to complement his earlier work on linguistics.

1780 Drawing heavily from the Changeling legends of European folklore [see 1520], the Swiss-born British artist Henry Fuseli [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "The Changeling" [image]. [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

1781 Johann Fuseli [see 1780] exhibits "The Nightmare", in which "a sleeping woman, her legs apart, her arms dangling, her hair tumbling, her lips parted, her nostrils flared" (Blanning, 2010, p64) shares her bed chamber with a goblin and a crazy horse [image]. It becomes an instant sensation. Fuseli will continue to be obsessed by the dark side of dream imagery, but lived a century too early to benefit from Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams" [see 1900]. As to Fuseli's longer-term relevance, Myrone (2001) [buy] observes as follows .....

"[Fuseli's] vividly stylised images of ghosts and fairies, muscle-bound superheroes, fainting maidens and voracious viragos, are obvious prototypes for the figures in today's comic books, action movies, and computer games" (p6). [THREADS = DISTURBING ART and THE UNCANNY]

1781 The French noblewoman, governess to royalty, writer, and skilled survivor in dangerous times Stéphanie de Genlis [Wikipedia biography] reportedly helps popularise the tableau vivant as a medium of entertainment at the social gatherings of those who could afford them. [See next 1781 (Hart)] [THREADS = FROZEN MOTION and THE UNCANNY]

1781 The Swiss painter Jean-Étienne Liotard [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Traite des Principes et des Règles de la Peinture" [= "Treatise on the Principles and Rules of Painting"] in which amongst other things he famously remarks that "Painting is the most outstanding sorceress. She can persuade us through the most evident falsehoods that she is pure Truth".

1781 Inspired perhaps by the popular success of Henry Fuseli's "Nightmare" [see 1781], the British painter Maria Cosway [Wikipedia biography] begins to turn out "a series of paintings on obscure literary themes, emphasising the supernatural and horrific aspects of the subject" (Myrone, 2001, p49). [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1781 [See firstly 1781 (Genlis)] An aspirating young actress named Emma Hart [Wikipedia biography] becomes mistress of Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh and entertains his friends by dancing nude for them. Her good looks soon get her sittings as an artist's model [see 1782 (Romney)], and the resulting artworks prove so popular with well-to-do gentry that she softens her act. Instead of out-and-out nudity she develops instead her "attitudes", semi-naked posings in the character of this or that Greek Goddess. These in turn prove so popular that in 1791 she marries into the nobility as Emma, Lady Hamilton, after which her appearance in artworks - but not the gossip of the time - is even more subdued. The "attitudes", meanwhile, inspire a host of "pose plastique" imitators, both on and off the stage. [THREADS = FROZEN MOTION and THE UNCANNY]

RESEARCH ISSUE - TABLEAUX VIVANTS AND POSES PLASTIQUES: A "tableau vivant" [= "living picture"] is a live-posed scene, usually from a known artwork, and therefore requiring a number of participants and complex supporting scenery. A "pose plastique" [= "plastic pose"] is a live posed portrait, sometimes with a historical reference, sometimes not, and requiring only a single participant with little or no scenery. The term "plastic" is used here in its original sense, and indicates that when the sitter's pose is adjusted - a hand moved higher, perhaps, or an eyebrow lowered - the new position is maintained. Cognitive science has no integrated theory to offer for the effectiveness of either genre because neither falls simply into the category of "negative action" described by Keir Elam [see 1980]. Both involve two-dimensional surface decoration made three-dimensional and vibrant, and both - by this token - have their pragmatics complicated by the intervening mind(s) of the performer(s).

1781/7 Kant publishes "Critique of Pure Reason" [buy], the first of three linked treatises concerning cognition, dealing primarily with perception, knowledge, and the relationship between the two.

KEY CONCEPT - THE NOUMENON: [(Pl. noumena).] A noumenon is "an object of purely intellectual intuition, devoid of all phenomenal attributes" (O.E.D.). Alternatively, it is "a basic reality underlying observable phenomena" (Wikipedia). The noumenon is Kant's notion of that which logically precedes the phenomenon, and which cannot therefore be consciously known. They are instead grasped [our word, chosen here to imply a less conscious form of knowing than knowing] "transcendentally".

1782 Having drawn upon the favours of Emma Hart [see 1781] as his model, the British artist George Romney [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Circe" [image]. His model, the future Lady Hamilton, still only 17 years old, shows off the unforced beauty which will shortly make her fortune.

1784 The French painter Jacques-Louis David unveils "Oath of the Horatii", in which a Roman patrician of the Horatius family holds aloft his three sons' swords and has them jointly swear on same that they will defend Rome to the death. The work had been funded by Louis XVI as an allegory to encourage loyalty to the crown in times of troubles [it failed, for he would be guillotined at the height of the French Revolution in 1793]. "The Horatii" is followed by a series of works also adopting Greek and Roman themes, creating a major new style named "Neoclassicism".

ASIDE - HOW TO RECOGNISE NEOCLASSICISM IN ART: Here are some of the features to look for in Neoclassicist artworks: (1) It contrasts historically with Baroque and Rococo. (2) It sits alongside and contrasts with Romanticism and Gothic. (3) The background is deliberately de-emphasised in favour of the foreground [The far wall on Horatii strikes as little more than a quickly colour-washed stage backdrop]. (4) The foreground colours are not particularly vivid, because what is important is the message, not the impact on the eye. (5) The composition in terms of the placing and grouping of the key figures is dictated by the message. There is no extraneous detail. (6) Brushstrokes cannot be seen (again because the message is deemed to be more important than the painter's craft). (7) There is a "frozen moment" feel to the work. (8) The message takes a position on some personal, ethical, social, or political issue from history. It allows the past to inform the present, using allegory.

1785 The German writer Karl Philipp Moritz [Wikipedia biography] begins to promote the notion that art pleases us to the extent that it is "complete in itself" and is graced with an "internal purposiveness". Thus .....

"Moritz continues that a beautiful object does not please us, like a clock or a knife, because it satisfies some need of its own, not even the need to be pleased, but, remarkably, that 'the beautiful needs us in order to be cognised'. [..... For example] when we see a play put on before an empty theatre we are displeased, not for the sake of the author or actors, but for the sake of the play itself, as a work of art whose need to be contemplated is going unfulfilled" (Guyer, 2007 online, e61).

1785 [See firstly 1757] Moses Mendelssohn publishes "Morning Lessons", in which he introduces into his explanatory system a third basic cognitive faculty, the "Faculty of Approval", to sit between those of cognition and desire. The work also includes a convenient example of the use of the German work Affekt to indicate the phenomenal experiencing of an emotion, thus .....

"In the Morning Lessons Mendelssohn [discusses] the effect of the activity of the mind in aesthetic experience on the state of the body [..... He] says that if 'each sensible rapture, each improved condition of the state of the body, fills the soul with the sensible representation of a perfection, then every sensible representation must also, in turn, bring with it some well-being of the body ... And in this way a pleasant emotion [Affekt] arises'" (Guyer, 2007 online, e30-31).

1785 The British philosopher Thomas Reid [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man", in which he distinguishes between "instinctive" judgements of perfection (where we cannot put into words why we find something beautiful), and "rational" judgements (where we can). [THREAD = HISTORY OF AESTHETICS]

1785 The American artist John Singleton Copley [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Charles I Demanding the Five Members in the House of Commons" [PosterShop image

]. This work will be identified by Ernst Gombrich [see 1950], along with others by Jacques Louis David, Goya, Velasquez, and William Blake as demonstrating a new freedom amongst artists to choose their own topic of argument. This is how Gombrich puts it .....

"It is curious how rarely artists before the middle of the eighteenth century [.....] painted a scene from a romance, or an episode of mediaeval or contemporary history. All this changed very rapidly during the period of the French Revolution. Suddenly artists felt free to choose as their subjects anything from a Shakespearean scene to a topical event, anything, in fact that appealed to the imagination and aroused interest" (pp380-381). [THREAD = ART AS REPORTAGE]

1786 The French painter Jean-Baptiste Regnault [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Pygmalion Priant Venus d'Animer sa Statue" [= "Pygmalion Begging Venus to Bring his Statue to Life"] [image], an interpretation of the Pygmalion-Galatea myth [see 8CE (Ovid's Metamorphoses)]. [THREAD = ARTIFICIAL LIFE]

1788 Kant's "Critique of Practical Reason" extends his Pure Reason analytic to include the ethics of volition.

1789 The German poet-playwright Johann Friedrich Schiller publishes a gothic novel of his own, entitled "The Ghost-Seer". He also turns a philosophical eye onto the relationship between artistic beauty and life's broader ethical and social issues. His conclusions are neatly summarised in the poem "The Artists" in which he argues that beauty ennobles humankind and is the key to wisdom. His views on psychology includes the term Spieltrieb [literally "play-drive"], a human motivation towards - ultimately -joy.

1790 The British philosopher Archibald Alison [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste", in which he argues that mere personal preference [= "taste"] for a something has to be learned. Specifically, the object of taste has to be associated with an object of instinctive appeal. [THREAD = HISTORY OF AESTHETICS]

1790 Kant's "Critique of Judgement" links the philosophy of aesthetics to his earlier theories of pure and practical reason [see 1781 and 1788, respectively], espousing the principle that sublime beauty lies in the fitness to please and harmony of the exemplar object; that in the absence of covetous desire it can give pleasure. This third Critique is an attempt at a science "of the power to cognize beauty" (Pluhar, 1987, xlix), and one of Kant's first points is that aesthetics has to treat the terms "beautiful" and "sublime" differently, thus ......

"A critique of pure reason, i.e., of our ability to judge according to a priori principles, would be incomplete if it failed to include, as a special part, a treatment of judgement, which, since it is a cognitive power, also lays claim to a priori principles. [..... Our problems arise] mainly in those judgements [Beurteilungen] called aesthetic, which concern the beautiful and the sublime in nature and in art" (pp5-6).

In fact there are gradations of liking everywhere, beginning with agreeability, then moving upwards through goodness to the beautiful, and each new definition brings problems of its own. With agreeability, for example, Kant is forced to consider two substantially different types of perception, thus .....

"Agreeable is what the senses like in sensation. [.....] Hence whatever is liked, precisely inasmuch as it is liked, is agreeable [.....] The green colour of meadows belongs to objective sensation, i.e., to the perception of an object of sense; but the colour's agreeableness belongs to subjective sensation, to feeling [.....] through which the object is regarded as an object of our liking [.....] This is why we say of the agreeable not merely that we like it but that it gratifies us" (pp47-48).

Similarly with goodness .....

"Good is what, by means of reason, we like through its mere concept. We call something good for [this or that] if we like it only as a mean. But we call something intrinsically good if we like it for its own sake. [.....] In order to consider something good, I must always know what sort of thing the object is [meant] to be, i.e., I must have a [determinate] concept of it. But I do not need this in order to find beauty in something. [.....] A liking for the beautiful must depend on the reflection, regarding an object, that leads to some concept or other [.....]. This dependence on reflection also distinguishes the liking for the beautiful from [that for] the agreeable, which rests entirely on sensation" (pp48-49).

And while some judgements are idiosyncratic and relative, judgements of beauty involve something more fundamental, thus .....

"As regards the agreeable everyone acknowledges that his judgement [is] confined to his own person. [.....] It is agreeable to me. [.....] Hence about the agreeable the following principle holds: Everyone has his own taste of sense. It is quite different (exactly the other way around) with the beautiful. [.....] Many things may be charming and agreeable to [a person]; no one cares about that. But if he proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the same liking from others; he then judges not just for himself but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things" (pp55-56).

A few pages further on Kant distinguishes between "free" and "accessory" beauty, thus .....

"There are two kinds of beauty, free beauty [.....]and merely accessory beauty [.....] Free beauty does not presuppose a concept of what the object is [meant] to be. Accessory beauty does presuppose such a concept, as well as the object's perfection in terms of that concept" (p76).

However the greatest problems come when differentiating the beautiful from the sublime [see 20BCE (Longinus)], thus .....

"The beautiful and the sublime are similar in some respects. We like both for their own sake, and both presuppose that we make a judgement of reflection rather than either a judgement of sense or a logically determinative one. Hence in neither of them does our liking depend on a sensation, such as that of the agreeable, nor on a determinate concept, as does our liking for the good" (p97).

1791 [See firstly 1784, Neoclassicism] A young French art student named Jean Auguste Domonique Ingres [Wikipedia biography] enrols at the French Royal Academy of Painting at Toulouse where he is tutored in the merits of Raphael. Over the coming decades he will become a major force in Neoclassicism. [See next 1795]

1791 The Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen demonstrates a rudimentary speech synthesis apparatus based on bellows, reeds, resonance chambers, and articulators.

1792 A young German philosopher named Johann Fichte anonymously publishes "Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation" in which he challenged Kant's idea of the noumenon, recommending instead that we treat consciousness as not being grounded "in a so-called 'real world'" (Wikipedia). Consciousness is in and of itself, and needs to be investigated as such [see next 1796].

1793 Another of David's students, Anne-Louis Girodet, paints "The Sleep of Endymion". It shows Endymion, cursed-blessed by Zeus to live forever, but asleep, being visited by the moon-goddess Selene [a.k.a., Diana]. This work has now been identified as formative within the Romantic genre, thus .....

"The peculiarities which mark Girodet's position as the herald of the romantic movement are already evident in his 'Endymion'. He has a decided inclination to the ancient style [but his works] are also distinguished for life, nature, and beauty" (Wikipedia). Girodet will become in the fullness of time a favourite of Napoleon Bonaparte, executing a number of major works at his commission [see, e.g., 1802].

1794 A young German painter named Caspar David Friedrich [Wikipedia biography] studies at the University of Copenhagen under the Sturm und Drang masters Lorentzen and Juel. "Mood was paramount [in their work], and influence was drawn from such sources as the Icelandic legend of Edda, the poems of Ossian, and Norse mythology" (Wikipedia). He later explained his method as follows .....

"The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead" (Wikipedia). [See next 1805]

1794 The British novelist Ann Radcliffe publishes the best-selling "The Mysteries of Udolpho", a Gothic fiction piece in the style of Walpole, save that the central male character is beginning to become more into the heroic mould than an outright villain.

1794 The British artist William Blake [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "The Ancient of Days" [image]. This work is another of those named by Ernst Gombrich [see1950] as helping to break with the entrenched traditions of the 18th century, thus .....

"But in his hands the figure has become dream-like and fantastic. In fact, Blake had formed a mythology of his own, and the figure of the vision was not strictly speaking the Lord Himself, but a being of Blake's imagination whom he called Urizen. Though Blake conceived of Urizen as the creator of the world, he thought of the world as bad and therefore of its creator as of an evil spirit. Hence the uncanny nightmare character of the vision [.....] Like the mediaeval artists, he did not care for accurate representation, because the significance of each figure of his dreams was of such overwhelming importance to him that questions of mere correctness seemed to him irrelevant" (p388; emphasis added). [THREADS = DISTURBING ART and THE UNCANNY]

1795 Ingres [see 1791] decamps to Paris to complete his studies under the pioneer of Neoclassicism, Jacques-Louis David. Then, prompted by a less than enthusiastic reception in France galleries, he spent his middle years working in Italy with Italian sponsors, soon winning the Grand Prix de Rome for "Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the Tent of Achilles" (1801) [image]. [See next 1813]

1795 The German Idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling publishes "On Self as Principal of Philosophy", and, over the ensuing decades, becomes a major force within the German Romantic movement.

1796 Matthew Lewis publishes "The Monk", a Gothic novel, one of whose characters is the Wandering Jew.

******************** 19TH CENTURY *******************

1802 A young Scottish poet named Walter Scott publishes "The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border", a collation of Scottish folk ballads which touch (as folklore inevitably must) on verbal history, popular nationalism, legend, and tradition.

1802 The struggling young British painter John Constable [Wikipedia biography] remarks to a correspondent that "The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth" (cited in Gombrich, 1950, p390).

1802 Working his way through a series of commissions from Napoleon Bonaparte, Anne-Louis Girodet produces "Malvine, Dying in the Arms of Fingal" and "Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of the Fallen French Heroes", both on themes suggested by Macpherson's "Ossian".

1804 The Swiss physician Ignaz Troxler [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "Űber das Verschwinden gegebener Gegenstände innerhalb unserer Gesichtkreises" [= "On the Disappearance of Objects in the Visual Field"], in which he records the subjective fading out of objects on the edge of a fixated visual scene. To experience "Troxler's fading" for yourself, click here. [See next 1833 (Brewster)] [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

KEY CONCEPT - STABILISED RETINAL IMAGES: "Troxler's fading" is a simple enough phenomenon to experience but is just the tip of a much larger theoretical iceberg. The real issue concerns what the phenomenon tells us about the nature of the visual system. What is it that allows vision to fail - and fading is failing - so quickly, and why? Follow the THREAD to see more recent thinking on this issue.

KEY CONCEPT - STABILISED AUDITORY IMAGES: The strange perceptual phenomena obtained with stabilised retinal images are mutatis mutandis similar to some of the illusions obtained by unnaturally stimulating the auditory system. A stabilised auditory image might involve the fading of one or other auditory "formants" (single frequencies in a many frequency sound) resulting in a change in the quality of the final perception, or the subjective re-identification of a monotonously repeating word. The present resource will not include this line of research because we are primarily interested in the visual system. We note in parting, however, that stabilised auditory effects might well be involved in the repetitive chanting found in certain religious systems.

1805 Drawing on the travels and experiences of his youth, the Polish soldier-scholar-adventurer Jan Potocki starts work on a story chain under the title "The Manuscript Found in Saragossa", fragments of which are published over the ensuing ten years. The work will not be available in English until Ian Maclean's 1995 translation. "The stories reflect Potocki's interest in secret societies, the supernatural, and oriental cultures" (Wikipedia). Indeed Potocki was himself "probably a Freemason and had a strong interest in the occult" (ibid.).

1805 Following the Bouchon-Falcon breakthrough in 1725/8, another French weaver - Joseph Jacquard - improves Falcon's system, enabling continuous loops of up to 24,000 instruction cards to be put together. The Falcon-Jacquard system is nowadays routinely cited in histories of computing, because it reduced a repetitive human craft to an essentially numerical process, it brought numerical control to a manufacturing industry, and it involved programming as we nowadays understand it.

1805 Caspar Friedrich [see 1794], now based in Dresden, wins this year's Weimar Competition thanks to Goethe being particularly impressed with his work. His growing reputation gets him elected to the Berlin Academy in 1810.

1805 Scott follows up his earlier successes with "The Lay of the Last Minstrel", "The Lady of the Lake" (1810), Waverley (1814), and "Ivanhoe" (1819). This is how Scott is now assessed .....

"Scott's ponderousness and prolixity were out of step with Modernist sensibilities. Nevertheless, he was responsible for two major trends that carry on to this day. First, he essentially invented the modern historical novel [.....] Second, his Scottish novels followed on from James Macpherson's Ossian cycle in rehabilitating the public perception of Highland culture after years in the shadows following [.....] the Jacobite rebellions. [..... However,] his re-creations of the Highlands were more than a little fanciful" (Wikipedia).

1808 Goethe completes the first draft of his play "Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy", a complex piece of social observation in which Mephistopheles, a devil, bets with God that he can corrupt even the most upright of human beings. They test this hypothesis on an ambitious but struggling academic named Faust, overly keen to discover the secrets of existence [cf. Gerbert, Bacon, John Dee, and Edward Kelley]. Faust's ambitions and lusts make his seduction comparatively simple and leave him shamed at the trail of human destruction he has caused. The world will have to wait until 1832 for the denouement to the story.

1808 The German playwright Heinrich von Kleist stages "Die Hermansschlacht", a dramatisation of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest [see 9CE].

1810 Friedrich completes "The Abbey in the Oakwood", a sepia-toned landscape in which monks carrying a coffin thread their way through a grove of winter-stripped oaks towards a ruined abbey. Images such as these will later abound in 20th century horror movies.

1810? Girodet completes "Malvine, Dying in the Arms of Fingal" [image].

1811 The Scottish physician Sir Charles Bell publishes "New Anatomy of the Brain" in which he analyses the organisation of the spinal cord and proposes a fundamental distinction between sensory and motor functions. The motor tracts, he claims, run ventrally.

1811? Francois Gérard, one of Jacques-Louis David's students, produces "Ossian on the Bank of the Lora".

1812 Caspar Friedrich [see 1805] produces "Old Heroes' Graves" [image], in which the spirit of Arminius, victor of the Teutoburg Forest campaign against the Romans in 9AD, returns to help the German states in their struggles against Napoleonic France. [See next 1818]

ASIDE - HOW TO RECOGNISE FRIEDRICH'S PROTO-SYMBOLISM: "Bare oak trees and tree stumps [are] recurring elements of Friedrich's paintings, symbolising death. Countering the sense of despair are Friedrich's symbols for redemption: the cross and the clearing sky promise eternal life, and the slender moon suggests hope and the growing closeness of Christ. In his paintings of the sea, anchors often appear on the shore, also indicating a spiritual hope" (Wikipedia). Or more succinctly, "the sun does not shine often in Friedrich's paintings and, when it does, it is usually going down" (Blanning, 2010, p72).

1812 [See firstly 1620? (Laanen)] The German writers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm [Wikipedia biography] publish "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" [= "Children's and Household Tales"], a collection of German folk and fairy tales. Not only will these stories reappear as English fairy stories such as "Cinderella", "Tom Thumb", "Hansel and Gretel", etc., etc., but they also provide fascinating insight into the interplay of a society's folklore and its formal belief system(s). Each tale is effectively a morality play in miniature and strongly reinforces the status quo. Tale #39, "The Elves", includes the following take on the changeling issue .....

"A certain mother's child had been taken away out of its cradle by the elves, and a changeling with a large head and staring eyes, which would do nothing but eat and drink, laid in its place. In her trouble, she went to her neighbour, and asked her advice. The neighbour said that she was to carry the changeling into the kitchen [.....] and boil some water in two eggshells, which would make the changeling laugh, and if he laughed, all would be over with him" (p208).

The Grimms' mediaevalist imagery inspired both painted artworks such as Alexander Zick's "Aschenputtel" [= "Cinderella"] and book illustrations such as those by Arthur Rackham for the English translation. More recently, highly sanitised versions of the tales have made a fortune for the Disney Corporation and continue to inspire a host of neo-mediaevalist illustrators [specimens].

1813 Ingres [see 1795] is commissioned to paint the archetypically Neoclassicist "The Dream of Ossian" [image] to grace Napoleon's pied-a-terre in Rome.

1816 Ernst Hoffman publishes a short story entitled "Der Sandman" ["The Sandman"] in which a young student, Nathaniel, falls for the female automaton, Olimpia, only to descend into suicidal madness when he finally finds out the truth. Hoffman's collection of stories went under the title "The Night Pieces" and is an example of a Gothic genre in literature which does not appear to have been paralleled in art until later in the 19th century. Freud published an essay entitled "The Uncanny" in 1919 in which he discussed the psychodynamic symbolology in this and similar works. Another story, "Rath Krespel", is about the confrontation between vulnerable innocence [in this case the ailing Antonia] and evil genius, and reappears in George du Maurier's "Trilby" [see 1894].

1817 The British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coins the term "willing suspension of disbelief" to describe the willingness of a reader to engage as audience in any act of story-telling, be it in literature, drama, in poetry, or in any of the particular forms of visual art. [Cf. Kris's "aesthetic illusion" (1953) and Radford's "Paradox of Fiction" (1975)] [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1818 The German philosopher Georg Hegel begins lecturing in aesthetics at Heidelberg. His views on the purpose of art have recently been summarised as follows .....

"The principal aim of art is not, therefore, to imitate nature, to decorate our surroundings, to prompt us to engage in moral or political action, or to shock us out of our complacency. It is to allow us to contemplate and enjoy created images of our own spiritual freedom - images that are beautiful precisely because they give expression to our freedom. Art's purpose, in other words, is to enable us to bring to mind the truth about ourselves, and so to become aware of who we truly are. Art is there not just for art's sake, but for beauty's sake, that is, for the sake of a distinctively sensuous form of human self-expression and self-understanding" (Houlgate, 2009 online).

1818 Girodet's "Sleep of Endymion" [image] takes a popular Greek myth as the basis for an artwork, and is nowadays acclaimed as a model of Romanticism.

1818 Caspar Friedrich [see 1794] now exhibits "Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer" [= "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog"], since acclaimed as a masterpiece of 19th century sublime. We shall say more concerning this work here, since we shall be returning to it in some detail in due course [see 1998 (Wollheim)]. [See next 1837]

1818 Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus" popularises the notion that biological systems can be "sewn together" and that (relatively) normal cognition and affect can be obtained from what would previously have been regarded as a monster. The book was written very much as a cautionary tale (hence the Promethean reference of the subtitle). Its theme was science biting off more than it could chew.

"I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection. In the Sorrows of Werter, besides the interest of its simple and affecting story, so many opinions are canvassed and so many lights thrown upon what had hitherto been to me obscure subjects that I found in it a never-ending source of speculation and astonishment. The gentle and domestic manners it described, combined with lofty sentiments and feelings, which had for their object something out of self, accorded well with my experience among my protectors and with the wants which were forever alive in my own bosom. But I thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretension, but it sank deep. The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me with wonder. I did not pretend to enter into the merits of the case, yet I inclined towards the opinions of the hero, whose extinction I wept, without precisely understanding it. As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read and to whose conversation I was a listener. I sympathized with and partly understood them, but I was unformed in mind; I was dependent on none and related to none. 'The path of my departure was free,' and there was none to lament my annihilation. My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them" (Frankenstein, Chapter 15).

Frankenstein is nowadays classified as Gothic fiction within Romanticism.

1820? The American painter William Hicks [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Peaceable Kingdom" [image in bio], a distinctly idealised depiction of William Penn's 1682 treaty with the Native Americans. This picture will be identified by Carl Jung (1961 [q.v.]) as an instance of a Paradise Archetype in art. [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNGIAN)]

1820 The Spanish artist Francisco Goya [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "The Giant" [image]. This work is another of those named by Ernst Gombrich [see1950] as helping to break with the entrenched traditions of the 18th century, thus .....

"Most of [Goya's prints] are fantastic visions of witches and uncanny apparitions. Some are meant as accusations against the powers of stupidity and reaction, of cruelty and oppression, which Goya had witnessed in Spain, others seem just to give shape to the artist's nightmares. ["The Giant"] represents one of the most haunting of his dreams - the figure of a giant sitting on the edge of the world. [.....] The monster sits in the moonlit landscape like some evil incubus. Was Goya thinking of the fate of his country, of its oppression by wars and human folly? Or was he simply creating an image like a poem? For this was the most outstanding effect of the break in tradition - that artists felt free to put their private visions on paper as hitherto only poets had done" (pp384-386; emphasis added).

1821 The British inventor Charles Babbage demonstrates a prototype "Difference Engine", a complex mechanical calculator. He later begins work on his "Difference Engine No, 1", a 15-ton mechanical calculator designed to resolve polynomial functions at high speed and to high levels of accuracy. The machine is never finished and Government funding is withdrawn in 1842.

1823 The German poet Heinrich Heine [Wikipedia biography] publishes the tragic play "Almansor". 110 years later this work will be one of those burned in the streets of Berlin for not neatly representing the Nazi ideal. Ironically the play includes the following dismally accurate prediction: "..... where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also".

1824 The French anatomist Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens devises a method of deliberately inflicting carefully targeted brain injuries on animals in order to observe which behaviours were lost as a result, and which preserved. His general conclusions were as follows .....

"Each part of the nervous system [] has a proper function; and that is what makes it a distinct part: but the activity of each of these parts affects the activities of all the others; and that is what makes them parts of a particular system. [What matters] is the way each distinct part of this system contributes to the common activity" (Flourens, 1824).

1825 The French physician Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud gives an early description of a motor aphasia, thus .....

"It is evident that the movements of the organs of speech must have a special centre in the brain, because speech can be completely lost in individuals who present no other signs of paralysis. [From these observations I believe] that the principal lawgiver of speech is to be found in the anterior lobes of the brain" (Bouillaud, 1825; cited in Head, 1926, p1).

ASIDE: The role of the frontal lobes in directing purposive behaviour is nowadays well established. They seem to be the home of planning, response selection, working memory, and the monitoring processes which (in most of us) allow us to withhold socially unacceptable behaviours when in polite company. They also help prevent contention for resources whenever mental multi-tasking results in competition for the same resource. [These facilities have all been incorporated into the Konrad software.]

1825 Olinde Rodrigues coins the word "avant-garde" to describe the creative arts' potential role in leading the rest of society towards radical social reform. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1827 The German philosopher Karl Trahndorff [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Aesthetics, or Theory of Philosophy of Art", in which he coins the term Gesamtkunstwerk [= "total artwork"]. The notion will reappear in Wagner's theory of musical drama a generation later. [THREAD = AESTHETIC THEORY]

1832 Having waited since 1808, Goethe finally publishes the follow-up "Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy".

1832 The British philosopher John Stuart Mill [Wikipedia biography] publishes an article entitled "On Genius", in which he espouses the view that "knowing come only from within", and that genius resides in being able to work things out for oneself. Education systems which are based upon the "cramming" of facts - learning by rote - fundamentally fail the students involved. [THREAD = THE NATURE OF THE CREATIVE ACT]

1833 Unaware of Ignaz Troxler's earlier paper [see 1804], the British physicist Sir David Brewster [Wikipedia biography] reports perceptual fading when gaze fixation was consciously prolonged. [See next 1904 (Tscherning)] [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

1834 Having seen weaknesses in his 1824 Difference Engine design, Babbage turns now to the blueprints for a more powerful "Analytical Engine". Central to this design is a programming facility using the Jacquard Card mechanism.

1834 The British inventor William G. Horner [Wikipedia biography] invents "The Zoetrope", a drum-stroboscope [image; action video courtesy of Bre Pettis] capable of generating (relatively) smooth perception of movement from a sequence of fractionally different image frames. [See next 1839 (Daguerre)] [THREAD = THE HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1835 [See firstly 530BCE (Pythagoras)] The German mathematician Martin Ohm [Wikipedia biography] includes a discussion of the Golden Ratio in his mathematical writings, introducing as he does so the alternative popular name "der goldene Schnitte" [= "the Golden Section"]. [See next 1854 (Zeising)] [THREAD = THE NATURE OF BEAUTY]

1836 The French physician Marc Dax is one of the first to record that when a stroke paralyses the right side of a right-handed person, the patient usually suffers speech loss as well.

1837 William Whewell's "History of the Inductive Sciences" [buy] revisits Francis Bacon's ideas on how best to pursue truth, and suggests the modern hypothetico-deductive scientific method.

1837 Caspar Friedrich [see 1812] exhibits "Landscape with Owl, Grave, and Coffin", one of his last works. He will now become little spoken of until the rise of German nationalism in the 20th century brings his work out of obscurity.

1838 The German physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner [Wikipedia biography] reports an experiment on the subjective experience of a colour illusion when presented with spinning black and white patterns. This will prove the first of many studies into human perceptual abilities using the objective and replicable methods of the physical sciences. Fechner's new science will become known as "psychophysics", and will in the fullness of time evolve into modern experimental psychology. [See next 1860]

1839 The American author Edgar Allan Poe publishes "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque", a collection of short stories on a generally dismal theme. They were deliberately created as Gothic fiction because it was selling well at the time, and Poe needed money. But their obsession with death, decomposition, premature burial, etc., seem to have come from Poe's inner being. For example in "The Fall of the House of Usher" deals with the fatal character failings of one Roderick Usher, his "mansion of doom", and of a mentally disturbed twin-sister too soon buried. This, together with works like "The Masque of the Red Death" and "The Pit and the Pendulum" would go on to provide fertile sources for the Hammer Horror films over a century later.

1839 The French chemist Louis Daguerre [Wikipedia biography] patents a silver-based photographic process. [See next 1841 (Fox Talbot)] [THREAD = THE HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1841 The British chemist William H. Fox Talbot [Wikipedia biography] demonstrates the "calotype", an early form of photographic image making. [See next 1861 (Sellers)] [THREAD = THE HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1842 The Swiss theologian Jacob Burckhardt, having noted the need for a new academic discipline in art history, publishes the first of a series of works on art collections and styles across Europe. In his analysis of Renaissance Italian art he would popularise the term Manierismus [German = "Mannerism"] to describe the bella maniera work of Raphael and those who based their practice upon his.

1842 The British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Steamer in a Snowstorm" [Tate image]. This work is another of those named by Ernst Gombrich [see1950] as helping to break with the entrenched traditions of the 18th century, thus .....

"In Turner, nature always reflects and expresses man's emotions. We feel small and overwhelmed in the face of the powers we cannot control, and are compelled to admire the artist who had nature's forces at his command" (p390).

1842 The Austro-Hungarian poet Nikolaus Lenau [Wikipedia biography] publishes an epic poem entitled "Die Albigenser" in which the sad history of the Cathars [see 1198] is brought up to date in romanticised verse.

1843 The British philosopher John Stuart Mill [Wikipedia biography] publishes "A System of Logic" [buy], in which pioneers the use of the case study method in furthering philosophical enquiry.

1846 The German philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer [Wikipedia biography] publishes the first volume of his "Aesthetics, or the Science of Beauty". Other volumes will follow over the ensuing decade, all emphasising the basic human faculty for the "symbolic interjection" of our emotions into our mental model of the world of objects. [See next 1873 (Robert Vischer)] [THREAD = EMOTIONALITY IN ART]

1848 A group of British painters led by William Holman Hunt, John Millais, and Dante Rosetti, react against the popularity of Mannerism on the grounds that it is essentially mechanical, and establish the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood". The objectives of the movement are to reclaim the subject matter and methods of Renaissance painting such as it had been prior to Raphael.

1849 Gustave Courbet's painting "Stone Breakers" depicts a very everyday theme painted in a very retinally faithful style using the subjects themselves and not models. This gets mixed reviews [critics accused Courbet of the "deliberate pursuit of ugliness"] but soon inspires the school of painting known as "Realism".

HOW TO RECOGNISE "REALIST" ARTWORKS: [See firstly 350BCE, Aristotle's Poetics, concerning the portrait painter's role being to beautify their subject.] By setting out to be "true to life" a Realist artwork becomes important for what it is not, that is to say, it is not Classical because it depicts no mythical or religious encounter or deed, nor is it Mannerist because it has not been artificially beautified, nor is it Romantic because it there is no instantly identifiable hero, and so on. Realist artworks are important instead because their very matter-of-fact-ness prompts you to contemplate instead the back story - to identify psychologically for a moment with the characters depicted, to put yourself in their place and - ultimately - to understand the world differently as a result. What, for example, would it be like to be one of Courbet's stonebreakers? What are their names? Are they brothers? Cousins? Do they have children? What are their ambitions in life? How does society at large treat them? Is that treatment fair and just? If not, what can be done about it and by whom? And so on .....

1849 The German composer Richard Wagner publishes an essay entitled "Art and Revolution" in which he sets out his masterplan for the proper placement of art in society, namely as a Neoclassical ideal rather than as something which merely sells well [what Bell (1914, p98) will later refer to as "literary music"]. In so doing he refines and popularises Trahndorff's notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk [see 1827] as a combination of music, choreography, a strongly poetic libretto, and the very loftiest of purposes.

1849 The German physician-physicist Hermann von Helmholtz [Wikipedia biography] is appointed Director of the Königsberg Physiological Institute, and succeeds in measuring the transmission speed of the nervous impulses which activate the leg of the frog at around 100 feet per second. [See next 1851]

1850 The American physician Henry J. Bigelow reports on the case of a 25 year old railroad worker named Phineas P. Gage, the victim of a blasting accident in 1848 which had driven a four-foot long iron bar in through his left cheek and out through the top of his skull. The injury destroyed much of the left frontal lobe, together with the medial elements of the right. Nevertheless it did not prevent the victim walking part of the way to the surgery, nor his survival for another twenty years. What is equally noteworthy were the changes to the man's personality which resulted. Whilst his general intellectual level remained more or less unaffected, his injury changed him from a well-respected and competent foreman to a state of indifference, carelessness, and frequent profanity.

1850 The French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau [Wikipedia biography] wins this year's Prix de Rome with "Zenobia" [image], and begins to develop a reputation for near photo-realistic traditionalism.

1851 Hermann von Helmholtz [see 1849] invents the opthalmoscope, an instrument for studying the internal structures of the eye. He also studies the processes of judgement involved in colour perception, and his "Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik" (various volumes from 1856) [in English as "Handbook of Physiological Optics"] will remain the standard textbook on the perception of form, colour, and movement for nigh on a century. [THREAD = THE SCIENCE OF VISION]

1851 The French playwrights Jules Barbier and Michel Carré dramatise four of Ernst Hoffmann's "Night Pieces" [see 1816], including "The Sandman", and stage it in Paris under the title "Tales of Hoffmann".

1853 The French painter Gustave Moreau [Wikipedia biography] has "A Scene from the Song of Songs" and "The Death of Darius" accepted by this year's Paris Salon, establishing him as a painter of biblical and classical themes. [See next 1864]

1854 [See firstly 530BCE (Pythagoras)] The German psychologist Adolf Zeising [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Proportionen der Menschlischen Körpers" [= "The Proportions of the Human Body"], in which he argues from selected examples that there is a nature-wide law of "Proportionality" based on the Golden Section. [See next 1865 (Fechner)] [THREAD = THE NATURE OF BEAUTY]

1855 The American artist James Whistler [Wikipedia biography] arrives in France to seek his fortune. He settles in the Bohemian quarter of Paris and slowly forges contacts with Courbet [see 1849], Manet [see 1865], and Baudelaire [see 1857]. He achieves his first exhibited work, "La Mere Gerard" [image] in 1858, just prior to removing to London. In England his "At the Piano" [image] gets him accused of "a recklessly bold manner and sketchings of the wildest and roughest kind" (Wikipedia). His "Symphony in White, No. 1" (1861)[image] was well received when exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in Paris in 1863. [See next 1871]

1856 The British Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt [Wikipedia biography] completes "The Scapegoat" [Wikipedia image], an apparently uncomplicated portrait of a goat on the salt flats beside the Dead Sea. His expressed intention is to depict the Levitican scapegoat, cast out as a symbol of atonement [see full story], thereby inviting us also to remember the later sacrifice of Christ's crucifixion. Not all viewers of the work were able to decipher the symbolism. [THREAD = ARCHETYPES IN ART (THE SCAPEGOAT)]

1857 Influenced by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the French writer Charles Baudelaire publishes "The Flowers of Evil" [buy], a book of poems on humankind's general fascination with the darker side of its nature. Individual topics ranged from rape and poison via Satan and diabolism to lesbianism, vampyrism, and pus. This genre will shortly be supported by the likes of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, and is currently flagged as on the stylistic cusp between Gothic Romanticism and what Jean Moréas will describe in 1886 as "Symbolism".

1858 Robert Zimmermann publishes "Aesthetics".

1859 The French composer Félicien-César David stages his opera "Herculanum" in which one of the characters is named "Olympia" [see 1985 below for the historical significance of this name].

1859 The British physician-zoologist Charles Darwin [Wikipedia biography], after 20 years collecting data and honing his arguments, publishes "The Origin of Species", in which he spells out the first formally complete theory of evolution. [See next 1872] [THREAD = THE NATURE OF INSTINCT]

1859 The Danish-French painter Camille Pissarro [Wikipedia biography] has his first work accepted for exhibition at the Paris Salon. His style has been influenced by that of Gustave Courbet [see 1849], Jean-Francois Millet, and Jean Corot, and his subjects are typically plein air rural studies. [See next 1872 (Cézanne)]

1860 Inspired by the works of Sir Walter Scott, the Italian painter Giovanni Fattori produces a number of Romantic paintings on themes of Scottish independence. Over the ensuing years he develops a style emphasising strong but geometrically simple composition. He also benefits from membership of the Macchiaioli, "a group of Tuscan painters whose methods and aims are somewhat similar to those of the Impressionists" (Wikipedia).

1860 Gustav Fechner [see 1838] publishes "Elements of Psychophysics" in which he reports a series of experiments into the relationship between what is available to our senses, what is detected by them, and the phenomenal perceptions which result. Equations and graphs showed many underlying predictabilities, all empirically replicable. [See next 1865]

KEY CONCEPT - PSYCHOPHYSICAL METHODS: Fechner is nowadays recognised as one of the founding fathers of experimental psychology. His experimental methods all require subjective judgement on the part of the person being tested, and their results therefore need careful interpretation if the whole process of enquiry is to avoid being either consciously or unconsciously biased. Nevertheless the procedures followed by the researcher are entirely replicable and the records maintained are every bit as objective as those maintained by "hard" scientists such as physicists and chemists.

1861 The French neurologist Pierre Broca reports on cases of non-fluent aphasia associated with lesions to the left lower frontal region of cerebral cortex.

1861 The American inventor Coleman Sellers [Wikipedia biography] patents the "Kinematoscope", a simple way of flicking through a series of slightly different images to obtain the impression of motion. [See next 1870 (Heyl)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1861 Having shown promise in his drawing classes at the School of Fine Arts in Aix, the young French painter Paul Cézanne [Wikipedia biography] leaves Provence for Paris and enrols at the Académie Suisse, where he meets and mixes with Armand Guillaumin, Camille Pissarro [see 1859], Jean Guillemet, and the Bohemian intellectuals frequenting the Cafe Guerbois on Avenue de Clichy [more on these]. He is soon dispirited, however, and returns south to work at his father's bank. [See next 1863]

1863 Hermann von Helmholtz [see 1849] now turns his laboratory skills to the auditory system, publishing his findings in "Tonempfindungen als Physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik" [in English as "On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music"]. [THREAD = THE SCIENCE OF HEARING]

1863 Paul Cézanne [see 1861] achieves his first professional success at this year's Salon des Refusés, although his style strikes critics and public alike as rough and untutored. He will later refer to this time as a period of "couillarde", that is to say, of vigour, heartiness, and daring (Brion, 1972). Works from this period include "Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne" (1866) [image], which will eventually be included in the 1882 Salon exhibition, and "Leda and the Swan" (1868) [image]. [See next 1872]

1864 Gustave Moreau [see 1853] exhibits "Oedipus and the Sphinx" [image], since described as one of the first Symbolist works. Moreau will go on to teach at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris.

1865 Gustav Fechner [see 1838] now turns his laboratory skills to aesthetics by studying judgements of the "Golden Rectangle". He finds that the ideal rectangle has height and width in the ratio 21:34. [See next 2010 (Phillips et al)] [THREAD = THE NATURE OF BEAUTY]

1865 The French painter Edouard Manet exhibits "Olympia", a female reclining nude [now in the Musee d'Orsay, Paris][image]. The painting depicts no more nudity than had been seen in various Renaissance works but because Manet seems to be criticising French society's attitude to women the work caused quite a controversy. The main cause of offence was initially that the central character is clearly depicted as a prostitute rather than a classical beauty, and then that the expression on her face is one of unexplained challenge. The art world has been discussing the causes of the furore ever since. Almost exactly a century later the young performance artist Carolee Scheeman will reprise the work in tableau vivant format.

ASIDE: In fact the painting's name seems not to have been chosen by Manet at all, but by a friend and sponsor of his, the art critic Zacharie Astruc. Flescher (1985) points out that Olympia was not a common French girl's name at the time: it was an assumed name with a particular meaning. Specifically it seems to have grown popular in the 1830s when it was adopted by French prostitutes as their nom d'enterprise. Parent-Duchâtelet (1831) had studied the practice here, and had identified "Colette, 'La Courtille', 'Brunette' as designations adopted by the lower classes, while Angelina, Flore, and Olympe signified those of a higher echelon". Floyd (2004) suggests that Olympia was deliberately painted to be visually similar to a certain Marguerite Bellanger, an intimate of Emperor Napoleon III.

ASIDE: None of the competing explanations of the Olympia controversy makes much of the Olimpia automaton in Hoffmann's "The Sandman". It may or may not be relevant that Barbier and Carré's "Tales of Hoffmann" had been staged in Paris in 1851, giving Parisians a recent alternative source for the name Olympia. The name would certainly be appropriate to the extent that the automaton Olimpia had been built to utter but a single human word, the word "yes", surely an ideal (albeit short) vocabulary for a prostitute. There is, however, little sense of the uncanny when viewing Manet's ouevre.

1866 The first steam-powered steering system is patented by the Scottish engineer J. Macfarlane Gray in 1866, and installed in the SS Great Eastern. The essence of the invention was that when the helm was moved to a new position no direct attempt was made to move the rudder. Instead, the helm moved a steam valve which powered a gear-train which moved the rudder. It is now known that the separation in this way of the control instruction from the power to execute it is typical of mechanical action systems in both engineering and biology.

1866 Gustave Courbet [see 1849] adds "L'Origine du Monde" [image], a hair-by-hair detailed female full-frontal nude, to his Realist portfolio. [THREAD = ART MOVEMENTS (REALISM)]

1868 The Dutch physiologist Franciscus Donders publishes a paper entitled "On the Speed of Mental Processing" in which he brings "central processing time" into the reaction time equation to help account for whatever mental decision making was needed between the sensory and the motor conduction processes. He devised a technique for comparing the average time for a simple reaction task with the average time for exactly the same reaction delivered or withheld according to the outcome of a broader decision task [this two-stimulus/two-response arrangement was known at the time as Donders' "type b" reaction and is known now as "choice reaction time"; Donders "type a" reaction was a single response to a single stimulus, and his "type c" reaction was a single response to two stimuli]. The simple reaction was always quicker than the one requiring the additional decision making, and by subtracting one set of timings from the other Donders was able to factor out what we would nowadays conceptualise as "thinking time".

KEY CONCEPT - PERCEPTUAL STAGES (3): [See firstly 1662, Descartes on Neurotransmission] Donders' early psychophysical experimentation raised an important new awareness, namely that different parts of the end-to-end process of cognition take finite amounts of time. Perceiving takes time, reasoning and decision making takes time, and so too does converting a mental act of will into the muscle contractions needed to express it physically. [This inset topic continues after 1874, Wernicke]

1868 The Italian painter Domenico Morelli accepts a professorship at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, where he specialises in religious, mystical, and supernatural themes.

1869 The British anthropologist Sir Francis Galton [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Hereditary Genius" [buy], in which he concluded that intellectual ability - and thus success and richness - was largely inherited, even to the extent that the rich should be encouraged to breed more freely than the poor. "I have no patience," Galton wrote, "with the hypothesis [that] babies are born pretty much alike". [THREAD = THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CREATIVITY]

1870 The first volume of Napoléon Peyrat's "History of the Albigeois", the culmination of 40 years of research into the story of the Cathars.

1870 The American inventor Henry R. Heyl patents the "Phasmatrope" [detail], and early moving projector of moving images. [See next 1878 (Muybridge)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1870 [See firstly 1838 (Fechner and psychophysics)] The British scientist W. Stanley Jevons [Wikipedia biography] steps out of discipline for a few days to devise and conduct a simple yet theoretically important experiment in human psychophysics. He is interested in measuring the "span of apprehension", that is to say, the number of simple objects which can accurately be visually perceived in a single brief exposure. He obtains his data using a only a supply of dried beans and a flat tray. For each trial he tosses a random number of beans into the tray and immediately estimates how many there are. He then counts the beans accurately and records any error. As the results accumulate they expose a fundamental property of human cognition - we can only accurately apperceive around five separate items at a time. Beyond that number we apperceive instead groups of items of approximated size, whose true number cannot be established in a single glance but needs to be counted.

1870 The Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch [Wikipedia biography] publishes the novel "Venus in Furs" [buy], in which the central character obtains sexual gratification by being whipped by a beautiful woman. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1871 James Whistler [see 1855] unveils "Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist's Mother" [image]. Popularly known as "Whistler's Mother", this work stands as an example of mid-Victorian stylistic experimentation and has remained instantly recognisable ever since. [See next 1885]

1871 Drawing upon his experience treating battlefield head injuries during the American Civil War, the American neurosurgeon Silas Weir Mitchell [International Brain Research Organisation biography] publishes a paper entitled "Phantom Limbs", in which he summarises the stump hallucinations experienced following traumatic amputation [see details].

RESEARCH ISSUE - PHANTOM LIMB: Peter Brugger [see 1994] has recently suggested that phantom phenomena might help explain the Doppelgänger hallucination, pointing out that the latter may be regarded as a whole body phantom.

1872 The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche [Wikipedia biography] publishes "The Birth of Tragedy" [buy], in which, amongst other things, he distinguishes between a "Dionysian" mental world wherein - after the Greek god Dionysus - everything is impulsive and hedonistic, and an "Apollonian" mental world wherein - after the ways of Apollo - everything is logical and ordered [more on this distinction]. In this, and many later works, the Dionysian way of being is seen as the best way of encouraging an artist's creative energies. [This distinction is further discussed in 1953 (Ehrenzweig)]

1872 Charles Darwin [see 1859] now publishes "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals", in which he identifies groups of human emotional states, complete with characteristic facial expressions, which have much in common with the instinctive (and by definition non-verbal) communication of lower vertebrate species. His groupings include "low spirits" (anxiety, grief, despair), "high spirits" (joy, love, tenderness), the violently negative states of hatred and anger, a cluster of mildly negative states such as disgust and guilt, a cluster of avoidance-related states such as surprise, fear, and horror, and a cluster of self-related derivative states such as shame and shyness, in which blushing plays a major part. [THREAD = THE NATURE OF INSTINCT]

1872 Paul Cézanne [see 1861] now studies for a while under Camille Pissarro [see 1859] at Pontoise, just outside Paris, and takes his mentor's advice never to paint with anything but the three primary colours. Pissarro also persuaded Cézanne to curb his petulant temper and finish more of his works in single sittings. As a result, "his canvases gained a new freshness and immediacy" (Brion, 1972, p27). [See next 1873]

1873 The French engineer Jean Joseph Farcot publishes a monograph on control technology entitled "Le Servo-Moteur", thus inspiring the word "servomechanism" in the control engineer's vocabulary.

1873 The German philosopher Robert Vischer [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Über das Optische Formgefühl" [= "On the Sense of Optical Feeling"], in which he follows his father's writings on empathy [see 1846 (Friedrich Vischer)] by emphasising the ability of the best artworks to exploit the essentially human ability for Einfühlung [= "feeling in"], that is to say, of projecting our feelings onto just about anything - animate or otherwise - in the outside world. [THREAD = EMOTIONALITY IN ART]

1873 The British philosopher Alexander Bain [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Mind and Body", in which he includes a neural circuit diagram [reproduced as Figure 2 in Wilkes and Wade (1997) and in Olmsted (2006 online)]. This diagram predates those adopted by the early Connectionists by 70 years [see 1943 (McCulloch and Pitts)]. [THREAD = NEURAL CONNECTIONISM]

1873 Paul Cézanne [see 1861] now relocates to nearby Auvers, where he continues to develop his personal style. The results can be seen in his second attempt at "A Modern Olympia" (1873) [image]. [See next 1874]

1874 The German neurologist Carl Wernicke reports on cases of fluent aphasia associated with lesions to the left parieto-temporal region of cerebral cortex. Wernicke accompanies his case reports with an early information flow diagram.

KEY CONCEPT - PERCEPTUAL STAGES (4): [See firstly 1868, Donders] By the late 19th century neurologists were starting to map the input and output sides of linguistic cognition. Wernicke (1874) [show me this] started the ball rolling by showing how the psychological function of word recognition sits in place atop the anatomical auditory nerve. Kussmaul (1878) [show me this] adds an "ideational centre" to take care of the highest cognitive functions. Lichtheim (1885) [show me this] shows only three substantive modules and five neurotransmission pathways, but cross-references these to the clinical symptoms expected if they are damaged. Lichtheim also recognises the possibility that some functional modules can be tightly localised whilst others are anatomically more distributed. Freud (1891) [show me this] shows a "word concept system" comprising four localised lexical processors alongside an "object concept system" made up of content-specific memory fragments. Modern neuropsychology will eventually incorporate all these findings into a larger 21-module X-shaped explanatory diagram of its own, namely that of Ellis (1982) [show me this].[This inset topic continues after 1902 (Meinong)]

1874 The German philosopher Franz Brentano [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint", in which he advances the concept of Vorstellung, the notion that the sensory systems somehow "presented" their contents to higher functions. His subsequent distinction between the act and the content of a presentation was to make him famous. "By presentation," he explained, "I do not mean that which is presented, but rather the act of presentation [den Akt des Vorstellens]" (1874, p79). He also coins the terms "intentionality" and "intentional inexistence" to describe how cognition needs without exception to be directed towards (or be in some way about) some focal object. By focusing on the dynamic sequence of mental processing in this way, Brentano takes a similar approach to the Perceptual Stages Debate as modern cognitive psychologists, and his general approach was further developed by one of his students, Alexius Meinong [see 1902].

1874 The French painter Fernand Cormon [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Meutre au Serail" [= "Murder in the Seraglio"] [Flickr image], and begins to develop a reputation for the gory and the sensationalist.

1874 Paul Cézanne [see 1861] now submits three canvases (including "A Modern Olympia") to the First Impressionist Exhibition. However as his works get better known so too do the criticisms get louder. For example, the guardian of good taste Joris Huysmans accuses Cézanne of "a disconcerting absence of balance" (Vollard, p39). And so begins the debate - still not finally concluded - over whether Cézanne's works were masterpieces or monstrosities. [See next 1877]

1874 During a term in Florence, the Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin [Wikipedia biography] sets out on a ten-year experiment weaving some darker imagery into his otherwise Neoclassical themes [for examples see ArtMagick e-Gallery] [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1875 The German physiologist-philosopher Wilhelm Wundt, one-time assistant to Helmholtz, starts to put together the world's first dedicated psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig, to pursue what he terms "physiological psychology". Over the ensuing years the Leipzig laboratory attracts researchers from across the world.

1877 The German sexologist-psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Psychopathia Sexualis" [buy], a collection of psychiatric case studies characterised by abnormalities in sexuality and sexual behaviour. Amongst the syndromes identified therein is "paraesthesia", where the sexual desire is aroused by or directed towards an inappropriate goal object, as with fetishism or paedophilia.

1877 Paul Cézanne [see 1861] now has 17 paintings included in the Third Impressionist Exhibition. These include "Portrait of Victor Chocquat" (1875) [image], a picture so ugly in one critic's eyes that he felt constrained to warn pregnant women not to view it for fear that it could still their baby in the womb. [See next 1880]

1877 The American philosopher-logician Charles S. Peirce [Wikipedia biography] is elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and publishes "The Fixation of Belief", in which he characterises the scientific method as the least unproductive of a number of rival methods of investigative enquiry. [THREAD = THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD]

1878 The British photographer Eadweard Muybridge [Wikipedia biography] famously uses an array of stills cameras triggered in quick succession by tripwires to demonstrate that a galloping horse has all four feet off the ground at the same time for part of its stride. He will make a lot of money over the coming years with 12-up prints, each a fraction of a second apart, of the horse, nudes, and athletes, moving in frozen time in this way. [See next 1882 (Marey)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1879 A young Gustav Klimt enters the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts to study as an architectural painter. Upon graduating he receives commissions to paint murals and ceilings in a number of Vienna's public buildings.

1879 The German physician Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt [Wikipedia biography] establishes a laboratory for psychological experimentation at the University of Leipzig. Over the next two decades he investigates such phenomena as muscle movement, perception, and reaction time, as well as analysing the modularity of linguistic processing [see 1902].

1880 The Italian art historian Giovanni Morelli [Wikipedia biography] publishes "The Work of the Italian Masters" in which he sets out the principles of objectively based art history, an approach known as "connoisseurship".

1880 Paul Cézanne [see 1861] now enters what has since been assessed as his "constructive period". He has learned how to view scenes analytically as assemblages of geometric shapes - spheres, cylinders, cones, etc., then using that data to synthesise [= construct] the desired artwork. The essence of his new technique is summarised as follows .....

"In contrast to the analytical vision of the Impressionists, Cézanne developed a synthetic vision based on the underlying geometric structure of forms" (Brion, 1972, p38).

Brion (1972) names "Rocks at l'Estaque" (1879-1882) [image] as typical of this period, and we can indeed see therein traces of the old couillade, an Impressionist middle ground, and multiple points of perspective. [See next 1882]

1880 The French painter Bertrand-Jean ("Odilon") Redon exhibits "Spirit of the Forest". Later works such as "Cactus Man" (1881) [image] and "The Crying Spider" (1881) [image] earn him a reputation for unnatural and disturbing composition.

HOW TO RECOGNISE DISTURBING ART: Primarily from the subjective experience that it disturbs you, the onlooker.

RESEARCH ISSUE - DISTURBING ART: [See firstly 1745 (Meier on Emotion in Aesthetics)] The physiological and psychological activities which somehow culminate in a negative emotional experience are just as unavailable for conscious introspection as are those which support our more positive affective experiences. Most of what takes place takes place subconsciously, and our conscious selves are left to make what sense they can out of what little is passed on to them. Physiological science accordingly has no satisfactory explanation of the tingling on the back of the neck when we are afraid, or the welling up of some sudden sadness, or the visceral disgust which comes with the smell of rotting flesh. And by the same token aesthetic science can do no more than superficially correlate the shapes and colours which bring out this or that specific emotion. They know the what and when about what makes a picture sad or scary, but not the underlying how, why, or where.

1881 The French composer Jacques Offenbach turns Barbier and Carré's 1851 play "Tales of Hoffmann" into an opera under the same name.

1881 The German physiologist Hermann Munk [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Über die Funktionen des Grosshirnrinde" [= "On the Functions of the Cerebral Cortex"], in which he reports amongst other things on the behaviour of dogs with deliberately inflicted injury to the cerebral hemispheres. In one often-quoted instance, he notes how an occipital lobe lesion may impair a dog's object recognition ability but leave intact the lower ability to avoid colliding with the same object when walking about! Munk famously termed this phenomenon Seelenblindheit [= "mind blindness"], usually translated as "psychic blindness". [See next 1986 (Weiskrantz)] [THREAD = LOCALISATION OF BRAIN FUNCTION (VISION)]

1881 The American engineer John S. Billings develops the punched card as a means of numeric data storage. [THREAD = HISTORY OF COMPUTING]

1882 The German composer Richard Wagner stages the first performance of the opera "Parsifal", a story involving the Knights of the Grail at Montsalvat, a fictional castle built to protect the Holy Grail and other early Christian relics. The opera recounts the search for Longinus' Spear - the weapon which had tortured Christ upon the Cross - which has been separated from its custodians by dark doings. One of the characters, Kundry, "the most complex character in all of Wagner's dramatic works" (Everett, 2009), seems to be a female version of the legendary Wandering Jew, sometimes beautiful [see Arthur Rackham's "The Grail Bearer" (????)] and sometimes haggardly.

1882 The French inventor Etienne-Jules Marey [Wikipedia biography] demonstrates his photographic "gun", a device capable of taking 12-exposures a second onto a single photosensitive plate. He used this technique to photograph birds in flight and other zoological phenomena. [See next 1888 (Le Prince)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1882 The young French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec [Wikipedia biography] begins a five-year period of study under Léon Bonnat [see 1882] and Fernand Cormon [see 1874] in the Montmartre quarter of Paris. [See next 1889]

1882 The French painter Léon Bonnat [Wikipedia biography] becomes a professor at the École des Beaux Arts, Paris, pursuing a practice which places the "overall effect" of a work above its technical detail.

1882 Thanks to the efforts by his friend Jean Guillemet, Paul Cézanne [see 1861] finally has work accepted at this year's Paris Salon. Nevertheless critical acclaim continues to elude him, and he spends much of his time in retreat in the provinces. Some works from this period appear "half-finished", perhaps because he had yet to find his mature Post-Impressionist style. [See next 1890]

1883 Francis Galton [see 1869] now publishes "Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development", in which he includes a short chapter to the topic of "Colour Associations", in which cites the biographical writings of Baron von Osten Sacken who experienced colour phenomena when recalling numbers and historical events. [See next 1907 (Ferrari)] [THREAD = SYNAESTHESIA]

1884 The American philosopher William James [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "What is an Emotion?" [full text online], in which he puts forward the view of the emotions which we know today as the "James-Lange Theory of Emotion" [see inset 1744].

1884 The American engineer Herman Hollerith, a US Census Bureau civil servant, obtains his first patent for a punched card data recording system. By 1889 he has enough experience for his Tabulating Machine Company to win the contract to process the data from the 1890 US census. [The Census Bureau, for their part, was quick to buy, because it had only just finished manually processing the 1880 figures! All went perfectly, and within a year the machines had tabulated over 62 million US citizens (Cortada, 1993).]

1885 The neurologist Ludwig Lichtheim develops Wernicke's 1874 diagram into a generic two-level biological cognitive hierarchy often referred to nowadays as "Lichtheim's house". Damage to any of the three processing modules or five information flow pathways produces a characteristic type of language disorder.

1885 The French painter Paul Signac [Wikipedia biography] adopts the Pointillist style [more on this]. [See next 1992 (Ratliff)]

1885 The Danish physiologist Carl Georg Lange publishes Om Sindsbevaegelser [= "The Mechanism of the Emotions"] (Lange, 1885/1912), in which he helps to state what will go on to become famous as the James-Lange Theory of the emotions [see inset 1744]. The essence of the argument may be seen in the following extract ..... 

"We have in every emotion as certain and manifest factors: (1) a cause, -- a sense impression, which acts as a rule by the aid of memory, or of an associated idea; -- and thereafter (2) an effect, namely, the previously discussed vasomotor changes, and further, issuing from them, the changes in the bodily and mental functions. The question now arises: What lies between these two factors? Is there anything at all? If I begin to tremble because I am threatened with a loaded pistol, does first a psychical process occur in me, does terror arise, and is that what causes my trembling, palpitation of the heart, and confusion of thought; or are these bodily phenomena produced directly by the terrifying cause, so that the emotion consists exclusively of the functional disturbances in my body?" (p673; emphasis added).

1885 James Whistler [see 1871] takes his "Ten O'Clock Lecture" [full text online] on tour in a thinly veiled attack on establishment values in general (and John Ruskin in particular) and the myth of the "art-loving nation". The true artist - he argues - "takes no joy in the ways of his brethren" (e3), and studies instead the "curious curvings" of Nature, that they might come to grace humanity's humble artefacts. Unfortunately this whole "wondrous" process is soon to be perverted by the arrival of "the middleman", who seeks not the dainty and the lovable in a painting, but its purpose. In Whistler's own words .....

"Then sprang into existence the tawdry, the common, the gewgaw. The taste of the tradesman supplanted the science of the artist, and what was born of the million went back to them, and charmed them, for it was after their own heart; and the great and the small, the statesman and the slave, took to themselves the abomination that was tendered, and preferred it [.....] And the artist's occupation was gone, and the manufacturer and the huckster took his place" (e4).

The outcome is then all rather predictable .....

"..... with his translation from canvas to paper, the work becomes [the middleman's] own. He finds poetry where he would feel it were he himself transcribing the event, invention in the intricacy of the mise en scene [i.e., methodically constructed], and noble philosophy in some detail of philanthropy, courage, modesty, or virtue suggested to him by the occurrence. [.....] Meanwhile, the painter's poetry is quite lost on him" (e8; bold emphasis added).

1886 Reflecting on the poetry of Baudelaire [see 1857], Mallarmé, and Verlaine, and the paintings of Moreau and Redon [see 1880], the art critic Jean Moréas publishes the "Symbolist Manifesto" exhorting adherents of the promising new artform to describe real world phenomena not for their own sake but only to the extent that their appearances represent secret deeper ideas. In poetry this meant evoking rather than describing, and generally using symbolic imagery as the language of the poet's soul, in generating a shared state of mind rather than a shared representation. In painting it often meant focusing even more intensely on the mysticism of the Romantic movement at the expense of ancillary detail, thus .....

"The symbolist painters mined mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul, seeking evocative paintings that brought to mind a static world of silence" (Wikipedia).

ASIDE - HOW TO RECOGNISE SYMBOLIST ARTWORK: Initially an outgrowth of Gothic Romanticism, Symbolist art emphasises the imagination. It uses dreamlike, sometime nightmarish, content to tease out some deeper truth, especially where other methods might fail.

1886 Robert Louis Stevenson's novel "Doctor Jeckyl and Mister Hyde" popularises the possibility that the human psyche might contain both an evil side and a good side, in constant struggle for control over one's thought and behaviour.

1886 Alluding directly to the recent death of his sister, the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch exhibits "The Sick Child" [image]. The work received hostile reviews for having dared to record something so personal as intimate family grief. Munch responds that it is "soul painting", and therefore wholly legitimate. He also concludes that the purpose of art is "to explain life and its meaning". Three years later he will decamp to Paris to spend time studying the styles of Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. He develops a personal style which uses colour rather than form as the primary vehicle of a work's symbolism.

1887 The British anthropologist Sir James George Frazer [Wikipedia biography] contributes an article entitled "Totemism" to the Encyclopedia Britannica. In it he collates what is then known about "savage totemism", that is to say, the use of "material objects which a savage regards with superstitious respect". Totems can relate to one's clan, to one's gender, or to oneself in isolation. Here is how Frazer sees it working .....

"The connection between a man and his totem is mutually beneficient; the totem protects the man, and the man shows his respect for the totem in various ways, by not killing it if it be an animal, by not cutting or gathering it if it be a plant. As distinguished from a fetish [see 1757 (de Brosses)], a totem is never an isolated individual, but always a class of objects, generally a species of animals or of plants, more rarely a class of inanimate natural objects, very rarely a class of artificial objects. [..... A] clan totem is reverenced by a body of men and women who call themselves by the name of the totem, believe themselves to be of one blood, descendents of a common ancestor, and are bound together by common obligations and by a common faith in the totem. Totemism is thus both a religious and a social system" (e3-4). [THREAT = ART, RITUAL, AND BELIEF]

1888 The French painter Paul Serusier [Wikipedia biography] joins Paul Gauguin's circle and puts the resulting experience to work in "The Talisman" [image in the bio], a work which will eventually be assessed as a masterpiece of Post-Impressionist cloisonnism [more on this]. [See next 1890] [THREAD = HISTORY OF AESTHETICS]

1888 The French inventor Louis Le Prince [Wikipedia biography] patents a paper-roll film feed system for a cine camera/projector. [See next 1889 (Eastman)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1888 The German-born American anthropologist Franz U. Boas [Wikipedia biography] publishes "The Central Eskimo", a report on his fieldwork on behalf of the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, including observations on the use of song and dance in Eskimo society. [See next 1894]

1889 The French poet Léon Deschamps [Wikipedia biography (French)] founds "La Plume", a "literary review and artistic bi-monthly", promoting poetry by "Les Décadents" as art and design by the Symbolists and the nascent Art Nouveau movement. One of the disciples is the young Italian poet Filippo Marinetti [see 1909]. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1889 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec [see 1882] now starts to feature regularly at the Salon des Independents and, when the Moulin Rouge cabaret opens its doors nearby, is chosen to promote its Belle Époque brand. He responds with a famously exuberant set of posters [gallery] which brings him not just fame in France but internationally. Sadly alcohol and illness will bring him at early death in 1901, aged only 36.

1889 A young Parisian painter named Paul Gauguin [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "The Yellow Christ" [image]. In this work a central caricature of Christ on the Cross is surrounded by three peasant women and set against a countryside which is more Provence than Golgotha. The colours are predominantly bright yellows and oranges, there is little attempt at chiaroscuro within each block of colour, and the figurework strikes as carelessly over-contoured. This latter effect will soon be recognised as part of Gauguin's signature style, and named "Cloisonnism" by the art critic Edouard Dujardin because the heavy use of contour reminded him of the colour separation boundaries found in cloisonné enamel, where the pigments need to be carefully kept from running together during firing. [See next 1891]

1889 A young French painter named Maurice Denis [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "The Road to Calvary" [image], a work which obtains the most compelling visual poetry out of figurative simplicity and drabness of colour. The following year he publishes a paper entitled "Définition of Néo-Traditionisme", in which he promotes an agenda of experimental but nonetheless reverential Symbolism. He also teamed up with like-minded practitioners such as Paul Serusier [see 1888] to form "Les Nabis" [Hebrew = "prophets"]. His Définition manifesto famously reminds its readers that even the most sublime of paintings is, at heart, just "a flat surface covered with colours", and his "Easter Mystery" (1891) [image], which relocates a carefully posed Resurrection to St. Germain-en-Laye, shows what you can accomplish if you put your hand - and no little artistic vision - to it. [See next 1898] [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1889 The American inventor George Eastman [Wikipedia biography] patents the sprocket drive system for celluloid film. [See next 1890 (Dickson)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1890 The French dramatist Paul Fort begins experimental drama at the Theatre d'Art in Paris.

1890 The American archaeologist Adolph Bandelier [Wikipedia biography] publishes "The Delight Makers" [Project Gutenberg full text online], a fictionalised account of life amongst the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico in which much factual insight into their folklore and dance is nevertheless included, as are many detailed observations of the local shamanic practices. Bandelier's work is discussed by Paul Radin [see 1954] in his essay on the Trickster Archetype in primitive society. [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNGIAN)]

1890 Paul Cézanne [see 1861] suddenly a number of works in progress, including "Portrait of Madame Cézanne in a Pleated Dress", "Boy in a Red Waistcoat" [image], and "Mountains and Hills in Provence" [image]. All are characterised by strong blocks of colour, little attempt at chiaroscuro, and heavy contour; Cézanne, in other words, as the world at large will soon come to know and love him. Brion (1972) remarks .....

"Because Cézanne created his own space and broke away from traditional perspective, and because he chose to paint his pictures, especially his still lifes, from arbitrary points of view and unusual angles of vision, the relations of masses are reorganised and rebalanced in a manner that has puzzled his contemporaries, for it disregarded all conventional notions of reality or of art" (p47; emphasis added). [See next 1895]

1890 The British inventor William K. Dickson [Wikipedia biography] patents the "Kinetograph", a 35mm implementation of George Eastman's sprocket drive. [See next 1895 (Lumiere Brothers)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1890 The German-born American biologist Jacques Loeb [Wikipedia biography] argues that the basis of many simple animal behaviours is the Kettenreflex, or "chain reflex", whereby a time-extensive piece of complex instinct is built up from individually far simply components, each facilitating in some way the one which follows until the final goal state is achieved.

1890 Sir James Frazer [see 1887] now publishes the first edition of "The Golden Bough", an analysis of primitive ritual practices and belief systems. [THREAD = ART, RITUAL, AND BELIEF]

1890 William James [see 1884] now publishes his magnum opus "Principles of Psychology". Our present interest is with what James has to say about the nature of, and prospects for, psychology as a science - can it ever succeed when its most important data - inarticulate phenomena such as dreaming, creative thought, intuition, emotional experience, etc. - are so difficult to bring into experimental focus. He named this problem the "Psychologist's Fallacy" [for an example of the Psychologist's Fallacy in aesthetic theory, see 1953 (Ehrenzweig)], and summarised it as follows .....

"The Psychologist's Fallacy: The great snare of the psychologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report. [.....] The psychologist [.....] stands outside of the mental state he speaks of. Both itself and its objects are objects for him. Now when it is a cognitive state (percept, thought, concept, etc.), he ordinarily has no other way of naming it than as the thought, percept, etc., of that object. He himself, meanwhile, knowing the self-same object in his way, gets easily led to suppose that the thought, which is of it, knows it in the same way in which he knows it" (Vol 1, p196). [THREAD = PSYCHOLOGY AS SCIENCE]

1891 [See firstly 1874 (Wernicke)] The Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud [Wikipedia biography] publishes "On Aphasia", in which he proposes that human communication is centred on a relatively non-modular conceptual system but operates through four highly modularised "word systems", two each for spoken and written language [show me this diagram]. This anticipated the modern cognitive scientific approach by nearly a hundred years. [See next 1896]

1891 The young French painter Henri Matisse [Wikipedia biography] studies under the ageing masters William-Adolphe Bougereau [see 1850] and Gustave Moreau [see 1853], and puts his new skills to good use in his early still lifes and landscapes. [See next 1897]

1891 The American dancer Marie Louise ("Loie") Fuller [Wikipedia biography] introduces American audiences to her trademark "Serpentine Dance", a bright and airy burlesque in which her skills are amplified by the clever use of lighting effects and the use of stick extensions under the silk of her costume. The popular success of this work will get her invited to perform at the Folies Bergère in 1892. She will return to fin de siècle Paris regularly, being a popular sitter for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec [see 1882], and appearing in one of the Lumière Brothers [see 1895] early cinema shorts [You Tube clip]. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL DANCE]

1891 Paul Gauguin [see 1889] leaves for Tahiti, and in the ensuing years becomes famously influenced by the folk art of French Polynesia.

1891 The Irish playwright Oscar Wilde publishes "The Picture of Dorian Gray", his only novel. Inspired by the Gothic fiction genre, it weaves a morality tale with a distinctly Faustian theme, allowing Gray to pursue a life of eternal youth, self-indulgent womanising, murder, and general debauchery, whilst diverting all the worry-lines and grey hairs to his portrait.

1891 The French painter Henri Rousseau exhibits "Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)". His "flat, seemingly childish, style" brings much criticism, but is now recognised as an early example of "Primitive [alternatively "Naive"] art.

HOW TO RECOGNISE PRIMITIVISM IN ART: Primarily from the subjective experience that the work in question reflects a different and untutored viewpoint on the world, be it that of a child (where the lack of tutoring is actual) or an adult from a different culture (where the lack of tutoring may be more down to cultural differences than anything else).

1892 Munch is invited to exhibit in Berlin and in the following year produces "The Scream". When not everyone is impressed by its soul-revealing emotional starkness he replies that it is always the artist's duty to "open his heart".

1892 The British philosopher Bernard Bosanquet [Stanford University biography] publishes "A History of Aesthetic" [buy] in which he promotes the view that art is "revelatory of the spiritual character of the world" (Sweet, 2008 online, e13). His point then is that it is impossible to create a meaningful aesthetic theory without adopting (or creating for oneself) a matching position on both ontology and mental philosophy.

1892 The French painter Édouard-Henri Avril [Wikipedia biography] pursues a career in erotic book illustration with works such as "Les Sonnetts Luxerieux" [image]. [THREAD = EROTIC ART]

1893 [See firstly 1781 (Hart)] The showman Edward Kilyani's "Living Pictures" troupe performs a season at London's Palace Theatre. By now the tableau vivant genre has polarised Victorian society, being seen by some as nothing but a front for pornography, prostitution, and paedophilia, and by others as just an innocent pastime. [THREADS = FROZEN MOTION and THE UNCANNY]

1893 Sponsored by the impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, the German bodybuilder Eugen Sandow [Wikipedia biography] removes to Chicago to perform at the World's Columbian Exposition. His posed "muscle displays" [image in bio] and feats of strength make him an instant attraction.

1894 The Franco-British writer George du Maurier publishes the best-selling "Trilby". Inspired by the Antonia story from Ernst Hoffmann's "Night Pieces" [see 1816], and drawing on the theatrical popularity of Mesmer's hypnosis shows, it tells the tale of Trilby, a tone-deaf girl who therefore cannot sing. Yet when she falls into company of "the evil musical genius" Svengali she discovers new talents. Unfortunately she can only perform when hypnotised.

1894 With 14 years of professional experience under his belt, but distracted now by a number of personal hardships, Klimt allows a new and more overtly sexual radicalism to creep into his work.

1894 Franz Boas [see 1888] now includes systematic use of stills photography in ethnographic research. [See next 1911]

1894 In a paper in Nature entitled "The Artificial Spectrum Top" the British scientist Charles Benham [Wikipedia biography] describes the visual illusions which could be induced using his "top". The essence of the illusion is that if you spin a black and white patterned disk the phenomenal experience includes illusory - that is to say, "subjective" - colours. To experience this illusion for yourself, try out the demonstration applet on the Michael Bach sensory illusions website.

1895 Paul Cézanne [see 1861] now stages a one man show at Ambroise Vollard's gallery in Paris, and for the first time the positive comments just about outweigh the negative. He has now outgrown the mantle of Impressionism and starts to be recognised as one of a new breed - a "Post-Impressionist". He is ready for what Brion (1972) calls "The Great Synthesis", the components of which are a rich source of imperative emotion giving you something to say as a painter, and the technical skills of arranging three dimensional form into convincing two dimensional form on the canvas. As for exactly what is involved in creating "significant form" of this sort, see the 1914 entry for Clive Bell.

1895 The French inventors Louis and Auguste Lumiere [Wikipedia biography] patent the "Cinematographe" and start selling simple motion pictures to an eager public. [See next 1902 (Melies)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1896 [See firstly 1891] Sigmund Freud produces the manuscript of "Project for a Scientific Psychology", a highly reductionist theory of cognition grounded in nervous activity. Unhappy with the result he puts the draft safely away in a drawer where it will remain until after his death. Freud's Project is particularly clear on how the psychodynamic process of cathexis might be implemented by attaching emotional excitation at cellular level to otherwise non-emotional mental activation. [See next 1897]

KEY CONCEPT - CATHEXIS: The word "cathexis" is the standard (i.e. Strachey) translation rendering of Besetzung in Freud's Project and later writings. "Bound" cathexis is Freud's notion of specifically invested libido, that is to say, of a long-term memory engram which is in some way "loaded" with emotional energy by virtue of the mechanisms described in the entry for Freud's Project. The advantage of having libidinal energy bound in this way is that the mind remains more or less in balance as a result; the disadvantage is that it is the system is no longer as flexibly responsive as it might have been. "Free" cathexis, on the other hand, is Freud's notion of levels of libido over and above that bound to long-term memory engrams. The advantage of having libidinal energy free to invest itself in the short-term as the fancy suddenly takes it is that the mind is more flexibly responsive than when that energy is bound to specific objects in the long term.

1896 The young French poet Alfred Jarry stages a mixture of slapstick and absurdist humour under the title "Ubu Roi" at Paris's Theatre de l'Oeuvre. The work is intended to be taboo-breaking and is duly received with a near riot in the audience.

1896 The German psychiatrist Paul E. Flechsig [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Gehirn und Seele" [= "Brain and Mind"], in which he draws up a cytoarchitectural map of the cerebral hemispheres on the basis of the cellular maturation profiles of the nervous tissues involved. He distinguishes areas which approximate to their adult microstructure at birth from areas which take many months of "myelination" to achieve that final form. It seems intuitively likely that such late myelinating areas are not needed until the infant becomes more mobile and independent, that is to say, that structural neuroanatomy paces its development to coincide with functional need, arriving in most of us neither too soon nor too late. Suffice it to note at present that the "primary visual cortex" - the area which Korbinian Brodmann [see 1909] will name Area 17 - is available for use well before the adjacent secondary and tertiary visual areas [18 and 19], and that the prefrontal areas are particularly slow to develop. Flechsig also uses the term Rindenblindheit [= "cortical blindness"] to indicate a loss of visual field awareness resulting from a lesion to primary visual cortex. [Compare 1917 (Poppelreuter)] [THREAD = THE VISUAL SYSTEM]

KEY CONCEPT - "PSYCHIC BLINDNESS": Flechsig's use of the term Rindenblindheit follows in the tradition of aphasiologists such as Paul Broca [see 1861], Karl Wernicke [see 1874], and Sigmund Freud [see 1891], and indicates an acquired neurogenic cognitive disorder particular to the cognitive functions carried out by the brain area in question [in this case, the primary visual cortex] prior to its being damaged. A century later, Lawrence Weiskrantz [see 1986] will popularise the term "blindsight" to refer to the unconscious residual abilities of the visual system in such cases.

1897 Klimt becomes one of the founding members of the "Vienna Secession", a movement committed to encouraging the unconventional in Austrian art.

1897 Henri Matisse [see 1891] now exhibits "The Dinner Table" [ABC Gallery image], only for it to be harshly reviewed. [See next 1905]

1897 [See firstly the various types of Identification in the Companion Glossary] Sigmund Freud [see 1896] mentions the process of "identifying with" another person in his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess (Letter 58 in Masson, 1985, p230) [buy]. This is the first of several mentions of this process prior to it becoming stated more formally in "The Interpretation of Dreams" [see 1900].

1897 The Irish novelist Bram Stoker publishes "Dracula" [buy], perhaps the best-known Gothic novel of all time thanks to its many cinema versions.

1898 The young Italian painter Amodeo Modigliani studies under Gugliemo Micheli in Livorno. Since Micheli was a Macchiaiolo this impressed upon Modigliani a love of bold colour. [See next 1906]

1898 A young Swiss student named Paul Klee enrols at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and soon starts to bewail a lack of any natural colour sense.

1898 Maurice Denis [see 1890] now famously remarks that "that which creates a work of art is the power and the will of the artist" [unchecked - Ed.]

1900 Sigmund Freud [see 1897] publishes "Die Traumdeutung" [German = "the significance/implication of dreams"], the work which introduces the world to the principles of psychoanalysis. The work is translated into English as "The Interpretation of Dreams" in 1913, makes Freud famous, and changes Humankind's perception of itself for ever.

******************** 20TH CENTURY ********************

1901 One of Brentano's students, the Moravian Edmund Husserl, publishes his first major work, "Logical Investigations" in which he develops Brentano's ideas on "intentionality".

1901 The young Spanish painter Pablo Picasso [Wikipedia biography] takes rooms in Paris and over the next three years turns out a series of blue-themed canvases including "The Old Guitarist" (1903) [image], "La Vie" (1903), and "Portrait of Suzanne Bloch" (1904). For this reason, the period 1901-1904 is now referred to as his "blue period". [See next 1904]

1901 Basing himself in Chicago, the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright [Wikipedia biography] helps popularise the "Prairie School" of American architecture, leading in 1909 to the Robie House [image] on the campus of the University of Chicago. [See next 1937]

1902 The French magician/film director Georges Méliès [Wikipedia biography] screens "Le Voyage Dans la Lune" [You Tube full length video], a 14-minute science fiction reel which is noteworthy in our present context for its pioneering use of special effects and trick photography. [See next 1903 (Porter)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1902 [See firstly 1868 (Perceptual Stages) and 1874 (Brentano)] Alexius Meinong's "On Assumptions" sets out his Theory of the Objektiv. His basic argument is that mental representations of discrete external objects [Gegenstände] are rarely, if ever, the true objects of perceptual judgment, nor, therefore, the content of phenomenal experience. Instead, there is a brief but important transitional stage of perception during which a particular Objektiv [an "objective", or "object of judgment"] emerges which incorporates but does not totally equate to the literal contents of the sensory field. When perception works properly this Objektiv becomes an Annahmen [an "assumption"]. This arrangement therefore permits "what if?" and "for the sake of argument" reasoning, forms of cognition which afford a very high survival value because they allow an infinite number of complex relational truths to be tested prior to committing to a particular response (not just the limited and uncomplicated truths of what might or might not be out there in the world). Meinong illustrates his point by asking his reader "to believe something that he knows only too well to be false" (1902, p11). One of his favourite mind games was to ask his students to imagine firstly a red cross, and then a cross which was not red. He would then point out that in terms of mental content the latter was actually a blue cross (say), and not a not-red one. This, in turn, allowed him to argue that perceptual reality and external reality were often surprisingly distant. [THREAD = STAGES OF PERCEPTION]

KEY CONCEPT - PERCEPTUAL STAGES: [See firstly 1874 (Wernicke and Brentano)] Meinong's notions of Objektiv and Annahmen raise a serious problem for stage theories of perception. This is because different types of content usually indicate different processing modules, only the first of which has access to the original input to the system. With biological perception we like to call this original input "sensation", but the evidence indicates that the first module in the sequence is NOT host to phenomenal awareness as we experience it. In fact the first processing that takes place is concerned with safety reflexes like the cochlear reflex (which acts at emergency speed to protect the ear in the event of sudden loud noise) and the eyeblink and pupillary reflexes in vision. The problem with staged processing, therefore, is that there will always exist as many "objects" as there are processing stages. Indeed one of the greatest sources of philosophical confusion in tracking the experience of objects is their lack of consistency in modelling the known modular anatomy of the perceptual pathway. In Leipzig, however, Wundt [see 1879] had been working on precisely this problem, and identifies both two and four stage pathways, depending on which way the information chooses to travel .....

1902 [See firstly 1874 (Perceptual Stages)] Wilhelm Wundt's "Principles of Physiological Psychology" provides one of the most sophisticated diagrams yet of the functional architecture of the visual and auditory pathways [show me this diagram]. One innovation is to show two simultaneously active ascending visual pathways, one from the "Visual Centre" directly to the "Apperception Centre", and the other indirectly via a cluster of "Intermediate Centres" capable of initiating behavioural responses in a semi-automatic fashion rather than as fully reasoned out volitional acts. This indirect visual pathway passes through three processing stages en route for conscious awareness.

1902 William James [see 1884] publishes "The Varieties of Religious Experience", in which he discusses the psychology behind religious phenomena such as affiliation, conversion, saintly forbearance, and mysticism. [THREAD = ART, RITUAL, AND BELIEF]

1902 The Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung [Wikipedia biography] publishes "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena", in which he presents a case study of a 15-year old female psychic medium suffering from somnambulism, clairvoyance, visions, and speaking in voices. One of the personalities expressed by these voices is frivolous and superficial and regularly disrupts the seances. This and later publications soon establish Jung as a force within the psychodynamic movement, initially as a follower of Freud but gradually more independently. [See next 1918 (Jung)] [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNGIAN)]

1903 The American film director Edwin S. Porter [Wikipedia biography] screens "The Great Train Robbery" [You Tube full length video], a film which is noteworthy as the first screen Western. [See next 1906 (Tait)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1904 Henri Matisse, a student of Gustave Moreau, paints "Luxury, Calm, and Pleasure", an early work in the "Fauvist" tradition [the name itself would not be given until 1905, see below].

1904 The Danish opthalmologist Marius Tscherning [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Physiological Optics", in which he notes amongst other things that the object fading previously observed to take place on sustained fixation [see 1804 (Troxler)] could, with appropriately designed stimuli, take place one or two fragments at a time, as well as holistically. [See next 1927 (Guilford)] [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

1904 Pablo Picasso [see 1901] now enters his "rose period" (1904-1906), in which his output is routinely tinged with pinks and oranges and harlequins are often included. Amongst the class-defining works from this period are "Family of Saltimbanques" (1905) [image] and "Boy Leading a Horse" (1906) [image]. [See next 1907]

1904 The British painter and art historian Roger Fry [external biography] is appointed Curator of the European Section of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.

1905 Henri Rousseau completes "The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope" [image]. It is exhibited at the Salon d'Automne that year.

ASIDE - HOW TO RECOGNISE FAUVIST ARTWORKS: The French word fauves means "wild beasts", and as a style Fauvism accordingly calls for a certain primitive simplicity in composition, form, colour, and execution. Superficially, there are strident patches of colour [one critic remarked of Fauvist works that "a pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public"].

1905 The German artists Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Kirchner, and Karl Schmitt-Rottluff found a common-interest group named "Die Brücke", to promote Expressionist art in Germany. [See next 1910 (Walden)] [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1906 The French historian Joséphin Péladin publishes a pamphlet "From Parsifal to Don Quixote: The Secret of the Troubadors".

1906 The Russian ballet dancer Alexander Shiryaev experiments with an early system of stop-motion animation, using it to capture the meticulously choreographed movement of dancing puppets. [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

1906 Following his experience under Micheli, Amodeo Modigliani transfers to Paris to join the penniless artists in the Montmartre garrets. Here, doing his best work (some say) under the influence of marijuana and alcohol, he developed a distinctive style nowadays described by some as "Figurative".

ASIDE: - HOW TO RECOGNISE FIGURATIVE ARTWORK: The term "Figurative" is not universally liked because it means different things at different points in history. To start with it indicated merely the depiction of the human figure. However in the sense that the word is used of Modigliani's work it indicates a work somewhere between purely representational but far short of abstract.

1906 The German philosopher Max Dessoir founds the journal Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft.

1906 The Australian film director Charles Tait [Wikipedia biography] screens "The Story of the Kelly Gang" [You Tube video clip], a film which is noteworthy for extending cinema running times beyond an hour. [See next 1908 (Griffith)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1906 The German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch publishes a paper under the title "On the Psychology of the Uncanny" in which he notes the human fascination with artworks and objects whose status on the animate-inanimate dimension is not quite certain. With Ernst Hoffman's Sandman story [1818 above] he argues as follows .....

"Horror is a thrill that with care and specialist knowledge can be used well to increase emotional effects in general - as is the task of poetry for instance. In storytelling, one of the most reliable artistic devices for producing uncanny effects easily is to leave the reader in uncertainty as to whether he has a human person or rather an automaton before him [.....]. Conversely, the effect of the uncanny can easily be achieved when one undertakes to reinterpret some kind of lifeless thing as part of an organic creature." [THREADS = THE UNCANNY and FROZEN MOTION]

1907 The French painter Georges Braque [Wikipedia biography] exhibits a number of works in the Fauvist style, only to become inspired by a Cezanne retrospective that autumn. Over the coming months he experiments with Cezanne's "simultaneous perspective" technique. The art critic Louis Vauxcelles uses the term "cubiques" to describe the new technique, because the painted surface ends up "full of little cubes".

1907 Inspired by the technical style of Gauguin [see 1889] and Cezanne [see 1866], and motivated by an interest in the art of primitive cultures, Picasso now produces a number of "African Period" works, in which elements of tribal maskwork and other imagery are included. More significantly, however, works from this period start to use the compound perspective about to be recognised as "Cubism". The emerging new style is used in "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" [image]. Demoiselles also shows elements of the "Analytical Cubism" which will shortly make him famous, and over the coming months Picasso and Braque work together to develop it further. [See next 1912]

1908 The German dancer Olga Desmond [Wikipedia biography] develops the practice of the Schönheitsabend, a theatrically posed display of living statues [image]. [THREAD = FROZEN MOTION]

1908 The American actor David W. Griffith [Wikipedia biography], having impressed his bosses at American Mutoscope, is given his own production project - "The Adventures of Dollie" [You Tube full length video] - to direct. He does a good job and other, more ambitious, projects follow, including "Birth of a Nation", the first cinema blockbuster. In 1920 he will found United Artists. Technically Griffith is now known for creative camera placement and for cross-cutting between parallel narrative threads to give greater pace. [See next 1915 (Chaplin)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1909 Picasso and Braque work together on their new style.

1909 The German neurologist Korbinian Brodmann [Wikipedia biography] publishes a monograph entitled "Comparative Localisation Studies" in which he maps the human neocortex. He bases this map on "cytoarchitectonic" criteria - on years of painstaking microscopic analysis of brain tissue samples, noting differences in cell size and morphology, and their relative frequency in a given area. Using this method of analysis each hemisphere turns out to have 52 differentiable areas, which Brodmann identified using his now famous "Brodmann Numbers" [full map]. It will soon be established that Areas 17, 18, and 19 - the neocortex at the brain's occipital pole - constitute the primary, secondary, and tertiary visual areas, respectively.

1909 In an essay entitled "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year Old Boy", Sigmund Freud [see 1891] introduces the notion of the "Oedipus conflict" to refer to a failure on the part of boys aged three to six years to identify psychologically with their fathers in order to possess their mothers incestuously but vicariously. As this explanatory proposition becomes more widely known the full impact of Freud's views on psychosexual motivation starts to become apparent. [For more on cathexis see Glossary (Cathexis); for more on defense mechanisms in general see Glossary (Defense Mechanisms); for more on identification see Glossary (Identification)]

RESEARCH ISSUE - PSYCHOSEXUAL CONTENT IN ART: Freud's explanatory analysis - although it may shock those new to the ins and outs of psychoanalytic theory - is not particularly complex. He proposes firstly that instinctive energies can "cathect" [= attach themselves] to otherwise emotionally neutral people and things. He proposes secondly that the resulting emotional attractions can be hurtful, especially if thwarted, and are therefore routinely held in check in the unconscious by a repertoire of "defense mechanisms". And he proposes thirdly that the resulting "repressed" emotional energy finds subtle and indirect avenues of expression - not least through dreaming and artistic creativity. [See next 1910 (Psychosexual Motivation in Art)]

1909 The avant-garde Italian poet Filippo Marinetti [Wikipedia biography] compiles "The Futurist Manifesto" as a half page appeal in Le Figaro. He then stages his first Futurist piece, "Roi Bombance", at the same venue which Jarry had used for "Ubu Roi" in 1896. His practice will eventually be summarised as follows .....

"Performance was the surest means of disrupting a complacent public. It gave artists' licence to be both 'creators' in developing a new form of artists' theatre, and 'art objects' in that they made no separation between their art as poets, as painters, or as performers. [.....] Futurists must teach all authors and performers to despise the audience, he insisted. Applause merely indicated 'something mediocre, dull, regurgitated, or too well digested'. Booing assured the actor that the audience was alive" (Goldberg, 1979, pp10-12).

1909 The Austrian painter-playwright Oskar Kokoschka [Wikipedia biography] stages the play "Murderer, the Hope of Women" [details], since acclaimed as an early example of Expressionist theatrical writing, full of powerful and disturbing imagery. [THREADS = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART; DISTURBING ART]

HOW TO RECOGNISE EXPRESSIONISM IN THE THEATRE: The essence of all avenues of Expressionism is that the emotionally laden idea within the artist needs to come out regardless of convention and public approval. Expressionist theatre is therefore always more willing to offend than earlier explorations of emotional conflict such as Sturm und Drang [see 1776]. Thus "Expressionist plays often dramatise the spiritual awakening and sufferings of their protagonists [and are] modelled on the episodic presentation of the suffering and death of Jesus in the Stations of the Cross" (Wikipedia). Dialogue is often heavily stressed and fragmentary, "heightened, whether expansive or rhapsodic, or clipped and telegraphic" (ibid.), and some self-reflective exploration of emotionality is essential.

1909 [See firstly 1904] Roger Fry publishes "An Essay in Aesthetics" in which he rejects the view that art is basically just the imitation of the real world, and proposes instead that the job of the artist is to take a critical position on this or that issue of public interest. He begins by adopting the James-Lange position on the relationship between human intellect and human emotion [see inset, 1744], thus .....

"I must begin with some elementary psychology, with a consideration of the nature of instincts. A great many objects in the world, when presented to our senses, put in motion a complex nervous machinery, which ends in some instinctive appropriate action. [.....] The whole of animal life, and a great part of human life, is made up of these instinctive reactions to sensible objects, and their accompanying emotions" (p13).

He turns then to the interaction of emotion with memory, thus .....

"But man has the peculiar faculty of calling up again in his mind the echo of past experiences of this kind, of going over it again, 'in imagination', as we say. He has, therefore, the possibility of a double life; one the actual life, the other the imaginative life. Between these two lives there is this great distinction, that in the actual life the [.....] instinctive reaction [.....] shall be the important part of the whole process [..... but that] in the imaginative life no such action is necessary, and, therefore, the whole consciousness may be focussed upon the perceptive and the emotional aspects of the experience" (p13).

He then offers the following illustration from what was then the cutting edge of entertainment technology .....

"We can get a curious side glimpse of the nature of this imaginative life from the cinematograph. This resembles actual life in almost every respect, except that what the psychologists call the conative part of our reaction to sensations, that is to say the appropriate resultant action, is cut off [..... so that] in the first place we see the event much more clearly [..... and] in the second place [.....] one notices that whatever emotions are aroused by them, though they are likely to be weaker than those of ordinary life, are presented more clearly to the consciousness" (pp13-14).

1909 The French anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep [Wikipedia biography] publishes "The Rites of Passage", in which he searches for the common denominator amongst Humankind's otherwise diverse "coming of age" practices. He classifies the psychological effects of such practices as "pre-liminal", "liminal", or "post-liminal", according to whether they arise before, during, or after the critical moment of transition from one state of existence [e.g., pubescence] to the next [e.g., young adulthood].

1910 With his "Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler", Picasso moves his style forward to what is now known as "Analytical Cubism". The Kahnweiler in question, a Parisian art-dealer, promotes Cubism so effectively that it becomes an established "school" almost instantly.

HOW TO RECOGNISE CUBISM: "Analytical Cubists 'analysed' natural forms and reduced the forms into basic geometrical parts on the two-dimensional picture plane" (Wikipedia). Topics will be frequently still lifes, without any human figures, and the final impression is one of monochromaticity and multifacetedness [see, for example, Braque's "Violin and Candlestick" (1910)]. "Synthetic Cubism is more of a pushing of several objects together [and has] less shading, creating flatter space" (Wikipedia).

1910 The Czech art historian Antonin Matĕjček coins the term "Expressionism" as a contrasting school to the Impressionists.

ASIDE - HOW TO RECOGNISE EXPRESSIONISM IN ART: "Influenced by the Fauves, Expressionism worked with arbitrary colours as well as jarring compositions. In reaction and opposition to French Impressionism which focused on rendering the sheer visual experience of objects, Expressionist artists sought to capture emotions and subjective interpretations: It was not important to reproduce an aesthetically pleasing impression of the artistic subject matter; the Expressionists focused on capturing vivid emotional reactions through powerful colours and dynamic compositions instead" (Wikipedia).

1910 Sigmund Freud [see 1900] publishes "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood" [buy], a psychoanalytic study of Leonardo da Vinci [see 1466] in which he attempts to reconcile what is known about the artist's private life and what we can still see in his output. Freud is searching, needless to say, for material compatible with his own theories, noting with relish Leonardo's "cool repudiation of sexuality" (p99), his "insatiable and indefatigable thirst for knowledge" (p108), and his pedantic record keeping (p143). Freud's argument begins by explicitly linking the inner world of a person's instincts with the outer world of his/her work, thus .....

"Observation of men's daily lives shows us that most people succeed in directing very considerable portions of their sexual instinctive forces to the professional activity" (p111).

Freud turns then to the "childhood memory" referred to in his title. This is the "vulture phantasy", a short anecdotal entry by Leonardo in Codex Atlanticus (F65v). In a passage about the flight of vultures Leonardo confides as follows .....

"It seems that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures; for I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips" (p117).

Freud interprets this phantasy as follows .....

"We can now reconstruct the origin of Leonardo's vulture phantasy. He once happened to read [.....] that all vultures were females and could reproduce their kind without any assistance from a male: and at that point a memory sprang to his mind, which was transformed into the phantasy we have been discussing, but which meant to signify that he also had been such a vulture-child - he had had a mother, but [an absent] father. With this memory was associated, in the only way in which impressions of so great an age can find expression, an echo of the pleasure he had had at his mother's breast. The allusion made by the Fathers of the Church to the idea of the Blessed Virgin and her Child [.....] must have played its part in helping the phantasy to appear valuable and important to him. Indeed in this way he was able to identify himself with the child Christ ....." (p128).

As to where these structures show themselves in Leonardo's practice Freud turns to the greatest painting of all time, Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" [see 1507], and particularly to its famous smile, to test his theory .....

"When, in the prime of life, Leonardo once more encountered the smile of bliss and rapture which had once played on his mother's lips as she fondled him, he had for long been under the dominance of an inhibition which forbade him ever again to desire such caresses from the lips of women. But he had become a painter, and therefore he strove to reproduce the smile with his brush, giving it to all his pictures (whether he in fact executed them himself or had them done by his pupils under his direction [.....] These pictures breathe a mystical air into whose secret one does not penetrate. [..... They] gaze in mysterious triumph, as if they knew of a great achievement of happiness, about which silence must be kept. [.....] It is possible that in these figures Leonardo has denied the unhappiness of his erotic life and has triumphed over it in his art, by representing the wishes of the boy, infatuated with his mother, as fulfilled in this blissful union of the male and female natures" (pp162-163).

RESEARCH ISSUE - PSYCHOSEXUAL MOTIVATION IN ART: [See firstly 1909 (Psychosexual Content in Art)] Freud's "Leonardo" revitalised one of the oldest debates in aesthetics, namely that concerning the almost inevitable mismatch between an artist's more or less idiosyncratic intentions and a viewer's more or less idiosyncratic interpretations. Leonardo exposed new and shocking depths to these idiosyncracies, and then challenged us to accept as data not just the non-empirical but also the downright invisible. An artist's intentions were intentions even if they reflected unconscious motivations which revealed themselves at the conscious level only with the greatest reluctance. This problem remains unresolved to the present day, despite having been approached from two different directions. One tradition of enquiry has focused on the philosophy of perception and representation, per se, and ignored the Dionysian turmoil beneath, and the other tradition has focused on the psychosexual and ignored the airier issues of perceptual stages and artistic intention. Levinson (1996 [q.v.]) and Wollheim (1998 [q.v.]) provide state-of-the-art examples of how far the upper level of enquiry has got. The psychodynamic tradition has been pursued by such authors as Adrian Stokes [see 1925], Anton Ehrenzweig [see 1953 and 1967], Ernst Kris [see 1953], Ernst Gombrich [see 1953], Hanna Segal [see 1993], and Stephen Newton [see 1996].

1910 The Hungarian choreographer Rudolf von Laban [Wikipedia biography] founds the Monte Veritá Dance School in Southern Switzerland to promote the avant-garde and esoteric in dance. [See next 1913 (Wigman)] [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1910 The German art critic Herwarth Walden [Wikipedia biography] founds a magazine entitled "Der Sturm" to promote German Expressionism, and follows this two years later with a gallery to showcase their works to collectors such as Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler and Solomon Guggenheim. Amongst those regularly contributing are Edvard Munch, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. Walden will eventually close down operations in 1932 in the face of increasing hostility from the Nazi Party. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1910 [See firstly 35000BP (SHAMANS AND SHAMANISM)] The French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl [Wikipedia biography] publishes "How Natives Think", in which he examines mysticism as an unavoidable primitive way of dealing with the world's many harsh realities. [Compare 1912 (Durkheim)] [THREAD = ART, RITUAL, AND BELIEF]

1910-1912 As explained in Virginia Woolf's 1940 biography, Roger Fry's interest in Cézanne's role in transforming French art arises in 1906 but takes four more years to become the subject of two major exhibitions. These take place at the Grafton Gallery in London. This from the Catalogue for the second of these events .....

"Another charge that is frequently made against [naive and primitive artists] is that they allow what is merely capricious, or even what is extravagant and eccentric, in their work - that it is not serious, but an attempt to impose on the good-natured tolerance of the public. [.....] The difficulty springs from a deep-rooted conviction, due to long-established custom, that the aim of painting is the descriptive imitation of natural forms. [..... But these artists] do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life. By which I mean that they wish to make images which by the clearness of their logical structure, and by their closely-knit unity of texture, shall appeal to our disinterested and contemplative imagination. [.....] In fact they aim not at illusion but at reality" (Fry, 1912, p167).

1911 The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire coins the term "Orphic Cubism" to describe the work of Sonia and Robert Delauney within the broader Cubist movement.

1911 The German activist-intellectual Franz Pfemfert [Wikipedia biography] produces the first edition of a magazine entitled "Die Aktion", in which he hopes to promote radical politics and Expressionist literature. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1911 The Munich-based Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky forms a self-help artists' cooperative under the name Der Blaue Reiter [= "the blue rider] to promote the expression of spiritual material in art. The membership of the group includes Franz Marc and a young Swiss artist named Paul Klee. The cooperative exhibits 1911 to 1913, publishing its theory as "The Blue Rider Almanac".

1911 The Dutch painter Piet Mondrian [Wikipedia biography] is heavily influenced by the 1911 exhibition of Cubism in Amsterdam. Luck has it that we can clearly see the effect this experience has on his style because he produced two versions of "Still Life with Ginger Pot": the first [image] is Cubist, whilst the second [image] is more abstract and geometrical. [See next 1917]

1912 The British cartoonist W. Heath Robinson [Wikipedia biography] starts to build a popular following for his sketches of unlikely, impossible, or just plain daft, machines [examples]. [Compare 1915 (Rube Goldberg)]

1912 [Save as indicated this entry draws on the investigative scholarship behind Reuben Hoggett's Cybernetic Zoo website.] The New Zealand electrical engineer Alban J. Roberts [Cybernetic Zoo biography] exhibits a radio-controlled airship [the present author's presumption is that this expertise led to his becoming involved in top secret (and therefore poorly documented) guided weaponry research during WW1 - compare Companion Resource (scroll to Section 4.6)]. [See next 1920] [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM and AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1912 The German painter Ludwig Meidner [Wikipedia biography] begins to produce paintings on nightmarish themes. His "Apocalyptic Landscapes", for example, are a series of oils in which Meidner depicts a variety of cataclysmic visions [images]. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1912 [See firstly 35000BP (SHAMANS AND SHAMANISM)] The French sociologist Émile Durkheim [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Les Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse" [= "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life"], in which he investigates the notion of "the sacred" in primitive society. [Compare 1910 (Lévy-Bruhl)] [THREAD = ART, RITUAL, AND BELIEF]

1912 Picasso's "Still Life with Chair-Caning" marks a new form of Cubism now known as "Synthetic Cubism". This contrasts with the earlier Analytical Cubism.

1912 Klee visits Paris to experience at first hand the experimentation going on there, and, as a result, adapts his personal style to make greater use of large blocks of colour.

1912 Marcel Duchamp exhibits "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2", using an experimental style in which three successive body and limb positions are shown, giving a frozen-in-time cinematic effect. This work has since been identified as including elements of both the Cubist and Futurist styles. [THREAD = FROZEN MOTION]

1912 [See firstly 1911] Roger Fry publishes "Art and Socialism" [buy] in which he relates the following anecdote .....

"Speaking recently in Liverpool, Mr Bernard Shaw placed the present situation as regards public art in its true light. He declared that the corruption of taste and the emotional insincerity of the mass of the people had gone so far that any picture which pleased more than ten per cent of the population should be immediately burned" (p44).

"Display is indeed the end and explanation of it all. Not one of these things has been made because its contemplation would give any one any pleasure, but solely because each of these things is accepted as a symbol of a particular social status. I say their contemplation can give no one pleasure; they are there because their absence would be resented by the average man who regards a large amount of futile display as in some way inseparable from the conditions of that well-to-do life to which he belongs or aspires to belong. [.....] The doctor who lines his waiting-room with bad photogravures and worse etchings is acting on exactly the same principles; in short, nearly all our 'art' is made, bought, and sold merely for its value as an indication of social status" (p48).

In the same year he publishes "The French Group", in which he remarks on the often obstructive role played by past experience in the appreciation of an artwork, thus .....

"All art depends upon cutting off the practical responses to sensations of ordinary life, thereby setting free a pure and as it were disembodied functioning of the spirit; but in so far as the artist relies on the associated ideas of the objects which he represents, his work is not completely free and pure, since romantic associations imply at least an imagined practical activity [..... so that] when the first shock of wonder or delight is exhausted the work produces an ever lessening reaction. Classic art, on the other hand, records a positive and disinterestedly passionate state of mind. It communicates a new and otherwise unattainable experience. Its effect, therefore, is likely to increase with familiarity" (p169). [See next 1920]

1913 The Italian Futurist painter and musician Luigi Russolo presents "noise music" from an orchestra of tone generators and sets out the theory behind it in "The Art of Noises".

1913 A young German psychologist named Wolfgang Köhler [Wikipedia biography] is appointed director of the Prussian Academy of Science's Anthropological Research Station on Tenerife. He will publish his research findings in "The Mentality of Apes" (1917), one of the classic works on primate cognitive abilities (and therefore, by extension, our own). For our present purposes we mention only the tests of insight learning which he carried out on a chimpanzee called "Sultan" [Wikipedia biography].

1913 The French dramatist Jacques Copeau founds a theatre company and sets up shop in the Theatre du Vieux-Colombier on the Parisian rive gauche. He published the plans for the new undertaking under the title "Essay on Dramatic Revival", in which he explains that his target audience is students and intellectuals rather than middle-class theatre-goers, and that his players will work in new and creative ways using minimal scenery ["Just give us a bare platform", he says]. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1913 The German dancer Mary Wigman [Wikipedia biography] becomes a student at Rudolf von Laban's dance school at Monte Veritá [see 1910]. In 1920 she will open her own school in Dresden to promote Expressionism in dance. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1913 Filippo Marinetti [see 1909] now publishes "The Variety Theatre Manifesto" as a prescription for creating more or less controlled mayhem as a vehicle for theatrical enlightment. Amongst the tricks used to amplify the theatre's challenging experience is the use of itching powder on the seats. Fights could also be arranged by selling the same ticket to more than one customer (Kirby, 1971). [THREADS = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART and THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1913 Edmund Husserl [see 1901] now publishes his follow-up work, "Ideas", in which he looks at how experience requires an "ideal" ego at the heart of the system to do the experiencing.

1913 Sigmund Freud [see 1891] now publishes a paper entitled "The Theme of the Three Caskets" [In Volume 12 of the Standard Edition], in which he analyses two Shakespearean plays - The Merchant of Venice and King Lear - for their hidden psychodynamic messages. [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (FREUDIAN)]

1913 The German painter August Macke [Wikipedia biography] organises an exhibition of progressive Rhineland artists under the title "Die Rheinische Expressionisten" [= "The Rhineland Expressionists"]. Amongst those contributing are Max Ernst [see 1923] and Paul Seehaus. Sadly Macke is destined to be killed in action on the Western Front in 1914. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1914 In a radical departure from his two-dimensional artwork, Duchamp exhibits a bottle rack under the title "Bottle Rack".

1914 The German psychologist Hans Volkelt [Wikipedia biography (German)] publishes "Űber der Vorstellungen der Tieren" [= "On the Consciousness of Animals"], in which he reports amongst other things on the hunting behaviour of funnel-web spiders. Normally, these spiders lie in wait for their prey at the end of a silken tube built into the centre of their web. When an insect becomes entangled in the web they dash out of the central funnel, kill it, and retrieve it into their lair. However, when a fly is put directly into the mouth of the funnel the spider adopts defensive rather than aggressive behaviour. Spiders, in other words, do not know much about flies. They, too, just mechanically follow an inbuilt program. [THREAD = THE NATURE OF INSTINCT]

1914 The British-based Polish ethnographist Maria Czaplicka [Wikipedia biography] publishes a literature review entitled "Aboriginal Siberia", in which she collates reports of the life and ways of the Siberian tribes, including the role of their "Shamans" in maintaining their belief system.

1914 The British art critic Clive Bell [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Art" [buy] in which he argues down the importance both of a painting's historical context and of its artist's expressed intent. For Bell it is a particular "combination of lines and colours" which gives an artwork its power to evoke an aesthetic experience in the mind of an onlooker. This view puts him in direct confrontation with theorists such as Maurice Denis [see 1898], and will be revisited in Wimsatt and Beardsley's "intentional fallacy" paper in 1946 [q.v.]. Concerned that aesthetics should be a theoretically sound psychological science, he proceeds to develop the following "aesthetic hypothesis" .....

"That there is a particular kind of emotion provoked by works of visual art, and that this emotion is provoked by every kind of visual art, by pictures, sculptures, buildings, pots, carvings, textiles, etc., etc., is not disputed, I think, by anyone capable of feeling it. This emotion is called the aesthetic emotion; and if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke it, we shall have solved what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics. We shall have discovered the essential quality in a work of art, the quality that distinguishes works of art from all other classes of objects. [But] what is the quality common and peculiar to all members of this class? [.....] There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist [.....] Only one answer seems possible - significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call 'Significant Form'; and Significant Form is the one quality common to all works of visual art" (p13; emphasis added). "In pure aesthetics we have only to consider our emotion and its object: for the purposes of aesthetics we have no right, neither is there any necessity, to pry behind the object into the state of mind of him who made it" (p14).

Bell then cautions against the careless use of the word "beauty" because it does not apply solely to works of art, thus .....

"That beauty is the one essential quality in a work of art is a doctrine that has been too insistently associated with the name of Whistler, who is neither its first nor its last, nor its most capable, exponent - but only of his age the most conspicuous. [.....] He is a lonely artist, standing up and hitting below the belt for art. To the critics, painters, and substantial men of his age he was hateful because he was an artist; and because he knew that their idols were humbugs he was disquieting. [.....] It is not very difficult to find a flaw in the theory that beauty is the essential quality in a work of art - that is, if the word 'beauty' be used as Whistler and his followers seem to have used it, to mean insignificant beauty. It seems to me that the beauty about which they were talking was the beauty of a flower or a butterfly. Therefore, if you wish to call the essential quality in a work of art 'beauty' you must be careful to distinguish between the beauty of a work of art and the beauty of a flower ....." (p100-101).

He speaks more highly of Cézanne [see 1866], thus .....

"Cézanne discovered methods and forms which have revealed a vista of possibilities to the end of which no man can see [.....] What the future will owe to Cézanne we cannot guess [.....] Cézanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form [.....] While he was working away in his corner of Provence [he] was always looking for something to replace the bad science of Claude Monet. And somewhere about 1880 he found it. At Aix-en-Provence came to him a revelation that has set a gulf between the nineteenth century and the twentieth: for, gazing at the familiar landscape, Cézanne came to understand it, not as a mode of light [.....] but as an end in itself and an object of intense emotion. [.....] From that time forward Cézanne set himself to create forms that would express the emotion that he felt for what he had learned to see. Science became as irrelevant as subject. Everything can be seen as pure form, and behind pure form lurks the mysterious significance that thrills to ecstasy" (p110-111).

He also addresses the problem of how to know how much detail is appropriate when digging down in search of this all-important significance, thus .....

"The contemporary movement has pushed simplification a great deal further than Manet and his friends pushed it [.....] Since the twelfth century, in sculpture and glass, the thirteenth in painting and drawing, the drift has been towards realism and away from art. Now the essence of realism is detail [.....] Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art. The tendency of the movement is to simplify away all this mess of detail which painters have introduced into pictures in order to state facts. But more than this was needed. There were irrelevancies introduced into pictures for other purposes than that of statement. There were the irrelevancies of technical swagger. Since the twelfth century there has been a steady elaboration technical complexities. [.....] What details are not irrelevant? In a work of art nothing is relevant but what contributes to formal significance. Therefore all informatory matter is irrelevant and should be eliminated" (p118).

1914 Klee exhibits "In the Style of Kairouan", composed of coloured geometrical shapes, a piece since described as "his first pure abstract" work. [THREAD = ABSTRACT ART]

1915 The American painter-photographer Emmanuel Radnitzky (henceforth "Man Ray") stages his first show of paintings and drawings. Over the ensuing five years Ray will align himself with the Dadaist movement [see 1916] and experiment with novel techniques of producing images [see, e.g., 1920].

1915 The zoologist W.M. Barrows publishes a paper entitled "The Reactions of an Orb-Weaving Spider, Epeira sclopetaria Clerck, to Rhythmic Vibrations of its Web", in which he records having stimulated the spider's web with different frequency tuning forks, and demonstrating thereby that the most effective artificial stimuli were (a) simple, and (b) necessarily similar to those given out by a species' natural prey. [THREAD = THE NATURE OF INSTINCT]

1915 The British music hall performer Charles S. Chaplin [Wikipedia biography] shoots to fame as a movie star in "The Tramp". [See next 1920 (Wiene)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1915 The Italian artists Fortunato Deporo [Wikipedia biography] and Giacomo Balla [Wikipedia biography] draft the manifesto "Ricostruzione Futurista dell'Universo" [in English as "Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe"]. Futurist ideas appear thereafter in Deporo's practice both in Italy and, from time to time, New York City. Typical of the Italian futurist genre is Deporo's ballet "Machine of 3000" (1924) [image]. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1915 The American cartoonist Reuben ("Rube") Goldberg [Wikipedia biography] starts to build a popular following for his sketches of unlikely, impossible, or just plain daft, machines [example]. [Compare 1912 (Heath Robinson)]

1915 "Futurist Synthetic Theatre Manifesto". The key lies in the word "synthetic", which here indicates "very brief" "one-idea" performances. The audiences were often left mystified, but this was part of the manifesto, thus .....

"The Futurists refused to explain the meaning of these Syntheses. It was 'stupid to pander to the primitivism of the crowd', they wrote, 'which in the last analysis wants to see the bad guy lose and the good guy win'. There was no reason, the manifesto went on, that the public should always completely understand the whys and wherefores of every scenic action" (Goldberg, 1979, pp19-20).

1916 The German artists Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings get together with the Romanian artist Tristan Tzara and a group of like-minded colleagues sheltering from the rigours of WW1 in neutral Switzerland, and begin putting on shows at the "Cabaret Voltaire" in Zurich. Their performances are openly critical of bourgeois society and its support for the war. This movement soon becomes known as "Dadaism" and famous for rejecting conventional aesthetic values. Dadaism has since been variously summarised as "anti-art", anti-establishment, and deliberately iconoclastic. It has also been acclaimed as one of the formative roots of modern performance art.

1916 The British actor James H. Finlayson [Wikipedia biography] drifts into early Hollywood comedies as one of Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops. Over the coming years his trademark beady-eyed irascibility makes him a favourite comedy support artist, not least in Hal Roach's Laurel and Hardy productions, and he will eventually be recognised as a master of the double-take [You Tube tribute]. [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

RESEARCH ISSUE - PSYCHOLOGY AND THE "LATE-" AND "DOUBLE-TAKE": Late-takes and double-takes are dramatic devices in which a stage or movie director ensures firstly that we are interested in how a particular character will react to a forthcoming surprise or revelation, before emphasising that reaction by delaying it momentarily. This permits the audience to see the character's mind at work, in slow motion as it were, and thereby places the audience sufficiently far ahead of the unfolding drama to relish the moment more thoroughly than would otherwise have been the case. The outcome is often - but not always - processed as humorous. The underlying cognition has not yet been precisely modelled.

1916 Three years after his death, representatives of the Swiss philologist Ferdinand de Saussure [Wikipedia biography] have his "Course in General Linguistics" [buy] published. This work is now acclaimed as seminal in the science of Semiotics.

1917 Now resident in New York City, Marcel Duchamp submits a signed urinal basin under the title "Fountain" for the annual Independent Artists exhibition. It is rejected by the panel on the grounds that a commonplace object cannot, for a number of reasons, be a work of art. Amongst the reasons given are (a) the fact that it had not been created by an artist, (b) that it had not been created to be art, and (c) that it was not unique.

1917 Sigmund Freud [see 1891] now publishes "Mourning and Melancholia" (Freud, 1917/1957), in which he look at what (and in whom, and why) makes some people permanently and pathologically bereaved - melancholics as type. [See next 1921 (Freud)] [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (FREUDIAN)]

1917 Edmund Husserl's [see 1901] papers on the cognition of "the living present" are published as "The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness". Topics discussed include what now is, how long it is, what it contains, how it interacts with memory contents from both near and distant past, and how all this constrains phenomenal experience so that we experience time as we do.

1917 The Dutch painter and art critic Theo van Doesburg [Wikipedia biography] founds the journal "De Stijl" [= "The Style"] to promote "pure abstraction and universality" in design by emphasising straight lines and primary colours. Piet Mondrian [see 1911] contributes articles and together the De Stijl movement fosters "Neoplasticism". Mondrian's "Composition VII" (1913) [image] is typical of the new genre. [See next 1930 (Mondrian)]

1917 With input by Roger Fry [see 1912], London's Burlington Fine Arts Clubs mounts an exhibition of drawings by "dead masters". Fry contributes to the exhibition Catalogue as follows .....

"I come now to the Rembrandts, of which there are several good examples [in this exhibition]. [.....] I believe that Rembrandt was never a linealist, that he never had the conception of contour clearly present to him. [.....] The last thing he saw was a contour, and more than anything else it eluded his vision. His vision was in fact so intensely fixed on the interplay of planes [.....] that with him the drawn line [..... is used more] to indicate directions of stress and movement [than contour]. He seems almost to dread the contour, to prefer to make strokes either inside or outside of it, and to trust to the imagination to discover its whereabouts. [.....] In conclusion I would suggest that the art of pure contour is comparatively rare in modern art" (Fry, 1919/1920, p177). [See next 1920 (Fry)] [THREAD = ART MOVEMENTS (FORMALISM)]

1917 [See firstly 1909 (Brodmann)] The German military neurologist Walther Poppelreuter [Wikipedia biography] publishes a monograph entitled "Disturbances of Lower and Higher Visual Capacities Caused by Occipital Damage" [buy] in which he analyses 52 detailed neurological case reports compiled from WW1 head-injuries. These data give many hints as to the broad cross-mapping of visual perception onto the neocortical region at the brain's "occipital pole" [show me where this is]. Unfortunately they then raise more problems than they solve: sometimes his patients suffered attentional deficits, often a contraction of the visual field, sometimes spared peripheral vision but lost focal vision (sometimes vice versa), sometimes defective depth perception, or number and/or word blindness, difficulties estimating the number of dots, and so on. In other words what we loosely refer to as "vision" includes so many lesser but compounded abilities! Poppelreuter therefore developed a battery of separately appropriate psychophysical and neuropsychological tests, and assessed each of his patients on each of the target visual abilities in turn. Here are some of his patients' notes [we have underlined the comments regarding picture cognition] .....

"[Case 17, "SW":] Wounded on 30 June 1915 by grenade splinters [.....] near the median occipital line. [.....] no disturbance of binocular depth perception or localisation by touch. [.....] Visual search is not slowed. [.....] Sorting of buttons is slow but correct. [.....] If very large pictures which contain many complex details are shown to SW he finds it difficult to get a quick and reliable overview" (pp310-311).

"[Case 19, 'B':] Wounded on 13 August 1915. [.....] Visual agnosia is present even for simple pictures [but] is more pronounced for complex pictures. [.....] Visual imagination also appears to be impaired; when asked for the number of sides of a hexagon he answers '4'" (p312).

"[Case 21, 'SH':] Wounded on 23 August 1914 in the left occiput by gunshot. [.....] Identification and naming of simple meaningful pictures is slowed but not impaired. [.....] Although he apperceives details correctly, he cannot comprehend the meaning of a scene" (p314).

"[Case 34, 'HP':] Wounded on 4 September 1914 by shrapnel or a rifle bullet in both occipital lobes. [.....] Apart from severe concentric field restriction he showed severe mindblindness, even with simple familiar objects. Reading was nearly impossible, except for a few words. [.....] Binocular depth perception is normal. Identification of meaningful pictures has meanwhile improved, but is still severely impaired. [.....] With more complex pictures and films he has great difficulties" (pp329-330).

And finally, for a defect in gist processing - what Poppelreuter termed "glancing over" (p162) - with preserved detailed scanning .....

"[Case 35, 'FR':] Wounded on 9 May 1915 [with] two wounds at the rear of the head. [.....] FR finds it very difficult to discriminate and identify lines. Normal binocular depth perception. [.....] Apperception of meaningful single pictures is not impaired [but] a severe impairment emerges with the apperception of complex picture series: FR is unable to identify the context, and relies entirely on details" (pp330 331).

Sadly Poppelreuter's battery of tests did not extend to judgements of emotion or beauty. [THREAD = THE SCIENCE OF VISION]

1918 The Dadaist performer Richard Huelsenbeck sets up the "Cafe des Westens" in Berlin to continue the pioneering work of the Cabaret Voltaire. Unfortunately their attacks on the war drew negative press. Only when they marketed their iconoclasm a bit more cleverly did it achieve acceptance for a couple of years, and then only on the fringe of theatre going. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1918 [See firstly 1757 (Charles de Brosses)] Oskar Kokoschka [see 1909] commissions the sculptress Hermine Moos to produce a life-sized doll in the image of his ex-mistress Alma Mahler. He assists her in this project with a life-sized sketch [image] of the woman in question, and, when the work is completed, uses it as part artist's model, part fetish object. [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

1918 Inspired by Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" [see 1900], Carl Jung [see 1902] now publishes "Studies in Word Association", in which he explains the clinical use of his association of ideas test to reveal the most troublesome memory complexes hidden in a person's unconscious [we recommend Winer (2002/2007 online) for a full tutorial on the technique]. Jung's rationale here is as follows .....

"The associations often enable us to recognise the nature of the complex, thus obtaining valuable clues for causal therapy. A by-product, not to be underestimated, is the scientific knowledge which we thus gain of the origin and inner construction of the psychogenic neuroses" (Jung, 1918, p108). [See next 1921 (Jung)] [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNGIAN)]

RESEARCH ISSUE - MEMORY COMPLEXES AND AESTHETICS: Complexes of inter-associated memory fragments have only to become emotionally invested in some way to become, in turn, potential sources of creative inspiration (in artists) and/or dramatic interpretation (in their public) [it may even be that by recording simultaneously how we see the world and what we feel about it, memory complexes will turn out to be the only art-predisposing mental factors]. Unfortunately, research in this area is exceptionally difficult technically. There are, for example, only two methods of analysing complexes. Both borrow heavily from computer science, and neither has really been pushed to its limits. The first method is to record the individual nodes in a given memory complex, and to set out your findings graphically as a "semantic network" [see example]. Such networks soon reach a limit of usefulness, simply because there is too much data to be shown. The second method is far more frugal because it steps back from the specific data and deals instead with the data types involved. Thus one data type - <TEACHERS> could stand for many hundreds of specific named teacher "occurrences". Computer scientists often referred to this abstract analysis of naturally occurring data as a "Data Model" [for a longer history of the data modelling process, and a detailed tutorial, see the Companion Resource]. It remains to be seen whether network analysis of this sort can assist aesthetic theory.

1919 The German architect Walter Gropius [Wikipedia biography] sponsors the "Romantic Bauhaus Manifesto", and rebadges the Saxon School of Arts and Crafts as the Weimar Bauhaus. So begins a period of rapidly growing reputation, initially in avant-garde art and interior design, but then increasingly in architecture and design in general, as well as in theatre. Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky soon join the teaching staff, as do Lothar Schreyer and Oskar Schlemmer. The Bauhaus will eventually be shut down by the Nazis in 1933 for promoting "degenerate" art. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1919 Freud (1919) revisits Jentsch's notion of the uncanny in which he applies his own theories to the subject. He begins with an extremely thorough dictionary search for meanings of the words "uncanny" and "canny" [German = (un)heimlich], before noting that the sense of uncanny as an aesthetic experience comes from the body of usage where heimlich, by signifying "at home", actually means "concealed, kept from sight" (p223). Freud then goes far deeper into the Sandman story than Jentsch, noting Nathaniel's recurring nightmare of losing his eyes to the Sandman. The dread of him, says Freud, "became fixed in his heart" (p228), and as the story unfolds eventually destroyed him. Freud's conclusion is different to Jentsch's in that he attributes the feeling of the uncanny "to the idea of being robbed of one's eyes" (p230), and that, in psychoanalytic thinking, is a sublimated fear of castration. The everyday aesthetics of the uncanny, in other words, is every bit as psychosexual in origin as any case of hysteria. Freud also points out that the eponymous villain of Sophocles' "Oedipus the King", the mother-loving father-killing King Oedipus, blinded himself in self-punishment at the end of the play, so we may also conclude that the Oedipus complex and the uncanny share some deep causal dynamic. [THREADS = THE UNCANNY and FROZEN MOTION]

1920 Assisted by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp produces his first kinetic piece, a "motorised sculpture" entitled "Rotary Glass Plates". This and subsequent spinning pieces often generate interesting visual illusions. In 1931 Duchamp suggests the alternative name "mobile" for such artworks.

1920 [This entry draws on the investigative scholarship behind Reuben Hoggett's Cybernetic Zoo website.] After a successful wartime career in the RNAS, and based now in Britain, Alban J. Roberts [see 1912] turns techno-performer with "Kaiser", a man-sized radio-controlled android. This so appeals to the public that Pathe Gazette arrange to have it put through its paces for the news cameras [see stills]. [THREADS = ANIMATED MECHANISM and FUTURIST PERFORMANCE]

1920 A young American newspaper cartoonist named Walter E. ("Walt") Disney [Wikipedia biography] teams up with an American animator named Ubbe Iwerks [Wikipedia biography] to try to make money in and around Kansas City with animated short films. Despite a good public reception, high production costs soon bring the venture to its financial knees. [See next 1923 (Disney)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1920 The German film director Robert Wiene [Wikipedia biography] screens "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari" [You Tube full length video], a film which will be acclaimed the standard bearer for German Expressionist cinema. [See next 1922 (Murnau)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1920 The German painter-draughtsman George Grosz [Wikipedia biography] releases the portfolio "Gott mit Uns" [= "God with Us"; the imprint on the belt clasp of the German Army uniform], a protest art collection of anti-WW1 caricatures [specimens] frequently contrasting well-heeled war-profiteers with the broken bodies of those who actually did the fighting. [THREAD = ART, WARFARE, AND PROPAGANDA]

1920 The Spanish painter Joan Miró [Wikipedia biography] sets up studio in Paris, initially to develop his understanding of Cubism but later to move towards Surrealism with works such as "The Tilled Field" (1924) [image]. [THREAD = SURREALIST ART]

1920 [See firstly 1911 (Fry) and 1914 (Bell)] Roger Fry now publishes "Vision and Design" [buy] in which he complements reprints of earlier papers with a purpose-written retrospective essay. This retrospective provides valuable insight into his own and Clive Bell's treatment of "formalism" [see 1914]. Here is his personal position on this issue .....

"I conceived the form of the work of art to be its most essential quality, but I believed this form to be the direct outcome of an apprehension of some emotion of actual life by the artist, although, no doubt, that apprehension was of a special and peculiar kind and implied a certain detachment. I also conceived that the spectator in contemplating the form must inevitably travel in an opposite direction along the same road which the artist had taken, and himself feel the original emotion. I conceived the form and the emotion which it conveyed as being inextricably bound together in the aesthetic whole" (Fry, 1920, p206).

..... and here is Bell's .....

Since it was impossible in these cases to doubt the genuineness of the aesthetic reaction it became evident that I had not pushed the analysis of works of art far enough, had not disentangled the purely aesthetic elements from certain accompanying accessories. It was, I think, the observation of these cases of reaction to pure form that led Mr Clive Bell to put forward the hypothesis that however much the emotions of life might appear to play a part in the work of art, the artist was really not concerned with them, but only with the expression of a special and unique kind of emotion, the aesthetic emotion. A work of art had the peculiar property of conveying the aesthetic emotion, and it did this in virtue of having 'significant form'" (p206).

Fry's central conclusion is as follows .....

"What I think has resulted from Mr Clive Bell's book, and the discussions which it has aroused on this point is that the artist is free to choose any degree of representational accuracy which suits the expression of his feeling. That no single fact, or set of facts, about nature can be held to be obligatory for artistic form. Also one might add as an empirical observation that the greatest art seems to concern itself most with the universal aspects of natural form, to be the least preoccupied with particulars" (pp206-207; emphasis added).

1921 A young Austrian-British philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein publishes "Tractatus", "an ambitious project to identify the relationship between language and reality, and to define the limits of science" (Wikipedia). It is not an easy read, presenting seven clusters of highly abstract propositions with minimal evidential support. Here, courtesy of an unnamed Wikipedia commentator, are the seven headline propositions .....

"(1) The world is everything that is the case.

(2) What is the case (a fact) is the existence of states of affairs.

(3) A logical picture of facts is a thought.

(4) A thought is a proposition with sense.

(5) A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.

(6) The general form of a proposition is the general form of a truth function, which is: .

(7) Where (or of what) one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence."

Wittgenstein later (1929) submits this work to the examiners at Cambridge University as his Ph.D. thesis, gets a job as lecturer, and is eventually promoted to Professor of Philosophy in 1939. He summarised the basic point of Tractatus as follows .....

"The main point is the theory of what can be expressed by propositions, i.e., by language (and, which comes to the same thing, what can be thought) and what cannot be expressed by propositions, but only shown; which I believe is the cardinal problem of philosophy" (Wikipedia, citing Edwards, 1982).

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: Wittgenstein's seven principles (to the extent that we understand them) have been incorporated into the proposition processing modules at the heart of the Konrad software [more on this].

1921 [See firstly 1812 (Grimm)] The Swedish Nobel Prize winning author Selma Lagerlöf [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Troll och Människor" [= "Trolls and Men"], a collection of Gothic tales. One of these - "The Changeling" - is a tale of troll abduction, but with an interesting twist intended to draw the reader's attention to the risks of belief-inspired child abuse. [See next 1932 (Freaks)] [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

1921 Sigmund Freud [see 1891] now publishes "Group Psychology" (Freud, 1921/1955), in which he describes the process of identification as follows .....

"Identification is known to psychoanalysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person. It plays a part in the early history of the Oedipus complex. A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow like him and be like him, and take his place everywhere. We may say simply that he takes his father as his ideal. [.....]. He then exhibits, therefore, two psychologically distinct ties: a straightforward sexual object-cathexis toward his mother and an identification with his father which takes him as his model. The two subsist side by side for a time without any mutual influence or interference. In consequence of the irresistible advance towards a unification of mental life, they come together at last; and the normal Oedipus complex originates from their confluence. The little boy notices that his father stands in his way with his mother. His identification with his father then takes on a hostile colouring and becomes identical with the wish to replace his father in regard to his mother as well. Identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone's removal" (Freud, 1921/1955, Group Psychology [Standard Edition (Volume 18)], p105). [See next 1923 (Freud)] [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (FREUDIAN)]

1921 Carl Jung [see 1902] now publishes "Psychological Types", in which he proposes four orthogonal dimensions of personality. The best known of these dimensions is E-I, where the extremes are Extraversion (E) and Introversion (I), according to whether a person is primarily interested in "the outer world of actions, objects, and persons" or "the inner world of concepts and ideas" (McCaulley, 1981, p298). Here is how Jung explains the distinction .....

"According to definition, the normal man is influenced in equal measure from within as from without. He makes up [the] middle group. On one side of this group are those individuals whose motivations are mainly conducted by the outer object, and on the other are those who allow themselves to be determined primarily by the subject. I have designated the first group as extraverted, the latter as introverted [.....]. The differentiation of type begins often very early, so early that in certain cases one must speak of it as being innate. The earliest mark of extraversion in a child is his quick adaptation to the environment, and the extraordinary attention he gives to objects, especially to his effect upon them. Shyness in regard to objects is very slight; the child moves and lives among them with trust. [.....] Apparently he develops more quickly than an introverted child, since he is less cautious. [.....] Every thing unknown seems alluring. Reversing the picture, one of the earliest marks of introversion in a child is a reflective, thoughtful, manner, a pronounced shyness, even a certain fear concerning unknown objects. [.....] Everything unknown is regarded with mistrust. Outside influence is, in the main, met with emphatic resistance. The child wants his own way, and under no circumstances will he submit to a strange rule that he does not understand. When he questions, it is not from curiosity or desire for sensation, but because he wants names, meanings, and explanations which could provide him with a subjective security over against the object. I have seen an introverted child who made her first efforts to walk only after she had learnt the names of all the things in the room with which she might come in contact" (Jung, 1928, pp82-84).

The other dimensions are as follows .....

Dimension S-N: The extremes here are Sensing (S) and Intuition (N), according to whether a person "prefers" to perceive "the immediate real practical facts of experience and life" or else "the possibilities, relationships, and meanings of experiences" (Ibid.).

Dimension T-F: The extremes here are Thinking (T) and Feeling (F), according to whether a person makes decisions "objectively, impersonally, considering causes of events and where decisions may lead" or else "subjectively and personally, weighing values of choices and how they matter to others" (Ibid.).

Dimension J-P: The extremes here are Judgment (J) and Perception (P), according to whether a person prefers to live "in a decisive, planned, and orderly way, aiming to regulate and control events" or else in "a spontaneous flexible way, aiming to understand life and adapt to it" (Ibid.). [See next 1939 (Jung)] [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNGIAN)]

RESEARCH ISSUE - JUNGIAN PERCEPTION OF ART: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a psychometric test of personality based on the Jungian dimensions listed above. Type ISFP is listed online [check it out] as being an inherently artistic personality, but there is ample scope for more research here.

"Psychological Types" also formalises a number of theoretical constructs which are essential to the "Jungian" position, as now introduced .....

Readers unfamiliar with psychodynamic concepts and vocabularies will probably benefit from pre-reading the following Companion Resources .....

Consciousness in General - Companion Resource (Consciousness)

Consciousness, Freud's View - same as above (scroll down)

Consciousness, Iceberg Metaphor for - same as above (scroll down)

The Unconscious, Freud's View - Companion Resource

Personification, Jung's View - Companion Resource (Personification)

KEY JUNGIAN CONCEPT - THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS: Like Freud, Jung based his psychodynamic theory on the presumption of an unconscious mind, a mental system beyond the range of conscious introspection where uncensored feelings can secretly influence decisions and create mental states capable of covertly influencing that which we like to think of as entirely uninfluenced, namely our free will. However, Jung then distanced himself from Freud by proposing an even deeper mental system which he termed a "kollektive Unbewusstsein", that is to say, a "collective unconscious". This deeper resource - an unconscious below the unconscious - is best seen as the vehicle by which cultural images are conveyed from one generation to the next. Here is Jung himself on this .....

"[The personal unconscious] rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the term 'collective' because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men" (Four Archetypes, pp3-4).

The contents of the collective unconscious are quite strictly compartmentalised into what Jung called "archetypes", as now discussed.

KEY JUNGIAN CONCEPT - ARCHETYPES: Jung made much of the notion of "archetypes", seeing them as organising the collective unconscious into thematically distinct blocks of memory content, and profiling them as "preformed faculties" (Four Archetypes, p13). In our present context, archetypes are important because they show themselves in a society's myths and fairytales. All mythical figures, Jung believes, [and therefore the bulk of human belief systems, and in turn many of the artworks referenced in the present resource - Ed.] "correspond to inner psychic experiences and originally sprang from them" (Four Archetypes, p136). Four archetypes are particularly important, namely (1) the Mother Archetype, (2) the Rebirth Archetype, (3) the Spirit Archetype, and (4) the Trickster Archetype, as now individually introduced .....

(1) THE MOTHER ARCHETYPE: The Mother Archetype is a preformed faculty - an archetype - in which are stored nurturance images from our infancy and childhood. As infants we were small and helpless whilst our carers were big and more or less fond of us, ministering to our physical needs and helping us to grow emotionally. What little we recall of these early years is not just stored away in, but is also structured by, the inherited Mother Archetype. Given that both the preformed faculty and at least some infant nurturing are common to all Humankind so, too, is the Mother Archetype. Given also that archetypes frame our structuring of the world, it follows that all human folklore - including most of the major religions - is also mother-structured. Here is Jung himself on this .....

"The concept of the Great Mother belongs to the field of comparative religion and embraces widely varying types of mother-goddess. [.....] The symbol is obviously a derivative of the mother archetype" (Jung, 1938/1972, p9). "[Other] things arousing devotion or feelings of awe, as for instance the Church, university, city or country, heaven, earth, the woods, the sea or any still waters, matter even, the underworld and the moon, can be mother-symbols" (p15).

(2) THE REBIRTH ARCHETYPE: The second important archetype reflects another preformed faculty, this time the one which shapes how we conceptualise the permanence of our own existence. Jung's argument is simple .....

"The mere fact that people talk about rebirth, and that there is such a concept at all, means that a store of psychic experiences designated by that term must actually exist" (Ibid., p50)

That said, there are a number of ways in which the Rebirth Archetype can exercise itself, namely in the notions of (1) "metempsychosis" [i.e., the transmigration of souls], (2) reincarnation, (3) resurrection, (4) personal renewal or rejuvenation, and (5) ritual transformation, as in the Eleusian mysteries [see 630BCE] or the sort of sudden transformative identification with cult or hero.

(3) THE SPIRIT ARCHETYPE: The third important archetype shapes how we conceptualise, from our very earliest years, those things in our day-to-day experience which relate to that which is reborn in the Rebirth Archetype. Jung explains that there are a number of competing definitions here, of which a wholly supernatural spirit as "an immaterial substance or form of existence" (Ibid., p86) is but one. The defining characteristics are firstly the ability to engage in voluntary movement, secondly the ability to generate perceptual images from within (i.e., in the absence of external sensory input), and thirdly the ability to manipulate those images in the interests of extracting their potential drama.

(4) THE TRICKSTER ARCHETYPE: The fourth important archetype shapes how we conceptualise, again from our very earliest years, everything in our experience which serves to frustrate even the simplest of our Spirit Archetype's desired actions. It might be something which baulks our crawling across the floor at nine months of age, or [Kleinians, please note] denied suckle, or it might be being picked up or put down when we were happy where we were, or tickled into helplessness, or teased mercilessly, or ignored, or misunderstood, or whatever. Such frustrations are subsequently easy to project unconsciously onto suitable model irritants such as magicians, teases, bullies, comedians, and, as we shall see, priests.

RESEARCH ISSUE - THE PURSUIT ARCHETYPE:

"Who are those guys!!" (Butch Cassidy)

Jung did not include a pursuit archetype in his discussion of the big four archetypes. Nevertheless it is easy to discern something approaching a pursuit archetype in both fine and popular art. Certainly the pursuer-pursued device comes up time and time again in the movies - think car versus car in "Bullitt" [remind me], man versus town in "Rambo" [remind me], and shark versus man in "Jaws" [remind me]. Curiously, we seem able to identify with either a single pursuer or a mob, or with a single pursued or many, or even with both pursuer and pursued simultaneously, as in "The Fugitive" [remind me]. And we are particularly gripped when, having once identified with the pursued, the pursuit is more than usually relentless, as with Han Gruber's murderous henchmen in "Die Hard", "Westworld's" dysfunctional android gunslinger [see 1973], or the axe-wielding Jack Nicholson in "The Shining". In fine art the plotting is perhaps more subdued but there is certainly no shortage of pursuit-inspired imagery. For starters, the simple act of hunting for food is one of the primary themes for just about all art prior to the neolithic, is far from ignored by classical myth [e.g., Titian's (1575) "Death of Actaeon" - Wikipedia image], and remains a common background setting for Renaissance works such as Brueghel the Elder's "The Hunters in the Snow" (1565) [image]. There are also some great historical manhunts, not least that depicted in Poussin's (1634) "Crossing of the Red Sea" [image].

KEY CONCEPT - MEMORY COMPLEXES: In everyday English, the word "complex" can be used either as an adjective [e.g., "a complex issue"] or as a noun [e.g., "a military complex"]. The word's root is the Latin complexio [= "connection"]. The word was therefore the lexeme of choice when early psychiatrists were looking for a term to describe recurring combinations of symptoms - "syndromes" - seen in the early asylums. This is why we still describe the sort of delusions of grandeur seen in certain psychotic patients as a "Napoleon complex". A young Sigmund Freud also used the word in his On Aphasia monograph [see Companion Resource], where he described the semantic referent of any given word as a Komplex (e.g., Freud 1891/1992, p148) of interlocking associations. Other famous complexes include Freud's "Oedipus complex", Adler's "inferiority complex", and Jung's "erotic complex". This latter is Jung's (e.g., 1918, p117) term for a complex of memory fragments "all showing characteristic disturbances which are ex hypothesi of a sexual nature" (p119), and which may be linked and integrated moreover by an overarching narrative or explanatory theme.

CAUTION: Jung's characterisation of the collective unconscious is often seen as implying the inheritance of specific memories. Jung himself recognised this risk and repeatedly clarified his position. Unfortunately, the Jungian terminology is itself so difficult to define that the clarifications often add little to the average understanding. Here is one particularly thoughtful attempt to help .....

"The collective unconscious is not to be thought of as a self-subsistent entity; it is no more than a potentiality handed down to us from primordial times in the specific form of mnemonic images or inherited in the anatomical structure of the brain. There are no inborn ideas, but there are inborn possibilities of ideas that set bounds to even the boldest fantasy and keep our fantasy activity within certain categories: a priori ideas, as it were, the existence of which cannot be ascertained except from their effects. They appear only in the shaped material of art as the regulative principles that shape it" (Spirit in Man, pp93-94).

1921 The Italian novelist-turned-dramatist Luigi Pirandello [Wikipedia biography] stages "Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore" [in English as "Six Characters in Search of an Author"] [see synopsis]. The work provides a powerful insight into the nature of theatrical reality by exposing many of the artifices by which we like to have that reality created, but which are herein omitted. It has been classified as "Theatre of the Grotesque", thus .....

"The spirit of the grotesque [.....] grows directly out of Pirandello's concept of 'umorismo', the painful laugh that accompanies a tragic sense of bewilderment in the face of a cruel and incongruous life. [.....] As a play, a grotesque ideally is itself a denial of any imposed form, neither a comedy nor a tragedy, but an experience where inner life forces the spectator into the same sense of bewilderment as the characters" (Longman, 1974 online, e1-2; emphasis added). [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1922 Karel Capek's play "R.U.R." introduces the word "robot". Thanks to the creativity of the play's director, Frederick Kiesler, it also included "television" screens [actually a camera obscura system] a full decade before television had actually been identified!

1922 The Austrian (later American) film director Fritz Lang [Wikipedia biography] screens "Dr. Mabuse" [You Tube video clip], a four-hour psychological thriller. [See next 1923 (Disney)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1922 The German film director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau [Wikipedia biography] screens "Nosferatu" [You Tube full length video], a highly atmospheric retelling of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" [see 1897], and the film which most successfully transferred the gothic tradition in art and literature onto the silver screen. [See next 1922 (Lang)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1922 Carl Jung [see 1902] now publishes a paper entitled "Űber die Beziehungen der analytischen Psychologie zum dichterischen Kunstwerk" [In English in 1923 as "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry"], in which he identifies two basic types of creative act. The first is creativity by conscious hard work, with a definite intention, and executed using pre-learned technical skills. The second is creativity from the unconscious spirit within, as now profiled .....

"While his conscious mind stands amazed and empty before this phenomenon, [the artist] is overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts and images which he never intended to create and which his own will could never have brought into being. Yet in spite of himself he is forced to admit that it is his own self speaking; his own inner nature revealing itself and uttering things which he would never have entrusted to his tongue. [.....] So when we discuss the psychology of art, we must bear in mind these two entirely different modes of creation" (pp84-85; emphasis added).

Jung calls this frenetically productive inner daemon an "autonomous creative complex" (p87), and proceeds on the assumption that it makes up a large part of the personality of the "great artist", thus .....

"We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche. [.....] Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers [.....] That is the secret of great art" (pp87 & 96); emphasis added). [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNGIAN)]

1922 The German psychiatrist-art historian Hans Prinzhorn [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Bildnerei der Geisteskranken" [= "The Artistry of the Mentally Ill"], in which he presents works from the archive of schizophrenic patients' art at the University of Heidelberg Psychiatric Hospital. Some items from the Prinzhorn Collection will eventually be included in the Nazi Party's exhibition of Degenerate Art [see 1937]. [THREAD = ART, WARFARE, AND PROPAGANDA]

1922 The latest offering from Man Ray [see 1915], a photograph entitled "La Marquise Casati" [image], produces a curious (and to the present author disturbing) four-eyed effect by jogging the camera at the moment of exposure. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

RESEARCH ISSUE - FACE PROCESSING: There are three distinct traditions in the modern literature on face perception. The first may conveniently be dated to Charles Darwin's scene-setting work "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" [see 1872 and its THREADS], and is interested in the extraction of indicators of emotionality from such facial parameters as eye movement, brow movement, and mouth shape. This is the zoological tradition, as comes through to the modern day via the works of Konrad Lorenz [see 1937], Niko Tinbergen [see 1951], Ray Birdwhistell [see 1952], and Desmond Morris [see 1967]. [To get a flavour of the issues currently being addressed by zoological ethology, click here]. The second research tradition falls within the branch of cognitive science known as "cognitive neuropsychology", and may conveniently be dated to the model of modular face recognition proposed in the paper by Bruce and Young (1986 [q.v.]). This approach is interested in the cross-correlating of clinical problems in face recognition with models of the likely underlying information processing networks. [To get a flavour of the issues currently being addressed in this area of cognitive neuropsychology, click here]. The third tradition is the use of deliberately distorted facial images as stimuli, and can either measure the ability of such images to induce such emotions as fear and disgust or else their ability to impair the recognition process. The precise relationship between morphological anomalies of this sort and the emotionality of disturbing art remains to be determined.

1923 The French stage performer Etienne Decroux enrols at the Vieux-Colombier stage school and begins to develop "corporeal mime", the sort of whole body attitude-sequence performance later made world-famous by his student Marcel Marceau. The essence of the Decrouxian method is that the actor should become "totally expressive", to the exclusion of conventional speech and gesture.

1922 The German choreographer Oskar Schlemmer [Wikipedia biography] stages his "Triadisches Ballett" [= "Triadic Ballet"] in Stuttgart. The name derives from the ballet's three act structure, three participants, and a general divisibility of things by three. The company will tour for several years and acquire a reputation for visually striking avant-garde performance. Schlemmer's main theoretical innovation is that his human dancers perform many of their movements in the never perfectly human style of puppets and marionettes. [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

1923 The Director of the Mannheim Art Gallery, Gustav Hartlaub, coins the term Neue Sachlichkeit [= "New Objectivity"] for an exhibition of alternatives to Expressionism in German art. One branch within this movement, represented by Otto Dix [see 1924] and George Grosz [see 1917], obtained its emotional effect by showing more unvarnished truths of trench warfare than those who were not on the field liked to see.

1923 Walt Disney [see 1920] now relocates to Hollywood and teams up with his banker brother Roy O. Disney [Wikipedia biography] to form Disney Brothers Studio. Five years later they will produce "Steamboat Willie" [You Tube full length video], the first sound Mickey Mouse cartoon, and set off on the road to Disneyland as we know and love it today. [See next 1927 (Lang)] [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1923 The Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt", subsequently translated as "Laws of Organisation in Perceptual Forms", a clear statement of the laws of proximity, similarity, common fate, closure, etc. One of Wertheimer's students, Rudolf Arnheim, will apply these rules to the aesthetics of both cinema [see 1932] and gallery art [see 1954].

KEY CONCEPT - "FIGURE" VERSUS "GROUND": No account of visual perception can be complete without accounting for form [see, e.g., 1914 (Formalism)]. In turn, no account of form can be complete without incorporating the Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organisation into the process, and no account of the Gestalt Laws can be complete without understanding the processes whereby some items are recognised as "figures" worthy of attention whilst others can safely be dismissed as "ground". The "figure-ground phenomenon" can be readily illustrated by studying so-called "reversible figures" where the information available to the visual system is deliberately inconclusive .....

SEE REVERSIBLE FIGURE-GROUND

It is also worth noting that some figures do not emerge easily from the retinal image, and need effort and time .....

SEE DIFFICULT FIGURE

1923 After seven years preparation Marcel Duchamp finishes "The Large Glass", a Proto-Surrealist work using glass panes instead of canvas and a variety of applique materials instead of paint.

1923 The magazine "Wierd Tales" begins publication.

1923 The Bauhaus experiments with puppets and mechanical figures.

1923 Matheson Lang stars as Matathias in the silent movie "The Wandering Jew".

1923 Influenced by August Macke's Rhineland Expressionists [see 1913], the German painter Max Ernst [Wikipedia biography] produces "Ubu Imperator" [image], a tribute to Alfred Jarry [see 1896], and the distinctly Surrealist "Men Shall Know Nothing of This" [image]. [See next 1948] [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1924 The French writer André Breton leads a Dadaist splinter-group including Salvador Dali to declare "The Surrealist Manifesto". Joined later by René Magritte they deliberately produce "anti-art" with a dreamlike compositional quality.

1924 The German artist Otto Dix [Wikipedia biography] releases a portfolio of 50 tell-it-as-it-was etchings of WW1 trench warfare under the title "Der Krieg" [= "The War"] [specimen images]. The following year he will take part in the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition in Mannheim. A number of his paintings will in due course be included in the Nazi Party's exhibition of Degenerate Art [see 1937].

1925 The "Exposition des Arts Décoratifs" introduces the term "Art Deco".

1925 The Russian film director Sergei M. Eisenstein [Wikipedia biography] screens "Strike" and "Battleship Potemkin", and is catapulted to instant international renown for his skill at cinematic montage [= dynamic narrative editing], especially where large crowd movements are involved [see specimen video]. [See next 1927] [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1925 The German painter Max Beckmann [Wikipedia biography] is appointed tutor at the Frankfurt Academy of Fine Art, where he promotes the Post-Expressionist principles of the New Objectivity movement [see 1923].

1926 The Austrian psychiatrist Melanie Klein [Wikipedia biography] sets up in practice in London and begins to put together her own variant of Psychoanalytic Theory. As with all good theories of psychotherapy, Klein's combines a detailed account of how minds are put together with equally detailed accounts (a) of how those minds can be damaged during that process and (b) of how to repair them when they are damaged. Central to all these considerations are the patient's experiences in very early childhood, because for Klein these experiences help habitualise a person's emotional responses to everyday people and objects. This is the thrust behind her explanatory notions of "object relations", "good objects", and "bad objects". She observes children as young as two years old at play, looking for hidden negative emotions such as aggression, envy, and greed, and suggests that that the guilt naturally associated with the depressive personality is the primary source of artistic creativity. In 1932 she will set out her theory in "The Psychoanalysis of Children" [buy]. Her collected works from the period 1921 to 1945 are available as "Love, Guilt, and Reparation" [buy]. [See next 1929] [THREAD = PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY]

1926 The British artist Sir Stanley Spencer [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "The Resurrection, Cookham" [image], his signature piece as an early British Modernist.

1926 The British educationalist Graham Wallas [Wikipedia biography] publishes "The Art of Thought", in which he puts forward a four-stage view of creative problem solving. The four stages are .....

Preparation: This is the first stage of creation, and involves consciously coming to grips with the task at hand. This means "doing your homework" as to what the task really involves, perhaps by working with the problem for a while, and perhaps by trying out previous failed solutions to find out why they failed. This helps put the problem into perspective, focussing the mind on the central difficulty. Thus "to realise what is structurally central and what is not, is, in most cases of thinking, of the highest importance" (Wertheimer, 1961, p269). This stage may take a considerable time, and should never be hurried. Indeed, the Greek scientist Archimedes actually warned his students not to ask too many questions about a problem all at once on the grounds that this was usually counter-productive.

Incubation: This is the second stage of creation, and involves unconsciously turning the problem over and over in your mind. It is therefore a period of apparent - but nonetheless vital - inactivity. This stage, too, cannot be rushed.

Illumination: This is the third stage of creation. It is very brief, and - like Archimedes jumping from his bathtub - typically involves the sudden appearance of a potential solution. This is the "1% inspiration" which most inventors claim has then to be supported by "99% perspiration".

Verification: This is the fourth stage of creation, and involves developing the potential solution into a fully functioning one. This stage, too, may take a considerable time, especially if the idea is related to a complex technological development. With major projects like the building of the atomic bomb or the race to the moon, the central objective reduces to thousands of constituent problems, each one of which follows the same four stages. That is why such projects tend to get measured in thousands of man-years of effort!

1926 The Spanish painter Salvador Dalí [Wikipedia biography] begins to develop a reputation at the Surrealist end of Dadaism. [See next 1931]

1926 Max Ernst [see 1923] now publishes a pamphlet entitled "Histoire Naturelle" [in English as "Natural History"]. In it he describes discovering the technique of frottage - "the scraping of pigments upon a ground prepared in colours and placed upon an uneven surface" (Ernst, 1945 [q.v.], p12). He even gives the exact date this happened - 10th August 1925 - and names the early works to result as "The Sea and the Rain" (1925) [image] and the symbolically challenging "Eve" (1925) [image]. [See next 1948]

1927 Fritz Lang [see 1922] now releases "Metropolis" [You Tube video clip], the very paradigm of Futurism in the cinema. [THREAD = HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY]

1927 The American psychologist J.P. Guilford [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "Fluctuations of Attention with Weak Visual Stimuli", in which he warns that there are optional physiological explanations of the sort of object fading noted by Troxler [see 1804] and Tscherning [see 1904]. He distinguishes in particular between "local retinal adaptation", where it would be the retinal receptor cells which somehow get fatigued by over-fixating and stop relaying information to the rest of the visual system, and "central fatigue", where neural processing units further up the visual system receive a full set of data from the retina but are themselves physiologically drained in some way and unable to process what they have been given. [See next 1942 (Marshall and Talbot)] [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

1927 The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, one-time student of Husserl, publishes "Space and Time", a highly original analysis of ontology and self. [Several of Heidegger's concepts, not least that of Dasein, the sense of "being there" which characterises sentient beings, are built into the Konrad software.]

1927 Sergei Eisenstein [see 1925] now adds "Oktober - Ten Days that Shook the World", another masterpiece of cinematic propaganda, to his résumé [see video extract]. [See next 1938] [THREAD = ART, WARFARE, AND PROPAGANDA]

1927 In an attempt to resolve the inconsistencies of the James-Lange Theory of Emotion, the Harvard physiologist Walter B. Cannon publishes his "Alternative Theory" of Emotion. He points out that the viscera are generally lacking in sensory innervation, that there is no one-to-one relationship between visceral activation and emotional state, that visceral changes generally lag behind emotional expression, and that many emotional expressions were demonstrably initiated by subcortical structures. Cannon therefore attributes emotion to activity in thalamic structures, as now summarised [a long extract heavily abridged] .....

"A THEORY OF EMOTION BASED ON THALAMIC PROCESSES: [.....] The neural organisation for an emotion which is suggested by the foregoing observations is as follows. An external stimulation stimulates receptors and the consequent excitation starts impulses towards the cortex. Arrival of the impulses in the cortex is associated with conditioned processes which determine the direction of the response. Either [the ascending impulses or the consequent cortical processes] excite thalamic processes. [.....] These neurons do not require detailed innervation from above in order to be driven into action. Being released for action is a primary condition for their service to the body - they then discharge precipitately and intensely. [.....] We may assume that when these neurons discharge in a particular combination, they not only innervate muscles and viscera but also excite afferent paths to the cortex by direct connection or by irradiation. The theory which naturally presents itself is that the peculiar quality of the emotion is added to simple sensation when the thalamic processes are roused" (pp119-120).

ASIDE - THALAMIC EMOTION AND THE KONRAD SOFTWARE: The sequence of events described above, which Cannon terms the "double control of behaviour" (p123), together with the proposed system's reliance on reafferent information flow, is closely mirrored by the Konrad software.

1927 The Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli [Wikipedia biography] sets up shop in Paris and launches a distinctive range of knitwear [example] to considerable commercial success. Later designs draw heavily on the work of Salvador Dali [e.g., the "Lobster Dress" (1937)] and Jean Cocteau. [See next 1938]

1928 Breton suggests that the ultimate in Surrealist performance would be to fire a revolver at random into a crowd of passers-by.

1928 The Canadian artist Emily Carr [Vancouver Art Gallery biography] exhibits "Skidegate" [image in bio], one of many works themed on Native American totemism. [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNGIAN)]

1928 The British naturalist-explorer Richard W. Hingston [Wikipedia biography] publishes a a review of insect behaviour entitled "Problems of Instinct and Intelligence among Tropical Insects", in which amongst other things he describes the foraging behaviour of the dung-beetle. These insects work in pairs to shape a bolus of dung out of animal droppings, and then roll it to a storage site to bury it. However, if upon their arrival at the dung they are given a ready-made dung ball, they ignore it. Instinct has given them a complex program to execute and they are not free to take this particular short-cut, no matter how sensible it might seem. [THREAD = THE NATURE OF INSTINCT]

1928 The German architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Kunst und Rasse" [= "Art and Race"], an explicit appeal for the sort of "racially pure" German art which would shortly become part of the Nazi Party's racial ideology. [THREAD = ART, WARFARE, AND PROPAGANDA]

1929 The American philanthropist and art collector Solomon R. Guggenheim [Wikipedia biography] begins to collect works by "non-objective" [= wholly abstract] artists such as Kandinsky [see 1911] and Mondrian [see 1911]. In the ensuing decade he will accumulate sufficient material to establish the "Museum of Non-Objective Painting" in New York City. [See next 1959]

1929 The Austrian engineer Gustav Tauschek [Wikipedia biography] obtains the German patent for an electro-mechanical optical character sorting machine. [THREAD = MACHINE VISION]

1929 Melanie Klein [see 1926] now publishes a paper entitled "Infantile Anxiety Situations Represented in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse". In this paper she reviews (a) the case of the fictional six-year old boy in Ravel's opera "L'Enfant et les Sortilèges" [in English as "The Child and the Spells"; in German as "Das Zauberwort" [= "The Magic Word"]], and (b) the case of the real-life artist Ruth Kjär. The boy's behaviour is full of sadistic destructiveness, which Klein interprets as an "attack on the mother's body and on the father's penis in it" (p86). The woman's behaviour is full of periods of deep depression, which she herself attributes to "an empty space in me, which I can never fill" (p90), and Klein interprets as "a sadistic desire [.....] to rob the mother's body of its contents" (p92). Klein then makes the link to the creative arts by proposing a "desire to make reparation" (p93), which fuels symbolic attempts to make amends to the mother. [See next 1930 (Stokes) and 1993 (Segal)]

1930 The German art critic Niels von Holst publishes "German Portrait Painting in the Time of Mannerism".

1930 Piet Mondrian [see 1917] now exhibits "Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow" (1930) [image], a textbook example of how to achieve visual appeal [is it beauty?] with just a few blocks of plain colour separated by straight lines.

1930 The up-and-coming artist-critic Adrian D. Stokes [Wikipedia biography] enters a period of psychotherapy under Melanie Klein [see 1926]. Two years later he will have learned enough to promote the thesis that Kleinian psychodynamics can be seen at work in Italian Renaissance painters of the 1400s, and publishes his ideas in ***** "The Quattro Cento" ***** [buy]. [See next 1934]

1930 Now one of the main figures in the Gestalt School, Wolfgang Köhler [see 1913] publishes "Gestalt Psychology" [buy], a textbook of gestaltist theory of perception and memory. This is one of the works which will be criticised by Anton Ehrenzweig [see 1953] for carelessly falling foul of William James' "Psychologist's Fallacy" [see 1890], thus .....

"The Gestalt Theory, by observing everywhere articulate gestalt [.....] and failing to give equal attention to inarticulate form experiences, committed the 'Psychologist's Fallacy' almost as a matter of principle, yet went uncensored" (Ehrenzweig, 1953, p4).

1930 Pablo Picasso [see 1912] exhibits "Crucifixion" [image], a work which will subsequently be described as "unique in the iconography of modern painting and of Christianity" (Rubin, 1968, p291).

1931 The German historian Otto Rahn tours South-West France studying the history and sites of the Cathars. He is motivated by the legend that significant Christian relics - possibly even the Holy Grail itself - were secreted at Montsegur during the Albigensian campaign [see 1198, 1906], and, since its protectors were then put to the sword, remain to be discovered. [See next 1933]

1931 Salvador Dalí [see 1926] exhibits "The Persistence of Memory" [image], a highly Surrealist and nowadays extremely well-known work.

1932 The British physicist Charles E. Wynn-Williams [Wikipedia biography] reports research carried out at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory resulting in an automatic counting device (Wynn-Williams, 1932). Insofar as this device was entirely electronic (being valve-based rather than electromechanical), and insofar as it performed binary arithmetic (rather than decimal), this development was one of the main stepping stones on the way to the computer age. In the run-up to WW2, Wynn-Williams' reputation with calculating circuits will get him transferred to the top-secret Dollis Hill research station to work on code-breaking computers [for a fuller telling of this story see Section 3 of our e-resource "Short-Term Memory Subtypes in Computing and Artificial Intelligence (Part 2)"].

1932 [See firstly 1690 (Locke) and 1728 (Cheselden)] By now many reports of sight-restorative surgery relevant to the Molyneux Question have accumulated in the medical literature, and the time is therefore ripe for all this evidence to be reviewed and its implications assessed. Step forward the German neurologist Marius Von Senden [no bio available], who identifies 40 reports besides Cheselden's in the period to 1931, and publishes his analysis of these in "Raum und Gestaltauffassung bei Operierten Blindgeborenen" [in English as "Space and Sight" (1960)]. On balance, these reports [see extracts] support the view that there is no recognition of visual pattern or depth in newly sighted patients: that is to say, that there has been no "transfer" of knowledge from tactile experience to the visual modality. There is, on the other hand, some apparent ability to distinguish colour and brightness or even to judge that two patterns were different [see detailed findings]. Von Senden's work will remain relatively obscure until referenced by Donald Hebb in his 1949 book "The Organisation of Behaviour", and will not be translated into English until 1960. [THREAD = THE VISUAL SYSTEM (THE MOLYNEUX QUESTION)]

1932 [See firstly 1921 (Lagerlöf)] The American showman turned movie producer Tod Browning [Wikipedia biography] releases "Freaks", a cautionary tale set in a circus freak show, the point of which is that the nastiest deeds are done not by the freaks but by the so-called "normal" folk around them. [See next 1957 (Thalidomide)] [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

1932 Rudolf Arnheim, a young German psychologist and student of Wertheimer's in Berlin during the 1920s, publishes "Film as Art", in which he compares the perceptual processes used in everyday life with those used when viewing movies.

1932 The Polish artist Hans Bellmer [Wikipedia biography] attends a performance of Offenbach's "Tales of Hoffmann" [see 1881] and is inspired thereby to express his artistic inspiration in a series of sexualised dolls and sculptures [see examples]. He will publish a selection of these in "Die Puppe" (1934). [See next 1936 (Morton Bartlett)] [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1933 The Nazis shut down the Bauhaus .

1933 Otto Rahn [see 1931] publishes the results of his research trip [see 1931] in "Kreuzzug gegen den Gral" [= "Crusade Against the Grail". He is also explicit as regards a link between the Cathars and the Celtic druids in the British Isles.

1933 The American composer John Cage [Wikipedia biography] is accepted as student by Arnold Schoenberg, and sets to work developing his own avant-garde compositional style. [See next 1938]

1933 John A. Rice and Theodore Dreier found Black Mountain College to pursue a liberal arts curriculum and generally promote John Dewey's theories of progressive education [more on this].

1933 Just before the closure of the Bauhaus by the Nazis, the artists Josef and Anni Albers leave Germany for the USA, there to join the drama course at Black Mountain College, NC, where they pursue the Bauhaus tradition in a new and safer locale. [See next 1949]

1933 The Hungarian photographer André Kertész [Wikipedia biography] experiments with distorting mirrors to create interesting and occasionally disturbing images. [THEME = DISTURBING ART]

1934 The British businessman William Hinds founds a film production company under the name "Hammer Film Productions". They produce four films over the ensuing four years, including "The Mystery of the Marie Celeste" (1936), starring Bela Lugosi, and "Song of Freedom" (1936), starring Paul Robeson. Things then go quiet until after WW2.

1934 The American art historian Edward F. Rothschild publishes "The Meaning of Unintelligibility in Modern Art" [buy]. He begins by identifying three factors which have to be present to a significant extent in an artwork for it to be acclaimed a "work of art". These three factors are as follows .....

"A work of art has three essential attributes: expression, involving the point of view of the artist, his attitude towards his theme, toward his public, toward himself, his faith, his feelings, his hopes - in short, a message in which certain more or less general and permanent attitudes and certain immediate feelings and reactions are given immediate or particular embodiment; style, the physical or sensory means, and their results or record in tangible, visual, or audible experience, which the artist employs as the vehicle of his expression or for the sake of their intrinsic integration; and quality, which is the degree of success approaching perfection that any observer may attribute to the result" (pp2-3).

Rothschild's substantive point is then that the artist's expression - the all-important message - can fly by many routes, not all of them straight and simple. Specifically, he argues that the low superficial intelligibility of a piece of modern art does not automatically prevent it having a significant message; such works are allowed, required even, to be "antiliteral" (p7) and idiomatic. The remainder of the work is an exploration of the "factors of unintelligibility" (p8). The first of these factors he names as "Individualism", the second as "Revolution", and the third "Dematerialisation". Individualism on the part of an artist implies not just having the courage of your convictions but also an "awareness of the function of self" during the process of observation (p12). Revolution implies constantly being on the look-out for "a new order" (p17). And Dematerialisation - arguably the most important of the three factors - implies a focus on the "insubstantialities" of Nature rather than its materialities. The art movement most associated with Individualism is Impressionism, thus .....

"It was with Impressionism that individualism became a 'systematic' source of unintelligibility. [.....] In an attempt to present a faithful rendering of the natural object it had become increasingly important to take complete account of sensory evidence. [.....] Previously artistic imagery had been determined by mental, tactile, and visual factors. With Impressionism it was determined by visual factors alone. [.....] The instruments of science are specialised or selective, and in operation they 'abstract'. Impressionism is like a science in that it uses a very specialised, selective instrument, the retina, to 'abstract' or extract all of the visual evidence which its object contains" (pp37-39).

The art movements most characterised by Revolution are Expressionism and Dadaism, for the following reasons .....

"[Expressionism's] language is violent and violence is one of the tenets of revolution. It is a fitting vehicle of the passion for action because it is explosive and dynamic. It is the idiom of propaganda, par excellence, because it appeals to the heart rather than to the head" (p61).

And finally, a number of art movements are characterised by Dematerialisation, including Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism. Of Dadaism, he explains his point as follows .....

"As the Dadaists sincerely proclaimed, true Dadaists were against Dadaism. They meant that Dadaism was an 'ism' to end all 'isms', and in opposing 'isms' they opposed Dadaism. Paradox is the essence of Dadaism and one of the most typical forms of 'unintelligibility'. [.....] Dada, for all the ridicule which has been heaped upon it, was serious, universal, and deep-seated. [.....] The question as to whether or not what Dada produced was art is relatively unimportant" (pp72-74). [THREADS = HISTORY OF AESTHETICS and ARTISTIC MOVEMENTS (VARIOUS)]

1934 The Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin [external biography] publishes "Discourse in the Novel", in which he coins the term "heteroglossia" [= "many tongues"] to describe the ability of conflicting types of speech to deliver ideas with the power required of great literature. What he terms "authoritative discourse" is so "unconditional" that whilst it is suited for textbooks it lacks the heteroglossia needed by effective fiction.

RESEARCH ISSUE: The formal study of the relationship between an author's message and the words (if any!!) by which that message is expressed is known as "pragmatics", and most modern theories of pragmatics are based on Austin's and Searle's Speech Act Theory. Because this theory requires a thorough prior grounding in psycholinguistics we recommend newcomers to the area to begin with our companion Psycholinguistics Glossary [scroll to the entry for praxis, and then work your way through the cluster of onward pointers]. Given that art is all about framing ideas in novel ways, applications of pragmatic theory to aesthetics are surprisingly rare [for notable exceptions, see 1968, Kowzan; 1969, Mounin; 1977, Eco; 1997, Butler; and 2010, Sacharova]

1934 The 1923 silent movie "The Eternal Jew" is remade with Conrad Veidt in the title role.

1934 Adrian Stokes [see 1925] now publishes "The Stones of Rimini" [buy], in which he famously distinguishes between the psychodynamics of "carving" and "modelling" as everyday sculpting skills. Carving, he asserts, is the process whereby an artist frees an artwork which is already in the stone from its imprisonment. Modelling is putting together an artwork which begins life in the artist's head and is then constructed out of initially formless materials. The different processes tap into the artist's unconscious mind in different ways. Depression is most likely to reveal itself in carving whilst paranoid-schizoid personality is most likely to reveal itself in modelling. [See next 1937]

1934 The German film director Leni Riefenstahl makes Triomph des Willens ["Triumph of the Will"] to document the 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nuremburg.

1934 [See firstly 1917 (Poppelreuter)] The German neurologist Karl Kleist [Wikipedia biography] publishes a monograph entitled "Wartime Brain Injuries and their Significance for Brain Localisation", in which he analyses some 1600 detailed neurological case reports compiled from WW1 head-injuries. These data give many hints as to the likely cross-mapping of different functional subcomponents of cognition as a whole in different anatomical locations [show me this diagram]. Using Brodmann's Numbers to pin his attribution of function to specific brain locations his diagram has stood up remarkably well in the face of subsequent research. Note how the Occipital Lobe [Areas 17, 18, 19, lateral and medial] is wholly devoted to vision but that eye movements are controlled from further afield [Area 8, lateral]. Note also the stippled "cingulate" cortex [Areas 23 and 24, medial], one of the few areas of neocortex directly concerned with emotion. [THREAD = FUNCTIONAL NEUROANATOMY]

1934 The American philosopher-psychologist John Dewey publishes "Art as Experience" [buy], including the warning that European museums risked being little more than "memorials of the rise of nationalism and imperialism" (p8).

1935 The Harvard psychologists Christiana Morgan [Wikipedia biography] and Henry Murray [Wikipedia biography] publish a paper entitled "A Method for Investigating Fantasies" [abstract], in which they report their initial experiences with a projective test known as the "thematic apperception test" (TAT). The essence of this test is that subjects who are shown a photograph and asked to explain what they think is going on will usually say an awful lot more about themselves than the photograph. Here are the actual instructions used .....

"This is a test of creative imagination. I am going to show you a picture, and I want you to make up a plot or story for which it might be used as an illustration. What is the relation of the individuals in the picture? What has happened to them? What are their present thoughts and feelings? What will be the outcome?" (p280).

..... and here is the nub of their findings .....

"That every subject almost immediately projects his own circumstances, experiences, or preoccupations into the evoker was only too obvious. [..... Some,] in fact, gave stories which were frank and unabashed autobiographies" (p282; emphasis added).

TEST YOURSELF NOW: How much do you like to read into everyday images? How many of your personal ambitions and hang-ups do you "project" into the characters on show? Take an online derivative of the TAT now - just click here.

[See 1962 (Arnold)] [THREAD = PERSONALITY AND ART]

1936 The American photographer Morton Bartlett begins to build a small family of half scale child-dolls, and photograph them in various tableaux. Apart from being the subject of a short article in the magazine Yankee in 1962 this collection will never be exhibited in the artist's lifetime, becoming famous only after being uncovered in 1993 [q.v.], a year after his death. [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

1936 The young American artist Jackson Pollack attends a warehouse on "liquid painting" and begins to specialise in abstract paintings created by pouring or dripping the paint onto canvases laid out horizontally on his studio floor (hence his later nickname "Jack the Dripper").

1936 The young Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper on computational theory entitled "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", in which he discusses the ability - then or ever - of a computing machine to assess any linguistically phrased proposition, and to correctly judge it as true or false. [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

1936 The young cognitive ergonomist Kenneth J.W. Craik [Wikipedia biography] joins the experimental psychology laboratories at Cambridge and, during WW2, works on a number of military projects, typically researching how to get the best out of the human operator when faced with aircraft or armoured vehicle control mechanisms or instrument read-outs. To help him understand what control cognition involves he extends Lichtheim's two-level cognitive hierarchy by an additional level. Although Craik died in 1945, the principles of his model are seen again in the models of Norman (1990) and Arkin (1990). [See next 1943]

1936 The British art historian Herbert Read [Wikipedia biography] publishes ***** "The Meaning of Art" *****, a collection of essays previously published in the BBC's "The Listener" magazine. This is a work of sustained erudition, putting over complex issues of philosophy and practice to a non-specialist audience. His definitions of pattern and form are particularly useful, thus .....

"Pattern alone does not constitute a work of art. Provisionally we may say that although a work of art always involves a pattern of some kind, all patterns are not necessarily works of art. [.....] A 'work of art' generally implies a certain degree of complexity. [.....] What we really expect in a work of art is a certain personal element [.....] We expect [the artist] to reveal something to us that is original - a unique and private vision of the world" (p33).

"There are various ways in which we can analyse a work of art. We can take the physical elements in a particular picture, isolate them, consider them separately and in relation to one another. There are perhaps five such elements; rhythm of line, massing of forms, space, light and shade, and colour, and this is in most cases the order of their priority - not in absolute importance, but merely as successive stages in the artist's mind. A form must be defined by an outline, and this outline, unless it is to be lifeless, must have a rhythm of its own. [.....] Delineation still remains one of the most essential elements in the visual arts - even in sculpture, which is not merely mass, but mass with outline" (p50).

Read also helps introduce the Surrealist movement to the English-speaking audience, thus .....

"As a movement, Surréalisme, or Super-realism, is totally distinct from all other contemporary schools, and indeed makes a complete break with all the accepted traditions of artistic expression. [.....] The artist, whether poet or mystic or painter, does not seek a symbol for what is clear to the understanding [but] realises that life, especially the mental life, exists on two planes, one definite and visible in outline and detail, the other - perhaps the greater part of life - submerged, vague, indeterminate. [.....] It is the aim of the Surréaliste, whether as painter or as poet, to try and realise some of the dimensions and characteristics of his submerged being, and to do this he resorts to various kinds of symbolism" (pp232-233).

1937 The American engineer George Stibitz completes his Model K, a relay-based calculator [he called it the "K" because he put the thing together on his kitchen table].

1937 The Austrian zoologist Konrad Z. Lorenz [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "Über die Bildung des Instinktbegriffs", in which he promotes the notion that complex instincts are best viewed as accumulations of lesser component behaviours. Each one of these lesser behaviours is "released" whenever environmental stimulation deals it an appropriate stimulation. The brain is equipped at birth with the necessary array of "innate releasing mechanisms" (although they may not all be operational until later life). [See next 1938]

1937 The Nazis mount an exhibition in Munich of entartete Kunst [= degenerate art]. Their criteria of degeneracy is to be out of step with Nazism's Neoclassical view of itself, and includes anything un-German, Jewish, or Bolshevik. These works were accordingly stripped from German art galleries. Among those whose works were attacked in this way were Max Beckmann [see 1925] and Walter Gropius [see 1919].

1937 Adrian Stokes [see 1925] now publishes "Colour and Form", in which he extends his carver-modeller dichotomy [see 1934] from sculpture to painting. A "carved" painting is one which has a "vitality", largely born of the effective use of colour, whilst a "modelled" painting fails to present itself as a non-schizoid whole.

1937 [See firstly 1901] Frank Lloyd Wright completes the Falling Water construction project, a stunning exercise in integrating a building with the natural features of the land, in this case a waterfall [image]. [See next 1959]

1938 Cage stages a concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "The hearing of the piece," he argues, "is his own action - that the music, so to speak, is his, rather than the composer's" (cited in Goldberg, 1979, p81) [see next 1952].

1938 Carl Jung [see 1902] now publishes "Four Archetypes", the contents of which we have already dealt with [see 1921 (Jung)]. [See next 1944 (Jung)] [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNGIAN)]

1938 Konrad Lorenz [see 1937] and the Dutch ornithologist Niko Tinbergen [Wikipedia biography] jointly publish a paper entitled "Taxis und Instinkthandlung in der Eirollbewegung der Graugans", in which they document the egg retrieving behaviour of the grey lag goose. Their observations famously include the use of model eggs varying in size, colour, and pattern in order to establish which dimensions formed part of the effective releasing stimulus for nurturing maternal behaviour. [See next 1943] [THREAD = THE NATURE OF INSTINCT]

1938 Sergei Eisenstein [see 1925] now screens "Aleksander Nevsky", as a cautionary allegory against the risk to the Soviet Union from the Nazis [Wikipedia synopsis]. [THREAD = ART, WARFARE, AND PROPAGANDA]

1938 The Latvian born American painter Mark Rothko [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Entrance to Subway" [image], in which there is just enough simplification of a subway booking hall for the work to count as abstract rather than naive. He will then devote much of 1940 to studying Frazer's "The Golden Bough" [see 1890] and Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" [see 1900], increasingly fascinated by the role which unconscious symbolism seems to play in aesthetics. [See next 1945] [THREAD = THE UNCONSCIOUS IN ART]

1938 The British novelist Daphne du Maurier publishes "Rebecca", a typical Gothic piece complete with foggy mansion [the famous Manderley], mysterious servant [the equally famous Mrs. Danvers], and a handsome but did-he-or-didn't he male hero.

1939 Homer Dudley develops VODER, the first electronic speech synthesiser, at Bell Telephone Laboratories.

1939 The American art critic Clement Greenberg [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "Avant-Garde and Kitsch", in which he distinguishes a genuinely intellectual form of artistic innovation - the avant-garde - from a shallower, more populist, version he calls "kitsch" [German = "tasteless; gaudy; cheap"]. [See now 1954 (Greenberg)] [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1939 The Westinghouse Corporation exhibits "Elektro the Motoman" [image, video, and cutaway drawing, courtesy of the Dave Buckley pages] at the New York World's Fair. Powered by a primitive electromechanical brain, Elektro could produce a number of simple output behaviours - movement and speech - to simple spoken commands. [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1940 Wolfgang Köhler [see 1913] now publishes "Dynamics in Psychology", in which he promotes a "dynamic field" approach to the internal representations activated during the process of perception.

1940 The Nazi propaganda service commissions and distributes Der Ewige Jude ["The Eternal Jew"] as part of their anti-Jewish propaganda.

1941 The German engineer Konrad Zuse completes the Z3, the world's first programmable electromechanical (relay-based) computer. [The Konrad software is named after this pioneer.]

1941 The American academic David Efron [no convenient bio] publishes "Gesture, Race, and Culture", in which he reports on field observations of ethnic minority groups (Jews and Italians) in New York City. The target of these observations had been the use of gesture as a coverbal sidechannel of communication, and his observational data demonstrated both culturally specific (learned) and cross-culturally common (unlearned) components. [See next 1943 (Russell)] [THREAD = THE NATURE OF INSTINCT]

1941 The American poet-academic John C. Ransom [Wikipedia biography] publishes a book entitled "The New Criticism", in which he argues that works of literature need "close reading" if their students are ever to understand how they function as "self-contained, self-referential, aesthetic objects" (Wikipedia). Probably the best-known example of New Criticism is Wimsatt and Beadsley's essay "The Intentional Fallacy" [see 1946].

1942 The American research team W.H. Marshall and S.A. Talbot publish a paper entitled "Recent Evidence for Neural Mechanisms in Vision [etc.]", in which they suggest that vision is partly based upon an "ultra-fine tremor" which serves to distribute the features of the external scene across more retinal cells than would otherwise be the case, thus improving the quality of the data extracted by the retina for higher visual processing. [See next 1950 (Ratliff and Riggs)] [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

1943 The American abstract painter Ad Reinhardt [Wikipedia biography] has his first one-man show at the Artists' Gallery in New York City, before going on to carve out a career as a painter-illustrator. He will become particularly well known in the 1950s and 1960s for a series of monochrome canvases in red, blue, white, and - eventually - black. [specimen images]. [Compare 1953, Rauschenberg]

1943 The Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Prolegomena to a Theory of Language", a work which anticipates many of the ideas in Herbert Grice [see 1989], John Austin [see 1962], and John Searle [1969], but which gets too little credit having been unavailable in English for several years. Hjelmslev's system will eventually be incorporated into Umberto Eco's Theory of Semiotics [see 1975].

1943 The Swiss biochemist Albert Hofmann [Wikipedia biography] accidentally experiences his first LSD trip. [THREAD = ART, RITUAL, AND BELIEF]

1943 The American neurophysiologist-cyberneticians Warren S. McCullough [Wikipedia biography] and Walter H. Pitts [Wikipedia biography] publish a paper entitled "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity", in which they suggest how it might be possible to construct an artificial neuron out of electronic components. They called their artificial neurons "neurodes", and each was a simple arrangement of electronic components designed to do two main things, namely (a) to output a signal similar to the bursts of action potentials output by biological neurons, and (b) to see to it that this output was modulatable - sensitive to what other neurodes in the vicinity were telling it. In this way, quite simple combinations of neurodes were capable of performing the logical operations AND, OR, and NOT to much the same end effect as the electronic circuitry then being developed for use in computers. Four years later they will publish the design for a neurode-based pattern recognition network. [THREAD = MACHINE VISION]

1943 Colossus, the first programmable electronic computer, is constructed at Bletchley Park and used for wartime codebreaking.

1943 Konrad Lorenz [see 1937] now publishes a paper entitled "Die angeborenen Formen möglicher Ehrfahrung" [in English 2010 as "The Innate Forms of Possible Experience" - buy], in which he promotes the notion of the Kindchenschema [= "baby schema"; read as "kintshen-skaymer"], an inborn preference for "cuteness" in babies' faces which has evolved precisely in order to release nurturing behaviours from those around them. [See next 1952] [THREAD = THE NATURE OF BEAUTY]

1943 [See firstly 1936] The nature of Kenneth Craik's war work has allowed/forced him to develop theories of his own as he goes along, and as a result he is now around 40 years ahead of mainstream cognitive science in developing the concept of the "mental model" and the theory of "the human operator". He publishes some of these ideas under the title "The Nature of Explanation", and his later writings also reveal a deep philosophical concern with what might be going on during the "central delay" component of performance time, the time lag between sensation and action during which the most interesting things tend to happen. Note how the various subsystems invite continuous cyclical reactivation .....

"..... activity is not regarded as a unidirectional train from perception to motor response; it is, instead, the patterns representing the possibilities of the situation which reign supreme, fed by the perceptual patterns of the situation, feeding the various response mechanisms with simpler tasks, and fed in turn with perceptions of the progress and success or failure of these motor responses" (Craik, 1943-1945, in Sherwood, 1966, p73).

KEY CONCEPT - PERCEPTUAL STAGES: [See firstly 1874 (Wernicke and Brentano) and 1902 (Meinong and Wundt)] Because wartime academic research has always been security classified, it is easy to underestimate how much WW2 was responsible for developments in cognitive science. The perceptual system and the dynamics of motor skill acquisition were both intensively studied because both had a direct military pay-back, and for our present purposes Craik is the worker to note. His contributions to cognitive science include his theory of the "discontinuous" cyclical nature of cognition, which he based on a three-stage perceptual hierarchy [show me this].

1944 A young Josef Beuys is seriously injured when his Stuka crashes on the Russian Front.

1944 Carl Jung [see 1902] publishes "Psychology and Alchemy", in which he seeks the hidden unconscious motivation for the symbols used in alchemy. [See next 1954 (Radin)] [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNGIAN)]

1944 The Swiss artist Peter Birkhäuser [Wikipedia biography] is so impressed by the image of a moth trying to get to the light through a closed window that it comes to haunt him as a soul archetype. He will spend the rest of his life [d. 1976] incorporating Jungian symbolism into his practice [see gallery]. [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNGIAN)]

1944 Wolfgang Köhler [see 1913] and the German-born American psychologist Hans Wallach now publish a paper entitled "Figural After-Effects", in which they discuss the theoretical importance of the perceptual illusion which follows sustained staring at one visual image with presentation of another. [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

1944 A Swiss art student named Jean Tinguely [Wikipedia biography] begins to experiment with machine-like sculptures fitted with electric motors to make them move. [See next 1957/1959]

1945 The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" (1945F/1962E) takes up phenomenology where Husserl left it, dissects it, and repackages it for a modern audience.

1945 Max Wertheimer [see 1923] now publishes a study of creativity under the title "Productive Thinking". Naturally enough he takes a strongly Gestaltist position, identifying most complex cognitions as having a moment when the person struggling with the available elements suddenly "catches on" to how they might best be co-arranged. Until that moment of insight arrives, cognition has gaps in it; gestalts are "unclosed", and not yet "good". What productive thinkers have to do, therefore, is move the temporary gestalts about in order to take advantage of the mind's natural dynamic ability - over time - to achieve a better "closure".

1945 Mark Rothko [see 1938] now now exhibits the more emphatically abstract "Slow Swirl at Edge of Sea" [image]. The following year he will experiment with "multiforms" such as "No. 18" [image]. [See next 1949] [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1946 Hammer Films is resurrected after WW2 to specialise in "quota-quickies", popular enough at the box office, but not too intellectually taxing.

1946 The American art critic Robert Coates popularises the term "Abstract Expressionism" to describe the work of avant-garde American artists such as Mark Tobey, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, especially as it set them apart from the earlier Surrealists. The defining characteristics are that their work is "rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic, and nihilistic" (Shapiro and Shapiro, 2000).

1946 The American painter Clyfford Still [Wikipedia biography] takes a lecturing post at San Francisco Art Institute, and there works on the style soon to be known as "Abstract Expressionism". Within that broad movement he is now assessed as the formative exponent of "colour-field" painting, using "jagged flashes" of one colour which appear to have been "torn off" the canvas to reveal a second colour underneath. His "1957-D No. 1" (1957) [image in above bio] is typical in this respect. [THREAD = ABSTRACT ART]

1946 After a war career in which he was wounded five times Josef Beuys enrols at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts to study Monumental Sculpture.

1946 [See firstly 1914 (Clive Bell)] The American academics William K. Wimsatt [Wikipedia biography] and Monroe C. Beardsley [Wikipedia biography] publish a paper entitled "The Intentional Fallacy", in which they challenge the idea that you should always be able to learn much about an author's poetic intent from that author's anecdotal comments on his/her motivation. The work itself should stand alone. [But see 1982 (Beardsley)]

1947 The American performance theorist Robert S. Breen experiments with "Chamber Theatre", the presentation of compressed works of heavy literature such as Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" and Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby". Sets and properties are minimal and role allocation often flexible or multiplexed. [THREAD = AVANT GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1947 The British neurologist Alfred F. Tredgold publishes the latest edition of his "Textbook of Mental Deficiency", and includes therein a section on the "idiot-savant" syndrome. [See next 1985 (Selfe)]

KEY CONCEPT - THE IDIOT-SAVANT SYNDROME: The French words idiot savant translate into English as "clever idiot", and it is in this sense that the term has entered medical terminology. An idiot-savant is a person of below average general intelligence, but possessing an above average skill in a particular area (commonly drawing skill, visual memory, or arithmetical party tricks).

1947 The Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt [Wikipedia biography] stages the play "It is Written", in which he pokes thoughtful fun at religious fanaticism. [See next 1956] [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1948 The American engineer Norbert Wiener publishes "Cybernetics" and thereby helps popularises this term as the science of control qua control in all systems, large and small, and animate or inanimate.

1948 The American painter Robert Motherwell [Wikipedia biography] contributes a preface to "Beyond Painting", a collection of five of Max Ernst's [see 1923] earlier writings and nine short tributes by "his friends" (not least André Breton [see 1924] and Tristan Tzara [see 1916].

1948 The American artist-commentator Barnett Newman [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Onement 1" [image], his first use of a "zip" of colour across the canvas. He also publishes an article entitled "The Sublime is Now", in which he takes the critical position that the 20th century has severely challenged earlier standards of beauty, and that it is now essential to distinguish very precisely between that which is beautiful and that which is sublime. [See next 1951] [THREAD = HISTORY OF AESTHETICS]

1948 Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver publish "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" in which they analyse all communication, machine or otherwise, from the perspective of a "noisy" (that is to say, imperfect) information transmission "channel". This book is now widely identified as one of the roots of the cognitive revolution.

RESEARCH ISSUE - INTEGRATED THEORY OF COMMUNICATION: Although it proposes a number of universal elements of communication, Shannon and Weaver's theory does not immediately have a lot to say about aesthetic communication. This is because it addresses primarily the transmission of messages, not their initial creation nor their subsequent interpretation - it explains neither the thinking behind the artist's "transmission" nor the generation of any emotional response at the receiving end. This is long-standing problem within cognitive science, where theories of intent and perceptual aesthesis are only rarely integrated into the sort of mathematically universal theory of communication here proposed. Here are some honourable exceptions .....

In semiotics, pure and simple, see 1960 (Berlo) and 1970 (Mounin)

In theatre and drama, see 1980 (Elam)

In fine art, see 2004 (Wensveen et al)

1948 [See firstly 1922 (The Golden Bough)] The British poet Robert Graves [Wikipedia biography] publishes "The White Goddess" [buy], a sustained but not always convincing attempt to identify the fundamental psychology behind humankind's interest in myth and ritual. The White Goddess in question is the prototype of all Egyptian, Greek, Celtic, and Germanic goddess cults, although for our present purposes we note only Graves' description of the emotional experience associated with the experience of the sublime in poetry, thus .....

"The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls, and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, or Mother of all Living, the ancient power of fright and lust - the female spider or the queen-bee - whose embrace is death" (Graves, 1948, p24). [THREAD = EMOTIONALITY IN ART]

1949 The philosopher Gilbert Ryle's "The Concept of Mind" reopens the debate on the Homunculus Fallacy and helps establish the terms "propositional" and "propositional" knowledge as modern versions of the classical distinction between episteme and techne, respectively.

1949 The French painter Yves Klein presents "The Monotone-Silence Symphony", a 40-minute performance artwork consisting of a 20-minute sustained chord followed by silence. [See next 1957] [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1949 Mark Rothko [see 1938/1945] exhibits "Magenta, Black, Green on Orange" [image], a work which will set his signature style for the ensuing decade. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1949 Born in Argentina to Italian parents, the painter-sculptor Lucio Fontana [Wikipedia biography] exhibits early punctured [specimen] or slashed [specimen] monochrome works. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1949 The American psychologist Melvin R. Marks publishes a paper entitled "Some phenomena attendant on long fixation", in which he reports the results of experiments similar to that reported by Troxler (1804 [q.v.]). Observers were asked to fixate upon a certain point on a simple shape, whereupon after only a few seconds subjective changes to the rest of the shape started to take place. When fixating on the corner of a square, for example, the other corners might start to "come apart", and straight sides bulge outwards. Marks' findings will be further discussed in Ehrenzweig (1953 [q.v.]). [See next 1950 (Ratliff and Riggs)] [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

1949 A 17-year old British schoolboy named Tony Sale [Wikipedia biography] unveils a simple life-sized robot named George to help out with household chores such as vacuum cleaning or mowing the lawn. When he joins the RAF the following year these skills get him a job as a radar technician, with official permission to pursue his researches. This brings an improved George V into the world, built from spare parts salvaged from a scrapped Wellington bomber. Controlled by radio pulses from a hand-held Morse key, George V was able to walk, turn his head, move his arm, and sit down. Like Elektro [see 1939] before it, Sale's robot attracted considerable public interest. However when the initial interest dies down the machine is consigned to Sale's garage, where it will remain until re-animated in 2010 [q.v.]. [THREAD = ROBOTICS]

1949 The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan [Wikipedia biography] presents a paper on the "mirror stage" of psychosexual development. His accumulated clinical experience over the next 15 years will be published in 1966 [q.v.].

1949 Josef Albers [Wikipedia biography] begins what will turn out to be a sustained experiment with a style of abstract art consisting of overlain coloured squares applied with a palette knife. Typical of this genre is "Homage to the Square" (1951) [image].

1949 The Canadian neuropsychologist Donald O. Hebb [Wikipedia biography] publishes "The Organisation of Behaviour" [buy], in which he promotes a cellular-level account of memory and perception. Hebb's pivotal notion is that of the "cell assembly", a structurally permanent wiring together of neurons by experience [more on this]. Amongst other things Hebb considers John Locke's "Molyneux Question" [see 1690 (Locke) and 1728 (Cheselden)]. To account for Cheselden's patient's difficulties, for example, Cell Assembly Theory needs only to propose that the necessary form recognition cell assemblies had not yet had a chance to establish themselves. Thereafter as new cell assemblies get created during ongoing visual experience the patient's form recognition abilities improve likewise. Hebb gives due credit here to Marius von Senden's review of the sight-restoration literature [see 1932] , even though this work is at the time still unavailable in English. Cell Assembly Theory will be modified and upgraded over the ensuing decades but remains the received model of the biological memory trace to the present day [June 2011]. [THREAD =- MAINSTREAM NEUROPSYCHOLOGY]

1950 The German physiologists Erich von Holst and Horst Mittelstaedt describe how the principles of "efference copy" and "reafference" help organisms cope with the potentially excessive feedback found in most biological systems. The problem is that motor activity - efference - does not just induce movement, but also affects what is picked up by the senses. As soon as you start moving, proprioceptors will tell you about limb position and balance, cutaneous receptors will tell you about changes in touch, pain, temperature, and pressure, homeostatic systems will signal requests for blood pressure and blood glucose maintenance, and special senses (eyes and ears) will detect the changing visual and auditory shape of the world. The senses, in short, are involved every bit as much in motor activity as are the motor pathways. [Mechanisms for efference copy and reafference have been incorporated into the present author's Konrad software.]

1950 Albert Michotte [see 1945] now publishes a paper entitled ***** "The Emotional Significance of Movement" *****, in which he reports experiments on the "kinetic combinations" which induce emotional experience. He reminds us firstly of his 1945 experiments, where "little coloured rectangles" were moved from side to side along a horizontal viewing slit, creating subjectively compelling feelings of causation [rectangle A chases rectangle B, or bumps it, or pulls it, etc.].

TEST YOURSELF NOW:

Click here to play Warren Thorngate's applet, and check out for yourself how convincing the Michotte illusion actually is.

Michotte now reports "a rather peculiar fact", namely that in their commentary his subjects often anthropomorphised their explanation, thus .....

"The letters A and B did not then signify the little rectangles as such, but took on the value of names of persons, and the experiments gave rise to interpretations of this nature: 'It is as though B was afraid when A approached, and ran off'; or 'A joins B, then they fell out, have a quarrel, and B goes off by himself' [.....] In all these cases, then, the observer is faced with a scene or an event in which two objects [.....] eventually evoke the idea of human behaviour" (p265).

To help explain the causal association between simple movement and complex intentional analysis, Michotte distinguishes between emotions of integration and those of segregation, thus .....

"Sympathy, friendship, and love belong evidently to the integrative class. In their most perfect form do they not result in identification, union, possession? On the other hand, antipathy, disgust, hate, and fear are obviously of the segregative type" (p266). [THREADS = ANIMATED MECHANISM and MECHANISMS OF PERCEPTION (VISUAL)]

1950 The American researchers Floyd Ratliff [New York Times obituary] and Lorrin A. Riggs [Rhode Island News obituary] publish a paper entitled "Involuntary Motions of the Eye during Monocular Fixation", in which they broadly confirm Marshall and Talbot's suspicion [see 1942] that the eyes are never totally at rest, even when we think they are or try to make them so. In fact, their data indicated three simultaneous components of eye movements, as follows: (1) a small and irregular high frequency tremor, (2) flicks lasting about 20 msec and occurring at irregular intervals, and (3) slow irregular movements. [See next 1953 (Ditchburn and Ginsborg)] [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

KEY RESEARCHER - FLOYD RATLIFF: Professor Ratliff is also noteworthy in our present context for having pioneered the application of hard cognitive science to the problems of aesthetics, culminating in the publication of "Paul Signac and Colour in Neo-Impressionism" [see 1992 (Ratliff).

1950 J.P. Guilford [see 1927] now delivers his Presidential Address to the American Psychological Society on the topic of creativity and how to encourage it. [THREAD = THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CREATIVITY]

1950 Alan Turing [see 1936] now publishes a paper entitled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in which he suggests that the question "can machines think?" is philosophically unsafe due to problems agreeing the meaning of the word think (Turing, 1950). Turing has long believed that all but the most obscure of problems can be solved by a sequence of simple actions, and already for a decade computer programmers have been proving him right. He now recommends that this sequence of actions be thought of as having an existence and meaning in itself: a program, once devised, is a solution in prospect, as it were, and simply "awaits" a machine to execute it. He then argues that the Mind will not only prove one day to be "programmable", but that the eventual program will be "implementable" on a machine. And once you have done that, of course, you will have a machine which will be indistinguishable from a human; that is to say, a machine which can "think" for itself. As to how you are going to test this indistinguishability, he proposes objectively establishing whether the machine, so programmed, can perform as successfully as a human in fooling an interrogator in an "imitation game" in which a man (A) and a woman (B) have to fool (C) as to which is the man and which is the woman. The knowledge pertaining to (A) and (B) is accumulated in the mind of (C) by asking questions, the only restriction being that the answers to those questions should be typewritten so as to prevent vocal clues being given. Turing's imitation game evolves somewhat over the years, and in its mature form will become popularly known as the "Turing Test".

KEY CONCEPT - THE TURING TEST: The standard form of the Turing Test runs as follows: if a human in room A were to communicate via keyboard and screen with an entity in room B which might be a human but which might also be a computer trying to appear human, then the definition of "humanness" would rest on whether the real human could tell the difference or not after five minutes of questioning. [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

1950 The German fashion photographer Hans Namuth [Wikipedia biography] records Jackson Pollock at work. The accumulated output not only helps make Pollock famous, but also helps divert critical attention from the artwork itself onto the production process by which it was created.

1950 The Austrian-born British art historian Ernst H. Gombrich [Wikipedia biography] publishes the first edition of "The Story of Art", an attempt to get inside the living mind of artists from prehistoric times onwards, using just their output as evidence. His chaptering sets the historical timeline and the sharpness of his analysis soon brings all the controversies of aesthetic philosophy tumbling out one by one before our eyes; even the opening sentence (in which he observes that there is really no such thing as Art, only artists) is controversial. Here is what he then has to say about the individuality of the viewer's response .....

"Actually I do not think there are any wrong reasons for liking a statue or a picture. Someone may like a landscape painting because it reminds him of home, or a portrait because it reminds him of a friend. There is nothing wrong with that. All of us, when we see a painting, are bound to be reminded of a hundred-and-one things which influence our likes and dislikes. As long as these memories help us to enjoy what we see, we need not worry" (p4).

RESEARCH ISSUE - HUMAN MEMORY: By alluding to the individuality of human experience in aesthetic appreciation, Gombrich is recognising the Associationist view of human memory organisation [more on this]. We have already introduced Carl Jung's Association of Ideas Test [see 1918] and Morgan and Murray's Thematic Apperception Test [see 1935], both of which techniques help probe and understand individual memory networks. We have also introduced the modern notion of the semantic network [see Companion Resource]. When all is said and done, however, we are little better able in 2011 to explain the nature of associative memory than was Aristotle in 350BCE, and there are few computer simulation architectures capable of truly modelling the network nature of biological memory [the present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software - more on this - uses the CA-IDMS network database platform to create its model of biological memory, but the similarity is often strained].

Gombrich also doubts whether every final feature of an artwork needs to be the result of a decision by the artist. More value seems to lie in the early planning than in the final execution. He compares four sketched studies made by Raphael when planning "The Virgin in the Meadow" (1505) [Wikipedia image] with the final work, noting how the sketches were concerned exclusively with matters of composition. Consider .....

"What he tried again and again to get was the right balance between the figures, the right relationship which would make the most harmonious whole. [Various compositional options discussed.] But if we now look back at the final picture we see that he did get it right in the end. Everything in the picture seems in its proper place, and the pose and harmony which Raphael has achieved by his hard work seems so natural and effortless that we hardly notice it. [.....] It is fascinating to watch an artist thus striving to achieve the right balance, but if we were to ask him why he did this or changed that, he might not be able to tell us. He does not follow any fixed rules. He just feels his way. It is true that some artists or critics in certain periods have tried to formulate laws of their art; but it always turned out that poor artists did not achieve anything when trying to apply these laws" (pp16-17; emphasis added).

1950 Sigmund Freud's 1895 "Project for a Scientific Psychology" is finally published in German, having been discovered amongst his unpublished writings after his death in 1939.

1951 Barnett Newman [see 1948] unveils an 8-by-18 foot orange near-monochrome entitled "Vir Heroicus Sublimis" [image], a work which will go on to be acclaimed as a classic of the colour-field genre [see 1961 (Rosenblum)].

1951 The American cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky [Wikipedia biography] builds SNARC, the world's first randomly wired neural network circuitry, capable of resetting its internal memory patterns according to external feedback [i.e., learning by experience]. [See next 1968] [THREAD = CONNECTIONISM]

1951 Niko Tinbergen [see 1938] now publishes "The Study of Instinct", in which he stakes his claim to be recognised alongside Konrad Lorenz [see 1937] as one of the founding fathers of the "ethological" approach to explaining animal behaviour. His signature topic is the reproductive behaviour of the three-spined stickleback [more on this], a complex concatenation of hormonally sensitised male-female sign-response behaviours that, taken together, add up to what would wrongly be assessed as an integrated reproductive "instinct". [THREAD = THE NATURE OF INSTINCT]

1951 Ernst Gombrich [see 1950] now publishes a paper entitled "Meditations on a Hobby Horse", in which he doubts that a picture can ever truly represent "a reality outside itself" (p10) for the simple reason that it alters said reality the moment it is introduced into it. He begins his argument by noting how easily ethologists fool animals with models of the things they find most stimulating in the wild, as when chicks gape eagerly as soon as a parent approaches their nest. Such behaviours are readily elicited with unlifelike trigger items, provided only that some crucial releasing aspect is present [see 1937 (Lorenz)]. He remarks .....

"An 'image' in this biological sense is not an imitation of an object's external form but an imitation of certain privileged or relevant aspects [..... and] man is not exempt from this type of reaction. [.....] We know that there are certain privileged motifs in our world to which we respond almost too easily. The human face may be outstanding among them. Whether by instinct or by very early training, we are certainly ever disposed to single out the expressive features of a face from the chaos of sensations that surround it, and to respond to its slightest variations with fear or joy" (p6).

Gombrich then turns to the "conceptual image", by which he means "the mode of representation which is more or less common to children's drawings and to various forms of primitive and primitivist art" (p8). The thrust of this notion is that children and primitives draw not what they see, but what they know, and this is often the very "privileged motifs" mentioned above. Here is the specific argument .....

"At the most primitive level, then, the conceptual image might be identified with what we have called the minimum image - that minimum, that is, which will make it fit into a psychological lock" (p8).

1952 Cage stages "4'33"" [read as "Four Minutes 33 Seconds"], a piece in three movements during which no sounds are intentionally produced. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1952 Warren S. McCulloch [see 1943] now publishes a paper entitled "Toward some Circuitry of Ethical Robots", in which he examines how a society of machines could ethically serve "the ends created by their association" (p195). His first point is that all "closed path" machines - those which (like thermostats) maintain a particular status quo in the face of natural variation - are essentially "appetitive" of the state in question. They have a purpose of some sort. Whereupon something interesting happens .....

"The mere fact that his fellows are appetitive requires the machine to treat them as appetitive, even if he only wants to use them for his own ends [..... which] may yet prove sufficient basis for an ethic of enlightened selfishness" (p196).

The nature of the resulting ethicality is curious because the ethical machine will learn the rules which it is expected to follow by observing the behaviour of its companions. So, too, will it copy any fellow machine found cheating! [It may be easier, therefore, to devise ethical machines than moral.] [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1952 The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Images à la Sauvette" [in English as "The Decisive Moment]. In it he takes the point of view that there is nothing in the world that does not have a decisive moment to it, and that it is therefore the photographer's task to be there when it happens.

RESEARCH ISSUE - THE DECISIVE MOMENT IN PERFORMANCE ART: Cognitive science does not yet know enough about the extraction of dramatic meaning from an ongoing action (even when that action has been frozen into a decisive moment image) to explain the particular intellectual and affective impact of performance artworks.

1952 The American psychologist Charles E. Osgood [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "The Nature and Measurement of Meaning", in which he develops the notion of "semantic space".

KEY CONCEPT - SEMANTIC SPACE: Osgood's fundamental notion is that we can profitably consider the body of concepts which make up an individual's accumulated knowledge and understanding as being organised on a number of two-dimensional indexing dimensions. One of the most important of these dimensions is <GOOD-BAD>, followed perhaps by <FRIENDLY-UNFRIENDLY>, <BEAUTIFUL-UGLY>, <VALUABLE-WORTHLESS>, and so on. Each new concept or event is recorded as a node in the resulting multiply indexed space by its coordinates on each of the referencing dimensions.

1952 The American anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Introduction to Kinesics", in which he explains the use of units of non-verbal bodily movement - "kinemes" - as a side channel in human communication. [THREAD = THE COMMUNICATION CHAIN]

1952 Konrad Lorenz [see 1937] now publishes "King Solomon's Ring", in which he presents his earlier work on animal instinct in general for a non-specialist audience.

1952 American art critic Harold Rosenberg, reflecting on Pollock's practice, observes that the canvas has become "an arena in which to act" and coins the term "action painting". [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

KEY CONCEPT - ACTION PAINTING: The term "action painting" describes any practice where the artist permits - or indeed encourages - the public to observe the creative act itself, even though it is the resulting gallery piece which is intended for permanence. As such it needs to be carefully distinguished from "Actionism", where the artist intends the action itself for permanence. [See next 1964, Aktionismus].

1953 The American artist Robert Rauschenberg exhibits an experimental collection of monochrome canvases under the self-explanatory title "White Paintings". These are followed over the ensuing months by similar collections under the titles "Black Paintings" and "Red Paintings", and by "Erased de Kooning Drawing", a borrowed de Kooning original, duly erased.

1953 Claude Shannon [see 1948 (Shannon and Weaver)] now publishes a paper entitled "Computers and Automata", in which he draws on his recent experience designing a maze-running mechanical mouse and tries to pin down the technical difficulties for any machine intended to operate autonomously. He lists the following critical differences between human and machine brains .....

1. The sheer number of components in the biological brain.

2. The "apparently random local structure" of most of those components.

3. The reliability of the resulting system, despite the unreliability of its individual parts.

4. The flexibility and elegance of its problem solving powers.

5. The complexity of its input and output channels.

1953 Ernst Gombrich [see 1950] now delivers a lecture entitled "Psychoanalysis and the History of Art", in which he considers the psychodynamic motivation in works of art possessing no obvious sexual or aggressive content. He takes Picasso's "Flying Dove" (1950) [image] as an example, noting nothing superficially remarkable. And yet Picasso's motivation ran deep nonetheless, as Gombrich proceeds to explain .....

"Picasso's father, Don Pepe Ruiz, was an artist and keeper of the local museum in Majorca, and he used to paint salon pictures of dovecots which Picasso still likes to glamorise. These pictures Don Pepe painted from stuffed pigeons which he carried to his office and back home. Now Picasso remembers having been paralysed with fear when left alone at school, and tells how he used to cling to his father and how he kept his father's walking stick, his paint brushes, and most of all his stuffed pigeon as hostages to make quite sure his father would come back and fetch him" (p32).

1953 The Austrian artist Anton Ehrenzweig [Wikipedia biography] publishes "The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Thinking", in which he attempts to deliver on William James' concern with "reestablishing the vague to its proper place in mental life". Specifically he examines the "inarticulate form elements hidden in the unconscious structure of a work of art" (vii), looking for the "abstract gestalts" which are routinely discarded by focalised visual perception .....

KEY CONCEPT - INARTICULATE FORM: Ehrenzweig is here using the term "inarticulate form" to refer to any mental phenomenon which is difficult to describe using the precisely phrased propositional language of science. These are the forms which most troubled William James for having no judgemental true or false about them [see 1890 (Psychologist's Fallacy)].

Ehrenzweig calls painted artworks which deliberately eschew a clear visual structure "gestalt-free painting" (p37), and sees this as involving the "lower layers" (p6) of the mind. It is then no great step to suggest that these are the levels at which abstract art seems to be processed, thus .....

"Traditional painting excludes eye-wandering by its good gestalt. The eye is presented with a pregnant pattern, is attracted by it at once, and so is given a stable centre of attention. Any scrutiny of the picture [.....] will unfailingly start from and return to the same eye-catching features. In [modern paintings] such dominant form features do not exist. [.....] Modern painting has background structure throughout" (pp23-24; emphasis added).

Ehrenzweig then adopts Nietzsche's distinction [see 1872] between Dionysian thought [= chaotic and negative] and Apollonian [ordered and beautiful], seeing these two types of thinking as reflecting our deep and surface minds, respectively, and thus containing, in turn, the secrets of beauty and ugliness in art. Here is how he puts it .....

"Dionysian form is neither 'beautiful' or 'ugly'. It repels and evades conscious perception altogether and is part of that unconscious Dionysian form language in which the direct conversation between depth mind to depth mind is conducted. Gradually, as it is raised to the surface level, there may intervene an intermediate stage when its transmutation into a beautiful fully articulate form element is not quite completed. If it is exposed, in this half-articulate state, to surface perception, its lack of 'good' gestalt is experienced as something very unaesthetic or 'ugly'. If, however, the half-articulate form is not fully exposed [.....] the feeling of ugliness does not occur. Modern gestalt-free art is experienced as 'ugly' by its opponents only because they cannot effect in themselves the diffuse state of consciousness in which these weakly articulated forms should be viewed" (p79).

Ehrenzweig further asserts that many emotions emerge only when our "surface mind" becomes "baffled" (p125), and is thereby forced to recentre the focus of cognition down into the depths of the inarticulate, where it finds expression in emotional rather than intellectual experience. This is typical, he suspects, of children's or primitive art, thus .....

"Every act of creative thinking involves the disintegration of 'concrete' thing perception into the 'abstract' images or ideas of creative thought [..... and] the first phase in creating the 'abstract' thought is a return to the undifferentiated thing perception of the child or to the lack of thing differentiation in primitive thought" (p168).

Our final interest in this work is with its analysis of eye scanning, and how this might have influenced Cézanne's artistic practice. Ehrenzweig's point is that what we end up "seeing" at the conscious end of the visual system emerges only after extensive and largely unconscious processing further down that system. One of the main limiting factors is that the most sensitive area of the retina - the fovea - deals with only the central 2º of arc of the available visual field [check it out]. Large or complex objects and everyday object arrays therefore have to be scanned by a series of single point fixations (just like putting the various pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together), and this can only be done at about six fixations per second .....

KEY CONCEPTS - FIXATIONS AND SACCADES: When an eye is "fixated" (that is to say, held stationary), the fovea is processing the symbols at the centre of the image while the parafovea and the periphery are working out where to direct the eye to next. The resulting eye movement - when it comes - is a rapid ballistic movement known as a "saccade" (Javal, 1879), and because information cannot be deciphered while the eye is actually moving it ends up arriving in small "packets". At any one instant, you can take in some four letters to the left of the letter you are looking at, and some eight letters to the right of it. This is your "perceptual span".

Ehrenzweig's concern with Cézanne comes from that artist's "very deliberate and consistent form distortions" (p193), which tend not to be noted by the observer unless and until they are pointed out. How is it, Ehrenzweig wonders, that a demonstrably flawed reality can be more "real" than a real one. His answer is that Cézanne had worked out how the eye worked, thus .....

"Now if you try to forget the static traditional realism and give yourself up to the movement something near miraculous may happen. Your eye is led along definite highways to definite fixation points, and from this movement the whole picture will suddenly seem 'right'. [.....] In traditional art it makes no difference in which sequence we view the single form details of a painting [.....]. It offers a static image corresponding to the final composite memory image which emerges into consciousness after the eye's initial oscillation. Cézanne's composition would be more exacting; it imposes definite fixation points and definite directions upon our eye's movements. His distortions are [.....] ambiguous; different fixation points require different distortions and if there were several fixation points in a painting the distortions can only be a compromise between conflicting influences issuing from the different fixation points. One can understand why Cézanne used to stare at his model for hours on end before he dared to put down the first brush stroke" (pp198-189; bold emphasis added).

1953 Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" is published posthumously to critical acclaim. It brings together the philosophies of mind and language, and emphasises the importance of having a precise and comprehensive investigative lexicon [he complains especially about the descriptive value of the verb "to think".

1953 The BBC screens a TV serial by Nigel Kneale entitled "The Quatermass Experiment". Just about everybody in Britain who could get near a TV watched the final episode.

1953 The British scientists Robert W. Ditchburn [academic obituary] and B.L. Ginsborg publish a paper entitled "Involuntary Eye Movements during Fixation", in which they review the sometimes contradictory literature to date, report new experimental data of their own, and conclude as follows .....

"Three types of rotation movements persist during fixation: (a) a tremor of 10-30" arc, 30-60 c/s; (b) flicks 1-20' arc, occupying 0.025 sec at intervals of 0.03-5.0 sec; (c) drifts up to 6' in an interflick period. In both monocular and binocular fixation the involuntary movements of the eyes are coodinated. Part of the drifts is due to convergence and divergence of the eyes. [.....] The movements of the eyes when larger fields are being observed are made up of a series of fixations of varying duration interrupted by voluntary flicks" (p16). [See next 1956 (Ditchburn and Pritchard)] [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

1953 The Austrian psychoanalyst-art historian Ernst Kris [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art" [buy], in which he proposes psychodynamic interpretations of a number of aspects of the creative process, including the art of the insane, comic caricature, and the role of the unconscious in creative inspiration. He begins by reminding us that the viewing of art involves the same "willing suspension of belief" [see 1817 (Coleridge)] as does being part of a theatre audience. Both activities bring forth a greater or lesser psychological commitment to cooperate with the artist/playwright in the understanding of the deeper message at hand. Kris calls this "the aesthetic illusion" (p39), and his core thesis is then that the development from magic ritual to dramatic art in Greek civilisation has many analogies in other cultural areas, the common element being "the tendency to the reduction of action and its more or less complete replacement by other experiences" (p40). It is in this process of symbol substitution, of course, that unconscious dynamic manipulation can interfere in order to shape the eventual outcome to its own hidden agenda. Art, in short, allows people to "indulge in what they otherwise fear" (p44). Kris states his core thesis as follows .....

"The shifts in cathexis of mental energy, which the work of art elicits or facilitates are, we believe, pleasurable in themselves. From the release of passion under the protection of the aesthetic illusion to the highly complex process of re-creation under the artist's guidance, a series of processes of psychic discharge take place, which could be differentiated from each other by the varieties and degrees of neutralisation of the energy discharged. All these processes, however, are controlled by the ego, and the degree of completeness of neutralisation indicates the degree of ego autonomy" (p63).

Kris draws his evidence from the literature on artistic genius, especially where this reflects upon an artist's role in society and their understanding of that role. Their early life and personality are often documented, perhaps - he suggests - because we unconsciously seek to remedy our own adult failings by glorifying our children. It is then only a small additional step to see both the process and the products of artistic creativity as magical, thus .....

"The belief in the artist's magical power, and at the same time also the belief in the forbidden nature of his activity, is deeply rooted in the mind of man. [.....] Artistic ability is part of the power of the demiurge [= a deity]. He is part of a world in which magic practices comprised art" (p78). "The states of inspiration are not permanent. They take hold of the individual for a certain time. They are mostly connected with a partial loss of consciousness and are almost habitually accompanied by various sorts of more or less uncoordinated motor activities. [.....] These highly complex processes may be described as phenomena of regression. [.....] To add another most characteristic feature, in states of inspiration speech becomes automatic. It is not the subject who speaks but a voice from out of him" (pp292-293; bold emphasis added).

1954 The Japanese artist Jiro Yoshihara founds the Gutai Group, promising to "create things that have never existed before".

1954 The American anthropologist Paul Radin [Wikipedia biography], with over 40 years of field study amongst the Winnebago Indians and other tribal societies in both North and South America under his belt, publishes "Der Göttliche Schelm" [= "the divine prankster"; In English in 1956 as "The Trickster"], an attempt to apply Jung's Trickster Archetype [see 1938] to tribal Shamanistic belief systems. Shamanism works, in Radin's analysis, precisely because shamanistic practices resonate with our predisposition to Trickster cognition. Here is the core argument .....

"Since all mythical figures correspond to inner psychic experiences and originally sprang from them, it is not surprising to find certain phenomena [which] remind us of the trickster. [.....] His universality is co-extensive, so to speak, with that of shamanism, to which, as we know, the whole phenomenology of spiritualism belongs. There is something of the trickster in the character of the shaman and medicine-man, for he, too, often plays malicious jokes on people, only to fall victim in his turn to the vengeance of those whom he has injured. For this reason, his profession sometimes puts him in peril of his life. [.....] His 'approximation to the saviour' is an obvious consequence of this, in confirmation of the mythological truth that the wounded wounder is the agent of healing, and that the sufferer takes away the suffering" (Four Archetypes, p136). [.....] "In picaresque tales, in carnivals and revels, in magic rites of healing, in man's religious fears and exaltations, this phantom of the trickster haunts the mythology of all ages [.....] In his clearest manifestations he is a faithful reflection of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level" (p140). "He is the forerunner of the saviour, and, like him, God, man, and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness. [.....] He is so unconscious of himself that his body is not a unity, and his two hands fight each other" (p143). [.....] "Although he is not really evil, he does the most atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and unrelatedness. [.....] The trickster is a primitive 'cosmic' being of divine-animal nature. [.....] The trickster has been a source of amusement right down to civilised times, where he can still be recognised in the carnival figures of Pulcinella and the clown" (p144). [See next 1961 (Jung)] [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNGIAN)]

1954 The French born American artist-sculptor Louise Bourgeois [Wikipedia biography] joins the American Abstract Artists Group, where she befriends Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. In the years which follow she develops a reputation for sculptures "suggestive of the human figure" and expressing "themes of betrayal, anxiety, and loneliness".

1954 Drawing upon his early involvement with the Gestalt School, Rudolf Arnheim's "Art and Visual Perception" sets out the Gestaltist position on visual aesthetics. This work has since been acclaimed as one of the "three classics" of art psychology [the others being Ehrenzweig (1967) and Chipp (1968)].

1955 Hammer Films produce the film version of the BBC TV serial "The Quatermass Experiment". It takes a lot of money at the box office, prompting a string of Gothic horror makes and re-makes like "Dracula" (1957), "The Mummy" (1959), and "The Evil of Frankenstein" (1964).

1956 George A. Miller's "Magical Number Seven" paper proposes the basics of an information processing approach to biological cognition and helps promote the "Cognitive Revolution".

1956 The Hungarian-born French artist Nicolas Schöffer [Wikipedia biography] exhibits CYSP-1 [images], "the first cybernetic sculpture in art history". [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1956 Fred M. Wilcox's movie "Forbidden Planet" [IMDB record] is released and introduces the world to Robby the Robot [image]. A very similar character - B-9 -appears in the TV series "Lost in Space" (1965-1968) [IMDB record], where he regularly saves human lives with lines such as "Danger, Will Robinson!" whilst not being afraid to admit occasional defeat with the line "Does not compute!*?!" [see both these gems]. Other popular TV series robots include "Holly" and "Kryten" ["Red Dwarf"], "Tweaky" ["Buck Rogers"], "Zen" ["Blake's Seven"], and "Mak the Elektran" [the instant interplanetary translation-bot] in the totally timeless "Space Patrol"] [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1956 Robert Ditchburn [see 1953] and Roy M. Pritchard publish a paper in the journal Nature entitled "Stabilised Interference Fringes on the Retina", in which they report successful use of a tiny telescopic system, complete with miniature stimulus, mounted by a short stalk onto a contact lens. Since the stimulus now moves whenever the eye moves, the system achieves high quality retinal stabilisation. [See next 1958 (Pritchard)] [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

1956 Friedrich Dürrenmatt [see 1947] now stages "The Visit" [plot], in his signature style of deadly serious comedy. [See next 1962] [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1956 Dartmouth College hosts a two-month summer school to bring together the ten most experienced cross-disciplinary workers in computing and cognitive psychology. Amongst those attending are John McCarthy, Oliver Selfridge, Herbart Simon, Allen Newell, Marvin Minsky, and Claude Shannon [see 1948]. The terms of reference are set out in what is now known as the "Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Proposal", and are as follows .....

"The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer."

Dartmouth's optimism was well founded, and the science of "Artificial Intelligence" was born.

1956 The British novelist John Cowper Powys publishes "The Brazen Head", in which he dramatises the role Roger Bacon might have played in 13th century attempts to develop automata.

1956 Isidore Isou publishes her take on the Value of Art Debate by proposing imaginary artworks capable of contemplation only in the mind of the onlooker.

1956 The Japanese avant-gardist artist Atsuko Tanaka presents "Electric Dress", a costume hung about with live coloured electric light bulbs.

1956 The American aesthetician Morris Weitz [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics", in which he debates whether it will ever be possible to arrive at an effective aesthetic theory, "in the sense of a true definition or set of necessary and sufficient properties of art" (p12). Progress will only be made, he argues, if we focus our minds not on "the nature of art" but rather on "what sort of concept" (p14) art is, and on how new concepts are formed every time someone invents a new artform. And if we are going to do that we need to be totally clear as to our "reasons for excellence" (p18). Consider .....

"For many, especially theorists, 'This is a work of art' does more than describe; it also praises. Its conditions of utterance, therefore, include include certain preferred properties or characteristics of art. I shall call these 'criteria of evaluation'. [.....] 'This is a work of art,' used evaluatively, serves to praise and not to affirm the reason why it is said. [..... Such] 'Art' has been redefined in terms of chosen criteria. [.....] The value of each of the theories resides in its attempt to state and to justify [these] criteria" (p17). [THREAD = HISTORY OF AESTHETICS]

1957 The British psychoanalyst William Sargant [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Battle for the Mind" [buy], one of the first books ever on the psychology of brainwashing. This work is noteworthy in the present context because it draws parallels between persuasive communication and religious conversion, especially insofar as both use carefully contrived physiological states to bring about their changes. [See now 1961, Laski]

1957 The American banker and amateur scholar R. Gordon Wasson [Wikipedia biography] collates 30 years of amateur research into the use of, and folklore surrounding, mushrooms in Russia (to 1953) and Mexico (1953-1956), and publishes same in "Mushrooms, Russia, and History". The resulting publicity leads to a request for a summary article from LIFE Magazine and he provides them with "Seeking the Magic Mushroom", in which he summarises his field trips to Mexico accompanied by the French botanist Roger Heim [Wikipedia biography]. Heim was then able to cultivate hallucinogenic mushrooms in his laboratory in Paris. The team were also assisted by the biochemist Albert Hoffman [see 1943]. [See next 1967]

1957 The American computer scientist Frank Rosenblatt [Wikipedia biography] completes the prototype of Cornell University's "Perceptron" machine vision system [see technicalities]. The essence of Rosenblatt's design was that the component neurodes [see 1943 (McCulloch and Pitts)] were arranged into two banks, or "layers". One of these was connected to an artificial eye and called an input layer, and the other was connected to the chosen output mechanism (usually an array of flashing lights) and called an output layer. Each point in the input layer was wired to each point in the output layer, and the effective strength of these connections was specifically designed to be varied. Learning was then a process of changing the strength of the connections - a process known as "weighting". [THREAD = MACHINE VISION]

1957 [See firstly 1932 (Freaks)] The latter-day apothecaries of the pharmaceutical industry release the sedative drug Thalidomide onto the market, only to be forced to withdraw it four years later because it was associated with birth defects [fuller story]. [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

1957 The German artists Otto Piene [Wikipedia biography] and Heinz Mack [Wikipedia biography] get together to found "Group Zero", a Düsseldorf-based cooperative dedicated to "new beginning" practice. In the ensuing years they will be joined by Günter Uecker [Wikipedia biography], Yves Klein [see 1949], and Jean Tinguly [see 1944]. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1958 [See firstly 1957 (Group Zero)] Yves Klein has nude women crawl over canvases as "living brushes". He also exhibits an empty room under the title "The Void", arguing that his paintings are now invisible. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1958 Roy Pritchard [see 1956] now publishes a paper entitled "Visual Illusions Viewed as Stabilised Retinal Images", in which he reports that attending to a fading stimulus fragment tends to protect it against fading. [See next 1960 (Pritchard et al)] [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

1958 The British engineer Oliver G. Selfridge [Wikipedia biography] delivers a paper entitled "Pandemonium, A Paradigm for Learning", in which he stresses the hierarchical structure of the biological brain, with a large number of individually simple "intelligent agents" - or "demons" - clamouring for attention.

1958 The British psychologist Donald Broadbent [Wikipedia biography] publishes his filter model of attention, for details of which see the Companion Resource.

1958 The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard [external biography] publishes "The Poetics of Space" [buy], in which he analyses the "lived experience" of a building (the psychological difference, for example, between a cellar and an attic, or a house's perceived similarity to an onlooker's childhood home) as the principal architectural design consideration after structural integrity. "Inhabited space," as he puts it, "transcends geometrical space".

1958 The American artist Red Grooms [Wikipedia biography] stages "A Play Called Fire", a 25-minute Happening in which he produces a painting in real time but is himself subject of photographic record [see 1960 (Cohen)]. This and later works help set the standards for installation art and performance art as we now understand them. [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1958 During a period of study with John Cage [see 1938], the American artist George Brecht [Wikipedia biography] invents the "Event Score", a system of notation by which short apparently impromptu performances can be accurately repeated, a technique which will get him invited into the Fluxus movement [see 1962]. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1958 The German painter Wolf Vostell [Wikipedia biography] stages "Theatre is on the Street" [image], the first of many Happenings over the coming years. He will cooperate with George Macunias in founding the Fluxus movement [see 1962]. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1959 [See firstly 1957 (Group Zero)] The Swiss sculptor Yves Tinguely, a kinetic artist in the Dada mould, creates "Méta-Matics", mechanical sculptures rigged to hold a stylus so as to create a permanent record of their movement.

1959 The British mathematician-psychologist and pioneer computer designer Albert M. Uttley [no convenient biography] publishes a paper entitled "Conditional Probability Computing in a Nervous System", in which he proposes "two particular mathematical principles" (p21) in the organisation of the biological nervous system. The first of these is the principle of classification, which provides for nervous tissue to "indicate, by firing, the occurrence of a particular spatio-temporal pattern of activity in the input to the system" (p121). The second is the capacity for computing conditional probabilities, which provides for nervous tissue to make inferences. He then sketches a number of detailed circuit diagrams fitting these criteria in various ways. [THREAD = BIOLOGICAL INFORMATION PROCESSING]

1959 [See firstly 1937] Frank Lloyd Wright completes the Guggenheim Museum design project [image].

1959 Marvin Minsky [see 1951] and John McCarthy [Wikipedia biography] found the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The facility has been a world-class centre of research excellence ever since. [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1959 The American Artist Frank Stella [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Die Fahne Hoch!" [= "Raise High the Banners!] [image] in black enamel paint on canvas. At first glance, the finished work appears to be a black monochrome, but on closer inspection it reveals a central vertical cross with a feint L-shaped banding in each diagonal quadrant. The work will be well-received critically for because its title - deliberately that of a Nazi marching song [play] - clashes with the Minimalism of its hung form.

1959 The American neurophysiologist David H. Hubel [Wikipedia biography] and his Swedish collaborator Torsten N. Wiesel [Wikipedia biography] publish a paper entitled "Receptive fields of single neurones in the cat's striate cortex" in which they report preliminary findings from microelectrode studies of the primary visual cortex of the cat. Their main finding is that different neurons respond selectively to specific light patterns on the retina, such as lines of a given orientation, contrast edges, and movement. These data, plus that presented in later papers, leads them to an explanatory view of vision as experienced as being constructed out of simple building blocks of neural response, and earns the team the 1981 Nobel Prize for Medicine [THREAD = FUNCTIONAL NEUROANATOMY]

1959 J.P. Guilford [see 1927] now publishes a paper entitled "Three Faces of Intellect", in which he subdivides "productive thinking" into "convergent" and "divergent" subtypes. He sees these subtypes as fundamentally different ways of navigating the contents of one's mind in order to use one's past knowledge to solve current problems. Convergent thinking involves activating a number of relevant knowledge elements, and then working inwards from there towards a required answer [as when you answer questions such as "What's the sum of three, two, and five?"]. Divergent thinking involves starting at a single knowledge element, and then working outwards from there towards possible answers [as when you answer questions such as "How many uses can you think of for a brick?"]. [THREAD = THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CREATIVITY]

1959 Having spent many years writing short stories for Wierd Tales, the American writer Robert Bloch publishes "Psycho", a classic of the Modern Urban Horror genre.

ASIDE - HOW TO RECOGNISE MODERN URBAN HORROR: The defining point about this genre is that the goose-bumps come from its very ordinariness. It is horror from just down the road; next door, even, if you are unlucky. There is no need for the Gothic or the supernatural.

1960 An American government committee named CODASYL [= Conference on Data Systems Languages] approves an early version of the COBOL programming language.

1960 The Austrian artist Otto Mühl [Wikipedia biography] stages his first solo exhibition in Vienna. [THREADS = AKTIONISMUS and DISTURBING ART]

1960 Roy Pritchard [see 1956], W. Heron, and Donald Hebb [see 1949] publish a paper entitled "Visual Perception Approached by the Method of Stabilised Images", in which they report using a wide variety of stabilised image stimuli, including geometrical shapes, text, and line-drawn objects, in an attempt to determine the deep logic of the fragmentation process. They found, for example, that a curved amoeba-like outline would fragment less readily than an angular one matched for size and complexity. Also that a facial silhouette contour would fragment less than a less familiar control curve. Also that a chimeric letter-like shape, the keyboard characters "4" and B fused along a common vertical, would fragment to one or other of the constituent parts, not to any of the meaningless alternatives. The team concludes that there could well be some sort of "perceptual goodness" effect at work, protecting "good gestalts" against fragmentation at the expense of less good ones. [See next 1963 (Evans and Piggins)] [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

1960 The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Truth and Method" [buy], the fundamental thesis of which is that there is no single method of enquiry - the scientific method included - which can even conceptualise a target truth, let alone establish one beyond challenge from one direction or another. The relevance of this work in the present context is that Gadamer regards art as one of the main sources of difficult-to-conceptualise truths. Scott (2003 online) summarises Gadamer's argument this way .....

"Truth may belong to a work of art as well as to a scientific theory or to a logical proposition. The truth of a work of art may be experienced by aesthetic consciousness. [.....] A work of art may be inspired by an experience, and may be intended to represent an experience. The truth of a work of art may, in some cases, be determined by how accurately or correctly it represents an experience. Thus a work of art may have its being as a form of representation" (e1).

1960 The French art critic Pierre Restany [Wikipedia biography] drafts a "Nouveau Réalisme Manifesto" to promote "new perceptual approaches to reality". Signatories include Yves Klein [see 1949/1958], Daniel Spoerri [see 1960], and Jean Tinguely [see 1944]. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1960 The American painter Morris Louis [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Where" [image in the bio], one of the class-defining works of the Washington Colour School. Louis will feature highly in Clement Greenberg's PPA exhibition [see 1964].

1960 The Italian born artist Ben Vautier [Wikipedia biography] sets up shop in Nice to promote his personal brand of avant-garde sculpture. He soon becomes a force in the "anti-art" movement. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1960 Jean Tinguely [see 1959] exhibits a self-destroying installation entitled "Homage to New York" [image]. [THREAD = ANIMISM AND MECHANISM]

1960 The American photographer John Cohen publishes "The Burning Building" [image], a photographic study of the artist Red Grooms at work on "A Play Called Fire" [see 1958]. [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1960 The Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Le Lieu de Repos de la Familie Delbeck", an assembly of items from a meal, still unwashed. It is described as an early example of "Nouveau Réalisme".

1960 Yves Klein [see 1958] now famously publishes "Leap into the Void" [image], a photograph of him apparently flying through the air at great risk of injury. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1960 The American psychologist David K. Berlo publishes "The Process of Communication" [buy], in which he adopts the basic Shannon and Weaver Theory of Communication [see 1948], strips out most of the mathematics, and then demonstrates how the residual propositions can profitably be applied to everyday application areas such as social interaction and education. [THREAD = THE COMMUNICATION CHAIN]

1961 The theatre critic Martin Esslin coins the phrase "Theatre of the Absurd" to describe the work of playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionescu, and Harold Pinter, who emphasise the breakdown of communication and the futility of life.

1961 Ten days before the onset of the illness which killed him, Carl Jung [see 1902] completes an essay entitled "Approaching the Unconscious" [not published until 1964], in which he reconfirms the validity of half a century of prior theorising, not least with the constructs of the collective unconscious and its archetypes. These were and still are the only way to explain the relationship between personal dream imagery and everyday societal imagery, including art. To pick one example from many, we particularly like his identification of a Paradise Archetype in William Hicks' "Peaceable Kingdom" (ca. 1820) [image] - check it out! [See next 1964 (von Franz)] [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNG)]

1961 Influenced by the largely structureless works of John Cage [see 1938], and Dadaism before that, the Lithuanian-born New Yorker George Maciunas [Wikipedia biography] organises the first "Fluxus" event in New York City. The purpose of the event is to bring together like-minded experimental artists and composers, and the movement as a whole will help establish performance artworks as legitimate artistic "events" distinct from Happenings. Early Fluxus associates include Josef Beuys, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, and Yoko Ono. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1961 The Italian artist Piero Manzoni [Wikipedia biography] produces 90 cans labelled "Artist's Shit" [image], to make the point that the creative act usually culminates in just another commodity. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1961 Clement Greenberg [see 1939] appeals for aesthetics to concentrate on its "essentials", that is to say, the final craft of making marks on flat surfaces.

1961 Robert Rauschenberg's "First Time Painting" emphasises the importance of the act over the product by being exhibited facing away from the audience.

1961 Niki de Saint Phalle experiments with "Tirs", that is to say, shooting at paint capsules suspended in front of a canvas. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1961 The German fashion photographer Helmut Newton [Wikipedia biography] settles in Paris and over the ensuing years specialises in "erotic stylised scenes, often with sado-masochism and fetishistic subjects" [specimens]. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1961 The American artist Allan Kaprow shows how art can become performance with the first of his "Happenings", pre-scripted fragments of "unconventional theatre" designed "simply to happen" more or less where they were and more or less with what was around at the time.

1961 The Austrian painter Adolf Frohner [Wikipedia biography (German)] begins a placement in Paris to study the work of the New Realists [see 1960 (Restany)]. Upon his return to Vienna the following year he will get involved with Hermann Nitsch [see 1963] and Otto Mühl [see 1960] in drafting the Blutorgel Manifesto [see 1964 (Aktionismus)]. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1961 Henry Flynt coins the term "Concept Art".

HOW TO RECOGNISE CONCEPTUAL ART: Art may be considered "conceptual" if it exerts its fascination by simplifying the sign without simplifying the signified. The artist has something to say and the artwork is merely the convenient vehicle - perhaps elegantly witty, perhaps deliberately ugly - for that message. It follows that conceptual art is automatically instantly at odds with Formalist aesthetics [see 1914 (Bell)] for the simple reason that it insists on there being an identifiable artistic intention.

1961 The American art historian Robert Rosenblum [Wikipedia biography] coins the term "abstract sublime" to describe the works of artists like Barnett Newman [see 1948/1951], Clyfford Still [see 1946], Jackson Pollock [see 1936], and Mark Rothko [see 1938].

1961 [See firstly 1957 (Sargant)] The British writer Marghanita Laski [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Ecstasy: A Study of some Secular and Religious Experiences" [buy], an avowedly atheistic analysis of the roles played by ecstatic states in allowing religion to maintain its hold over us. Here is how Campbell (2000 online) summarises the core experience .....

"[Ecstasy] is typically rather brief, usually lasting a few minutes, occasionally up to an hour [..... and] may be accompanied by physical sensations of various kinds, usually pleasurable but sometimes painful. Ecstasies may be of various kinds. In some, the person feels that life is joyful, purified, renewed [.....] In others, there is a feeling of knowledge gained, and this involves the idea of contact with a source of knowledge, often identified with God. [.....] Laski uses the term 'trigger' to describe the circumstances that can induce or precipitate ecstasy. [.....] Sudden or flashing lights are often involved [which] suggests to me the possibility of a neurophysiological explanation, since we know that the brain is affected by photic stimuli of this kind [.....] Waves of the sea, and water in general, are another common trigger. Works of art may also have this property." [THREAD = PERFORMANCE AND RELIGION]

1962 The Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin publishes "How to do Things with Words" [buy] in which he demonstrates how language can be used with remarkable versatility to achieve desired effects upon the world.

KEY CONCEPT - PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCES: The performative utterance, or "performative" for short, is one of several basic types of sentence which cannot be assessed as true or false. To be a performative is therefore not to be a "constative". Austin's favourite examples of performatives are non-descriptive sentences such as "I promise to do the dishes". CAUTION - This document regularly refers to the interaction between artists or performers and their audiences as "the performative exchange". This use of the word "performative" is not in the same sense as used here.

1962 The American artist Jim Dine [Wikipedia biography] has work included in the "New Painting of Common Objects" exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, alongside Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, thereby helping to introduce the term "pop art" into the vocabulary of aesthetic theory. [THREAD = HISTORY OF AESTHETICS]

1962 The American psychologist Magda B. Arnold [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Story Sequence Analysis", in which she promotes an extended version of Morgan and Murray's Thematic Apperception Test [see 1935], specifically designed to differentiate between the "impulses, needs, or affects projected on the character with whom the storyteller identifies" and more general "defensive and adaptive processes". [THREAD = PERSONALITY AND ART]

ASIDE: Over the years, psychodynamic theory has been promoted by different schools and approaches. Since the central explanatory constructs differ from school to school, so too do the research instruments devised to detect and measure them.

1962 Friedrich Dürrenmatt [see 1947] now stages "The Physicists" [plot], another deadly serious comedy, this time set in a lunatic asylum and exploring the nature of sanity and the dangers posed by those who would exploit knowledge. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1962 Ernst Gombrich [see 1950] now delivers a lecture entitled "Expression and Communication", in which he wonders out loud what form "a language of the emotions" (p56) would have to take in order to inform aesthetic theory. In expanding his thoughts on this issue he finds value in Charles Osgood's notion of "semantic space" [see 1952].

1962 Bell Labs researcher A. Michael Noll [Wikipedia biography] experiments with creating digital artist output on his computer [specimen]. [THREAD = COMPUTERS IN ART]

1962 Piero Manzoni [see 1961] now exhibits "The Base of the World", an inverted metal plinth [image]. His point is that if you view the presented object upside down it totally changes your perspective and elevates the entire planet to his artwork. [THREAD = CONCEPTUAL ART]

1963 In "Conjectures and Refutations" Karl R. Popper follows Hume by arguing that the final defining aspect of a true science is that it offers its key assertions for peer-falsification. He was particularly emphatic on the need NOT to be misled by a theory's "apparent explanatory power" because "the world was full of verifications of poor theory". He lists Marxism and psychoanalysis as prime examples of how not to do science, and argues that the best theories were those which explicitly forbade certain things to happen, because they invite the most attempts to falsify.

1963 The French mime artist Étienne Decroux [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Paroles sur le Mime" [In English as "Words on Mime"], in which he promotes "corporeal mime", that is to say, whole-body mime, as a significantly purer form of theatre than that which relies on the spoken word alone.

1963 Otto Mühl [see 1960] now stages his first "Materialaktion", a performance entitled "Versumpfung eines Weiblichen Körpers" [= "Degradation of a Female Body"], in which he smears an increasingly naked female model with paint [image sequence] [See next 1964] [THREADS = AKTIONISMUS and DISTURBING ART]

1963 The British researchers Christopher R. Evans [Wikipedia biography] and D.J. Piggins publish a paper entitled "A Comparison of the Behaviour of Geometrical Shapes when Viewed under Conditions of Steady Fixation", in which they report perceptual fading phenomena across a range of target stimuli selected to put one or other of the Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organisation [see 1923 (Wertheimer)] to the test. With a three-line Z-shaped stimulus, for example, they found the "most marked event" was that fading alternated between the two parallel lines and the diagonal, whilst with a gentle curve bisected by a more squiggly one the gentle curve was "much more stable" than the other. The authors state the core problem very succinctly, as follows .....

"If in its 'normal' state an organism is confronted with an ever changing environment, we might ask the question, 'What would happen to the physical system if it were confronted with an unchanging one?'" (p1). [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

1962 The Austrian performance artists Gunter Brus [Wikipedia biography], Otto Mühl [see 1960], Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler have themselves literally walled up together for four days to plan a head-on confrontation with the art establishment. The outcome is the "Blutorgel Manifesto" [see the text], a recipe for an artistic shock and awe offensive. [See next 1963 (Nitsch); 1964 (Aktionismus)] [THREADS = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART and AKTIONISMUS]

1963 The Austrian painter Hermann Nitsch [Wikipedia biography] makes a name for himself by exhibiting "Aktion II", basically a skinned and mutilated lamb carcass. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART] [See next 1964 (Aktionismus)]

RESEARCH ISSUE - BLOOD ART: The ironic thing about blood art is that it is more than normally difficult to engage dispassionately with it, even for the purposes of scientific analysis. Even the most dispassionate of analysts risk having their emotions so heightened by the material under consideration that their intellectual opinion will be coloured by it before it can be expressed in words, even to the point that they may "love" or "hate" it without being able to say why. Cognitive science has no coherent theory to explain this, and progress is held back by the fact that few cognitive scientists have access to the self-harming community, this being a clinical specialism. Ultimately the problem has to be a systems design problem, thus: Q: Given a high-specification autonomous robot, what device needs to be added in (or if already present switched off) to make that robot see self-harming behaviour as productive by using its body - as Oliver (2003 online) puts it - as "the site of inquiry" for whatever it is trying to accomplish at that moment in time?

1963 The Austrian developmental psychologist Heinz Werner [Wikipedia biography] and the American cognitive scientist Bernard Kaplan publish "Symbol Formation", a monograph on the relationship between psychological identity and the Mind's ability to manipulate symbols. [THREAD = MAINSTREAM COGNITIVE SCIENCE]

1963 The Argentinian artist Marta Minujín [Wikipedia biography] choreographs a Happening under the title "La Destruccion", based around a "livable sculpture" of mattresses. Later this year her "Parthenon of Books" [image], a life-sized model of the Athenian original, makes a touching protest on behalf of the planet's intelligentsia against those who prefer burning ideas to thinking them. [THREADS = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE and ART, WARFARE, AND PROPAGANDA]

1963 The German painter Georg Baselitz [Wikipedia biography] has two of his paintings - "The Big Night down the Drain" [image] and "Naked Man" [image] - impounded by the authorities for showing masturbatory male erections (but gaining him valuable publicity nonetheless). [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1964 The American art critic Arthur C. Danto publishes "The Artworld" in which he attempts a definition of what constitutes a work of art. Central to this definition is a deliberate "rhetorical ellipsis", an obliqueness of reference; a structured cleverness of some sort. [Note that this metaphorical obliqueness encourages differences in interpretation, which, in turn, encourages precisely the sort of "verifications of poor theory" eschewed by Popper above. Art theory is thus at its core as unscientific as Marxism and Psychoanalysis.]

1964 The British eccentric actor-artist-designer (later performance artist) Bruce Lacey [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Old Money Bags" [image], a voice-activated mobile. [See next 1966] [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1964 A team of National Physical Laboratory engineers led by John Parks [no convenient biography] unveils the Cyclops I, a machine capable of "visually" recognising numerals at around 2000 characters per second (Tatham, 1967). [THREAD = MACHINE VISION]

1964 The British neuropsychologist John Morton [Royal Society biography] publishes a paper entitled "A Preliminary Functional Model for Language Behaviour", in which he provisionally identifies some of the compartmentalised processing resources involved in producing speech output [see the diagram]. [See next 1979]

1964 The Hungarian author Arthur Koestler [Wikipedia biography] publishes "The Act of Creation" [buy], in which he argues (a) that creativity is the defeating of ineffective habits of mind, (b) that it is best achieved by an act of regression, and (c) that it constitutes when it happens an act of liberation of the individual concerned.

1964 The American conceptual artist Robert Morris [Wikipedia biography], inspired by Duchamp's urinal [1917 above] and Abstract Expressionism in general, presents a performance artwork entitled "21.3" [image and detail] which draws attention to the separate threads of articulation and ideation in human communication. [THREADS = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART and THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1964 The American visual artist Carolee Schneeman participates in Robert Morris's performance artwork, "Site", playing the eponymous central character from Edouard Manet's 1865 painting "Olympia" (q.v.), that is to say, a naked prostitute. This is followed by a performance in Paris entitled "Meat Joy" in which eight nude figures perform with a range of objects such as wet paint and raw meat.

1964 The American art critic Clement Greenberg [see 1939] stages an exhibition of "Post-Painterly Abstraction" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This exhibition highlights the various formless colour schools which had grown up within Abstract Expressionism since the 1950s. Exhibitors include Morris Louis [see 1960] and Frank Stella [see 1959]. [THREAD = ABSTRACT ART]

1964 Carl Jung's colleague Marie-Louise von Franz [Wikipedia biography] incorporates his 1961 essay into a book of essays entitled "Man and his Symbols" [Jung is listed as first author on this work despite having been dead three years]. Von Franz herself contributes a paper entitled "The Process of Individuation", in which she attempts to add precision to the Jungian notion of the Self. Here is how she explains the various concepts involved .....

"The Self can be defined as an inner guiding factor that is different from the conscious personality and that can be grasped only through the investigation of one's own dreams. These show it to be the regulating centre that brings about a constant extension and maturing of the personality. [.....] How far it develops depends on whether or not the ego is willing to listen to the messages of the Self" (p163).

Von Franz then looks at the process of "individuation", that is to say, "the conscious coming to terms with one's own inner centre" (p169), something which generally begins with an emotional trauma of some sort. As in myth, the cure for this crisis - or "shadow" - often involves "seeking something that is impossible to find or about which nothing is known" (p170). Both men and women also have major opposite-sex elements expressing themselves in their dreams. These are the "anima" (in men) or the "animus" (in women), and will be coloured as a rule by a man's mother or a woman's father. Von Franz sees many such images in the work of Peter Birkhäuser [see 1944]. [See next 1964 (Henderson)] [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNGIAN)].

1964 The American Jungian psychotherapist Joseph L. Henderson [New York Times obituary] contributes an essay entitled "Ancient Myths and Modern Man" to Marie-Louise von Franz's tribute volume [see above]. He finds both hero and heroine elements in many belief systems and their associated artworks. [See next 1964 (Jaffé)] [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNGIAN)]

1964 The German Jungian psychotherapist Aniela Jaffé [Wikipedia biography] contributes an essay entitled "Symbolism in the Visual Arts" to Marie-Louise von Franz's tribute volume [see above], in which she (a) examines the natural history of sacred symbols and then (b) extends her observations to 20th century modern art. Amongst the most sacred symbols we have standing stones (natural or deliberately arranged), animals, and circles. Of Greek mythology, for example, she writes .....

"Greek mythology is full of animal symbolism. Zeus, the father of the gods, often approaches a girl whom he desires in the shape of a swan, a bull, or an eagle. [.....] Even in Christianity, animal symbolism plays a surprisingly great part. [.....] Christ himself symbolically appears as the Lamb of God or the Fish" (p265).

As for modern art, Jaffé argues that this is best seen as itself wholly symbolic of its age, thus .....

"My starting point is the psychological fact that the artist has at all times been the instrument and spokesman of the spirit of his age. [.....] Consciously or unconsciously, the artist gives form to the nature and values of his time, which in their turn form him. [.....] The effect produced by works of modern art cannot be explained entirely by their visual form. [..... Nothing] reminds the spectator of his own world. [.....] It is the aim of the modern artist to give expression to his inner vision of man, to the spiritual background of life and the world" (pp285-287). [See next 1964 (Jacobi)] [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNGIAN)]

1964 The Swiss Jungian psychotherapist Jolande Jacobi [Wikipedia biography] contributes an essay entitled "Symbols in an Individual Analysis" to Marie-Louise von Franz's tribute volume [see above], in which she relates details from her case notes on a 25-year old male analysand codenamed "Henry". During Henry's therapy Jacobi had recorded many of his dreams, and upon inspection these now reveal many themes to look for in works of art, not least the depressiveness in Arnold Böcklin's "Isle of the Dead" (1880) [image], the shy femininity of Edwin Landseer's "Young Girl and Fawn" [image], and the general sensuality of the Venus of Willendorf [image]. [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART (JUNGIAN)]

1964 Working to their Blutorgel Manifesto [see 1962], the Austrian performance artists Gunter Brus, Otto Mühl [see 1960], Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler get together to found the Wiener Aktionismus [= Vienna Aktionist] movement. [See next 1965] [THREADS = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART and AKTIONISMUS]

ASIDE: It is now customary to keep the German "k" in Aktionist, rather than to Anglicise it as Actionist. The same goes for the individual performances, which become Aktions rather than Actions (and sometimes even "Akshuns", in the sense that André Stitt [see 1996] uses the word).

1965 The German computer scientist Georg Nees [external biography] programs a computer to print out random curves until such time that he decided the output was complete. The output from one such run was exhibited as "Locken" [= "curls"]. His 1968 Ph.D. dissertation on computer art is the first on the subject.

1965 Gunter Brus [see 1962] now stages an exhibition of his work under the self-explanatory title "Painting, Self-Painting, and Self-Mutilation". [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1965 Warren S. McCulloch [see 1943] now publishes a paper entitled ***** "Machines that Think and Want" *****, in which he contemplates and compares the physics of both biological and machine computation, in search of the critical common design principles. Here is an admirably clear statement at how neurons might act together to underpin higher cognitive processes [supporting citations omitted] .....

"Think of a neuron as a telegraphic relay which, tripped by a signal, emits another signal. To trip and to reset takes, say, a millisecond. Its signal is a briefer electrical impulse whose effect depends only on conditions where it ends, not where it begins. One signal or several at once may trip a relay, and one may prevent another from so doing. Of the molecular events of brains these symbols are the atoms. Each goes or does not go. All any neuron can signal to the next is that it was tripped [.....] thus the signal received is an atomic proposition. It is the least event that can be true or false. If it is unnaturally evoked it is false [.....] How you find it false is another question" (p307). [THREAD = BIOLOGICAL INFORMATION PROCESSING]

1965 Christopher Evans [see 1963] now publishes a paper entitled "Some Studies of Pattern Recognition Using a Stabilised Retinal Image", in which he reports that angles and intersections in a stabilised image stimulus increase the likelihood of its fragmentary disappearance. Acute angles are particularly at risk. [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

1965 The British aesthetician Richard A. Wollheim [Wikipedia biography] publishes an essay entitled "Minimal Art", in which he coins the term "minimalist" to describe artworks such as Duchamp's "Fountain" [see 1917] which stimulate the intellect with wit and simplicity rather than a mere display of painterliness. [Compare 1961 (Conceptual Art)]

1965 Josef Beuys, now professor at the Düsselsdorf Academy, presents a performance artwork entitled "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" in which he sat behind glass, face smeared with honey and gold leaf, explaining the other artworks in the room to a dead hare cradled in his arms.

1965 The American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "One and Three Chairs" [image], a juxtaposition of a chair, its hung life-sized image, and a hung dictionary definition of a chair. [See next 1969]

1965 The Vienna Aktionist [see 1964] Rudolf Schwarzkogler [Wikipedia biography] stages "3rd Aktion", "in which a patient's head swathed in bandages is being pierced by what appears to be a corkscrew, producing a bloodstain under the bandage" (Wikipedia) [image]. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1966 Charles Osgood [see 1952] now publishes a paper entitled "Dimensionality of the Semantic Space for Communication via Facial Expressions" in which he identifies nine emotional clusters, or "factors". These reflect the operation of "at least" three underlying bipolar dimensions of facial emotion, which he labels Pleasantness (P), Activation (A), and Control (C). Each distinct cluster of emotional expressions (e.g., surprise, horror, etc.) is simply a combination of particular positionings on the three underlying dimensions.

1966 Bruce Lacey [see 1964] now exhibits "The Womaniser" [image], a hermaphroditic techno-sculpture with six breasts. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1966 The American engineer Johan Wilhelm ("Billy") Klüver [Wikipedia biography] and the artist Robert Rauschenberg [see 1953] establish EAT [= Experiments in Art and Technology] to develop collaborations between computer engineers and artists. Sadly EAT's "9 Evenings" performances at the Armory, NYC, are dogged by technical difficulties. [THREAD = COMPUTERS IN ART]

1966 The American artist Solomon ("Sol") LeWitt [Wikipedia biography] contributes an untitled "structure" at the "Primary Structures" exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York City.

1966 The American psychiatrist Arnold M. Ludwig publishes a paper entitled "Altered States of Consciousness", in which he analyses the "possession states" induced by many primitive religious rituals. [THREAD = RITUAL AND BELIEF]

1966 The Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama [Wikipedia biography] wins the Most Promising Young Photographer prize and carves out a career photographing young naked girls. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1966 A. Michael Noll [see 1962] publishes a paper entitled "Human or Machine", in which he challenges 100 subjects to examine Piet Mondrian's "Composition with Lines" (1917) [image (Figure 1)] and his own machine-generated "Computer Composition with Lines" (1964) [image (Figure 3)], and decide which artwork has been executed by the machine and which by the man. 59% of his subjects preferred the computer artwork, explaining that it was "neater" and more "abstract" than the Mondrian. Noll fully acknowledges, however, that "artistic merit is not generally accepted as something that can be determined by a jury" (p9).

1966 Jacques Lacan [see 1949] publishes his accumulated clinical writings in "Ecrits". The essence of his method of psychotherapy has been to bring patients to understand "the truth of their desires" and thereby to lead them to the "purification" of those desires. He also names the structure of the mind in which speech originates as "the Other", and emphasises that the workings of this structure (including the deep processes of language production) are not accessible to conscious introspection.

1966 The British actor-painter Jeffrey A. Nuttall [Wikipedia biography] helps found "The People Show", an experimental performance group, and thereby to promote "happening"-style events in Britain.

1966 The American artist Raphael Ortiz [Wikipedia biography] takes part in the first DIAS [= "Destruction in Art Symposium"] in London, helping to promote the idea that short destructive performances will help focus attention on the broader problems of violence and destruction in society. Over the years, his signature work will become the piano destruction event, of which he will carry out more than 80. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1966 Konrad Lorenz [see 1937] now publishes "On Aggression", in which he presents his earlier work on animal aggression for a non-specialist audience.

1967 Ulric Neisser's "Cognitive Psychology" becomes the first popular textbook for the new science.

1967 The Hungarian-born Canadian computer artist Leslie Mezei [University of Toronto biography] publishes a paper entitled "Computers and the Visual Arts", in which he reviews poor progress to date applying computers to art. [THREAD = COMPUTERS IN ART]

1967 The Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Tropicalia" [image], one of a number of experiments with walkthrough sculpture called Bolides [= "fireballs"] and Penetraveis [= "penetrables"]. He also experiments with Parangolés [= "confused excitement" (slang)], crosses between a costume and a wearable sculpture. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1967 The French philosopher Roland Barthes [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "The Death of the Author" in which he argues that it is nigh on impossible to know an author's true intention (and culpably bourgeois of you even to try). [See next 1980]

1967 The British anthropologist Desmond Morris [Wikipedia biography] famously applies the science of animal instinct to the human species, publishing his findings in the mass-market best-seller "The Naked Ape" [buy]. He makes much of humankind's ability for non-verbal communication, and its often destructive tribalism.

1967 Glaser and Strauss publish "The Discovery of Grounded Theory" [buy], in which they promote a research philosophy based on relatively unstructured data sources, and therefore more appropriate for social scientific research that the experimental methods used in the physical sciences. Such sources might include interviews, diaries, anecdotes, video transcripts, and so on. The skill then lies in the formalised and dispassionate analysis subsequently carried out on the accumulated data, and this - because of the large data volumes involved - will usually take a lot of time.

1967 The American director Richard Schechner [Wikipedia biography] founds "The Performance Group", an experimental performance group. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1967 R. Gordon Wasson [see 1957] now publishes "Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality" [buy], in which he reports research into the psychoactive properties of the Fly Agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, and of its use in shamanic ritual around the world. He will revisit this theme in his later book "The Road to Eleusis" [see 1978 (Wasson et al)].

1967 Anton Ehrenzweig expands his psychoanalytic analysis of art [see 1953] with "The Hidden Order of Art", since acclaimed as one of the "three classics" of art psychology [the others being Arnheim (1954) and Chipp (1968)]. He is particularly concerned to explain cognition's demonstrable ability to profit from incomplete understanding, and regards the control of visual perception - that is to say, the directing of one's gaze - as being executed unconsciously as often as consciously. He also makes much of the distinction between "analytic" and "syncretistic" scanning of an artwork. Analytic scanning involves an exhaustive logical fragment-by-fragment inspection of the image, and is typical of adult vision. Syncretistic scanning, on the other hand, is more primitive: "his vision is still global and takes in the entire whole which remains undifferentiated as to its component details" (p6).

1967 The French philosopher Jacques Derrida [Stanford University biography] publishes "Speech and Phenomena" [buy], in which he expands upon Husserl's treatment of the timespan of the here and now [see 1917]. In doing so he makes the following highly significant observation about the nature of cogntion .....

"In other words in the very moment when silently I speak to myself it must be the case that there is a miniscule hiatus differentiating me into the speaker and into the hearer. There must be a hiatus that differentiates me from myself, a hiatus or gap without which I would not be a hearer as well as a speaker. [.....] And this hiatus, this fold of repetition, is found in the very moment of hearing-myself-speak" (Lawlor, 2006 online, e10)

RESEARCH ISSUE - DISCONTINUOUS PROCESSING (2): The sort of hiatus referred to above is precisely what you get with the sort of discontinuous processing cycle described by Kenneth Craik [see 1943 (Perceptual Stages)], and has been successfully simulated in the present author's Konrad artificial cognition testbed [more on this].

Derrida will go on in later works to develop the analytical system known as "Deconstructionism".

1968 The Institute of Contemporary Arts stages an exhibition of computer art entitled "Cybernetic Serendipity". The exhibition included works by Jean Tinguely, Nam June Paik, Bruce Lacey, and Gordon Pask. One highlight of the exhibition came from the Polish-born British artist Edward Ihnatowicz with his SAM [= "Sound-Activated Mobile"], his first attempt at "cybernetic sculpture" [image]. [For a compact but intelligent insight into the exhibition, see Usselmann (2008 online).]

1968 The Vienna Aktionists [see 1964] stage "Kunst und Revolution" [= "Art and Revolution"] at the University of Vienna [Frieze Magazine article]. Gunter Brus's contribution is to defecate and masturbate in public while singing the Austrian national anthem, an offence which earns him a jail sentence. [THREADS = AKTIONISMUS and DISTURBING ART]

HOW TO RECOGNISE AKTIONIST PERFORMANCE: For our present purposes we shall be regarding Aktionist performance as a subclass of performance art which sets out to disturb its audience rather than to edify or to amuse them. We also suspect that the individual motivation to practise in this way may not be precisely known even to the artists themselves. The most charitable interpretation is that society at large often wallows in self-satisfied complacency and positively benefits from a little bit of shock therapy now and then. A slightly less charitable explanation is that it sometimes pays handsomely to be a bad boy or bad girl because it keeps you in the public eye at little cost. And less charitable still is the explanation that the need to offend reflects nothing more than a personality defect on the part of the artist, a personality defect which is content to masquerade as a creative urge.

RESEARCH ISSUE - IS THERE AN AKTIONIST PERSONALITY OR MENTAL DISORDER?: [Readers unfamiliar with the DSM-IV should pre-read the Glossary entry in our Companion Resource.] A number of the diagnostic categories recognised by the DSV-IV include at least some of the features required for a deliberate intent to offend. These include .....

281.89 Alcohol-Induced Mood Disorder

292.0 Substance Withdrawal

292.11 Various Induced Psychotic Disorders

292.84 Various Induced Mood Disorders

296.-- Various Bipolar 1 Disorders

300.14 Dissociative Identity Disorder

301.0 Paranoid Personality Disorder

301.50 Histrionic Personality Disorder

301.7 Antisocial Personality Disorder [more on this]

301.81 Narcissistic Personality Disorder [more on this]

302.4 Exhibitionism

313.81 Oppositional Defiant Disorder

etc., etc.

1968 Marvin Minsky [see 1951] now edits a collection of papers on artificial intelligence under the title "Semantic Information Processing". [See next 1969] [THREAD = COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS]

1968 Stanley Kubrick's movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" [IMDB full plot] is released. Central to the plot is an all-seeing flight computer named HAL, who has been tasked with assisting the two-man human crew of a deep space mission. Unfortunately HAL goes ever so slightly haywire and murders one of the crew and three suspended animation passengers. The surviving crewman - "Dave" - then manages to get access to the computer's memory banks, where he removes the circuit boards one by one. The cineplay makes much of the slow descent of HAL's once mighty mind to little more than infantile babbling as this happens [You Tube video clip]. [See next 1973 (Westworld)] [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1968 The American singer Meredith Monk [Wikipedia biography] founds "The House", an experimental performance group. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1968 The Polish semiotician Tadeusz Kowzan publishes a paper entitled "The Sign in the Theatre" in which he proposed that "everything is a sign in a theatrical presentation" (p57, cited in Elam, 1980).

1968 The American art historian Herschel Chipp publishes "Theories of Modern Art", since acclaimed as one of the "three classics" of art psychology [the others being Arnheim (1954) and Ehrenzweig (1967)].

1968 The American dramatist Robert Wilson [Wikipedia biography] founds the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, an experimental performance company. The company is named after Wilson's boyhood dance teacher, from whom he gained "a knowledge of the body's own knowledge" (Fishaut, 2008 online, e2). The core principle of the resulting theatre is that audience members should "listen" with their whole body, and he makes this easier for them by paying minute attention to the layout, contents, and lighting of the acting space. [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1968 An American electronics postgraduate named Edward ("Ted") Hoff [Wikipedia biography] joins a small Silicon Valley start-up named Intel. He is set to work alongside Stan Mazor [Wikipedia biography] on the Intel 4004, the world's first single chip microprocessor. [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

1968 The British computer scientists Alan Sutcliffe, George Mallen, and John Lansdown get together to form the Computer Arts Society, in order to foster collaborations between artists and engineers. The society is now a Specialist Group of the British Computer Society [join]. [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

1968 Christopher Evans [see 1963] now publishes a paper entitled "Fragmentation of Patterns Occurring with Tachistoscopic Presentation", in which he reports that very brief presentations of geometric stimuli will result in phenomenally convincing but objectively incorrect perceptions similar to those already recorded in the stabilised retinal image literature [e.g., 1953 (Ditchburn and Ginsborg)].[See next 1971] [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

1969 The California philosopher John R. Searle publishes "Speech Acts", in which he takes Austin's notion of verbally delivered psychological acts and gives them the name "speech acts".

1969 The American performance theorist Theodore Shank [university homepage] publishes "The Art of Dramatic Art", in which he argues that the whole point of drama is to promote in its audience some sort of emotionally grounded revelation, especially one which would not have been attainable by any other device. [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1969 The Brazilian conceptual artist Artur Barrio [Wikipedia biography] starts to use performance art as a peaceful but powerful form of protest against the Brazilian government's cynical use of death squads as an instrument of crime fighting and social cleansing. In one such "situation" he deposits bundles of blood-soaked rags known as "Trouxas Ensanguentadas" [= "Bloody Bundles"] around Rio de Janiero to symbolise the human bodies dumped in similar offhand fashion by the authorities [image]. [THREAD = ART AS PROTEST AND SOCIAL COMMENT]

1969 The American artist Robert Barry's "Telepathic Piece" is an early example of "invisible art", an artform which sets three-dimensional imaginal objects in the boundless three-dimensional display space of the onlooker's own mind, rather than centring a two-dimensional figure or two on a conventional canvas.

1969 Inspired by Arnold M. Ludwig's 1966 paper on ASC [=Altered States of Consciousness], the American psychologist Charles T. Tart [Wikipedia biography] publishes a collection of related papers under the same name which immediately makes ASC a popular area of study.

1969 The Polish Laboratory Theatre, brainchild of the avant-garde director Jerzy Grotowski, stages a modern adaptation of Calderon de la Barca's "The Constant Prince", in which no scenery is used and the action hovers between the deliberately discomforting and the hauntingly skillful. [For an informative contemporary review, courtesy of the Owen Daly website, see Oppenheimer (1969 online).][THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1969 CODASYL publishes the initial specifications for a network database to go with its COBOL programming language. At the date of writing the only surviving product in this design genre is Computer Associates' CA-IDMS.

1969 The American new media artist Norman White [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "First Tighten up on the Drums" [image], an electronic artwork based on pre-programmed, but nevertheless unpredictable at run-time, light patterns. [See next 1974]

1969 Marvin Minsky [see 1951] and the South African mathematician Seymour Papert [Wikipedia biography] publish "Perceptrons", in which they analyse progress in the area to date, and discuss prospects for the future. [See next 1987 (Minsky)]

1969 Joseph Kosuth [see 1965] now publishes a three-part paper entitled "Art after Philosophy", in which he traces the origins of Conceptual Art back to Duchamp's "Fountain" [see 1917].

1970 The French philosopher Georges Mounin [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Introduction à la Sémiologie", in which he applies pragmatic theory specifically to theatrical communication.

1970 The British neuropsychologist David C. Marr [Wikipedia biography] publishes a long and detailed paper entitled "A Theory for Cerebral Neocortex", in which he summarises what has been found out so far about the microstructure of the cerebral cortex [more on this] and then shows how the biological information processing resources might be organised to carry out mental computation. [See next 1982] [THREAD = THE SCIENCE OF VISION]

1970 Students Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore team up under the name "Gilbert and George" to perform "The Singing Sculpture", a revue piece in which they "covered their heads and hands in multi-coloured metalised powders, stood on a table, and sang along [to] a recording of Flanagan and Allan's 'Underneath the Arches', sometimes for a day at a time" (Wikipedia). Their style of deadpan camp proves a hit with audiences, and is supplemented over the ensuing 35 years by "The Pictures", a series of experimental and frequently disturbing posed photographs. Typical of their productions are "England" (1980) [image], "Death Hope Life Fear" (1984) [image], "Was Jesus Heterosexual" (2005) [image], and "Shitty Naked Human World" (1994) [fragments].

1971 The American performance artist Chris Burden [Wikipedia biography] performs "Shooting Piece" in which he is shot in the left arm by an assistant.

1971 The British chemist/cognitive scientist Hugh Christopher Longuet-Higgins [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "Artificial Intelligence", in which he stresses the difference between speech - which is relatively easy to computerise both as output (i.e., speech synthesis) and input (i.e., speech recognition) - and language, which [even 4 decades later] still defies computation. Consider .....

"If we want to understand the nature of thought, we can hardly afford to ignore the way in which human beings actually think - even if we could; and there is no better window into the human mind than the words which we use for expressing our thoughts" (p220).

Longuet-Higgins is particularly concerned that cognitive science should direct itself towards "real" problems such as explaining the ability of the retinal image to "conjure up an internal model of the world" (p219), or the ability of the auditory system to hear what the speaker intended despite demonstrable imperfections in the stream of sound which actually arrives.

1971 The Armenian-born American psychologist Albert Mehrabian [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Silent Messages", in which he analyses the relative contribution of linguistic and nonverbal components to an effective face-to-face communication. He famously concludes that only 7% of our intended meaning is conveyed literally by the words we use, with a further 38% conveyed by tone of voice, and a massive 55% conveyed by facial expression.

1971 Edward Ihnatowicz follows up his 1968 SAM with "The Senster" [images], a caribou-sized skeletal quadruped which moved as it detected external movement.

1971 The American cognitive scientists Richard C. Atkinson [Wikipedia biography] and Richard M. Shiffrin [Wikipedia biography] publish a paper entitled "The Control of Short Term Memory" [full précis], in which they put together a summative model of the relationship between short- and long-term memory.

1972 [See firstly the definitions of epistemology and reality in Companion Glossary and Companion Glossary, respectively] The American philosopher Hubert Dreyfus [Wikipedia biography] publishes "What Computers Can't Do" [buy], in which he sets out the philosophical issues which make it difficult, perhaps even intrinsically impossible, to achieve genuine artificial intelligence (AI). He identifies four common fallacies, as follows .....

(1) The Biological Problem: It is not yet established whether the cellular switching mechanisms which subserve biological information processing [and these mechanisms have still to be determined - Ed.] can be meaningfully simulated by the binary flip-flops and sequential processing used in digital electronics.

(2) The Psychological Problem: It is exceptionally difficult to study the phenomenon of propositional thought in isolation in human subjects.

(3) The Epistemological Problem: It is an unproven assumption that the only real problem with knowledge is its sheer volume, and that therefore a machine will eventually be able to encode all there is of it. Rather there are likely to be qualitative barriers, for much of knowledge appears to be non-symbolic.

(4) The Ontological Problem: It is a simplistic assumption that the world consists of independent facts in the first place, not because they are difficult to encode [this being the thrust of (2) and (3)], but because observers can only ever appreciate natural reality within a system of encoding and informed by the sensory apparatus available. True reality is therefore difficult to define and impossible to experience.

1972 The cognitive scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela introduce the term "autopoeisis" [Greek = "self" + "creating"] to describe systems wherein sub-processes act together to pursue a single coherent purpose.

1972 The French literary theorist Philippe Hamon publishes a paper entitled "Qu'est-ce qu'une Description?" [= "What is a Description?"], in which he recommends treating dramatic characters as beginning life as "empty signs", and - just as "migratory morphemes" do in grammar - before gradually acquiring their final meaning.

1972 The French anthropologist-philosopher René Girard [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Violence and the Sacred" [buy], in which he asserts that the origins of religion lie in a universal process of social scapegoating. Nowhere is this more clearly to be seen than in those religions which practice ritual sacrifice. [THREAD = ART, RITUAL, AND BELIEF]

1972 The American painter Bill Stoneham [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "The Hands Resist Him", in which a young female doll, perhaps three years old, is posed in a shop doorway alongside a slightly older boy, while behind them a number of disembodied? hands fret mysteriously against the inside of the glass [image]. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1972 The American cognitive scientist Terry Winograd publishes SHRDLU, a computer program "that in some sense" can understand language. The software incorporated four key features, namely (1) a distinction between procedural and declarative knowledge, (2) "an emphasis on how language triggers action", (3) sensitivity to awkward conversational phenomena such as pronominalisation [the technical term is "deixis"], and (4) an explicit recognition of the role played by prior context [all of which factors have been incorporated into the Konrad software].

1973 The Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović [Wikipedia biography] stages a performance entitled "Rhythm 10" [image] in which she records the sounds - including her own gasps of pain - as she plays the knife-and-fingers version of Russian Roulette. Her motivation in doing this is that once an artist is in the "performance state", it becomes possible to push the body to new heights of endurance. [See now 1974] [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1973 [See firstly 1950 (Michotte)] The Swedish psychologist Gunnar Johansson [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled ***** "Visual Perception of Biological Motion and a Model for its Analysis" *****, in which he reports experimental results pertaining to the nature of the biological movement perception system. His experimental method was to attach small lights to various points on a model's body and to view those lights in total darkness, initially with the model standing still, and then with the model moving. The phenomenal reality of the human form only emerges in the moving condition .....

TEST YOURSELF NOW:

Demonstration versions of the Johansson Effect are available on You Tube [click here] and at Michael Bach's illusions website [click here].

Johansson's conclusion is that the visual system will perceive a configuration of elements as rigid unless and until there is good reason not to. [See next 1982 (Cutting)] [THREADS = ANIMATED MECHANISM and MECHANISMS OF PERCEPTION (VISUAL)]

1973 Michael Crichton's movie "Westworld" [IMDB full plot] is released. The story centres on a futuristic amusement park where androids pander to the secret wishes of customers with enough money to pay for them. Unfortunately one of the androids - "Gunslinger" [Yul Brynner] - goes ever so slightly haywire and sets out to kill as many humans as it can [You Tube trailer]. [See next 1979 (Alien)] [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1973 Roland Barthes [see 1967] now publishes an essay entitled "Le Troisième Sens" [in English as "The Third Meaning"], in which he explores the effectiveness of movie frame enlargements, or "photograms", in the works of the Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein [see 1925]. He does this not at a straightforward or even symbolic level, but at a third level of meaning which Julia Kristeva [see 1980] terms "signifiance", a level at which all meaning is "obtuse" and as often as not deeply emotional. It is the level where one Dionysian mind can talk directly to another Dionysian mind without having to explain themselves in words. One of Barthes' selected stills - from "Battleship Potemkin" (1925) - shows a distraught old woman in a headscarf [play video (right at end)], in whose expressions he sees elements of a clown's painted face. As one recent reviewer summarises it .....

"The third meaning is what strikes me in the image as 'for me', without being reducible to 'what I like' [.....] The obtuse meaning comes askance, rounds off, softens or 'foams' the symbolic meaning" (ffrench, 2006 online, e4).

RESEARCH ISSUE - PEER-TO-PEER* DIONYSIAN COMMUNICATION: By studying how much meaning can be crammed into (or gleaned from) a single photogram, Barthes is reducing cinematic action in the same way that the painter reduces life to a static canvas. Action is frozen in time and all the parameters of dramatic narrative - not least character and intention - have to be reanimated in the mind of the spectator. By then stressing how quickly one cinematic frame is overlain by the next, and by denying any absolute need for the message to pass through the higher cognitive systems at either end of the artist-viewer channel (where the propositional point would probably be corrupted anyway), Barthes again calls attention to the need for an integrated model in which propositional processing is sufficiently separated from perceptual processing to allow the one to operate independently of the other. The spectator's mind needs to be able to operate in a state of almost pure evaluation, and the artist needs to know how to bring that state about. It may or may not be relevant that the present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] maintains a side-channel of emotional propositionality complementing the main channel in which full intellectual analysis takes place. [* The term "peer-to-peer" comes from telecommunications theory, where it indicates a same layer conversation between two communication stations, both capable of conversation at more than one level of analysis. See the present author's "Shannonian Theory" (esp. Figure 4) for details.]

1973 The British neuropsychologists John C. Marshall [Wikipedia biography] and Freda G. Newcombe [obituary (The Independent)] publish a paper entitled "Patterns of Paralexia", in which they review six clinical cases of acquired dyslexia [see definition], differentially categorise these into three distinct dyslexic subtypes, and then explain the differences using a box-and-arrow explanatory model. [Click for detailed précis]

1973 The American psychoanalyst and specialist in infant development Daniel N. Stern [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "On Kinesic Analysis" in which he discusses (a) how people in general acquire "the movements, rhythms, and signals that make possible exchanges of information and emotion" (p114), and (b) how actors can use that same knowledge to improve their performance. [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1974 Dan Graham's "Present Continuous Past" uses delayed video feedback to involve his audience in his art. Consider .....

"Graham's theory of audience-performer relationships was based on Bertold Brecht's idea of imposing an uncomfortable and self-conscious state on the audience in an attempt to reduce the gap between the two. In subsequent works Graham explored this further, adding the elements of time and space. Video techniques and mirrors were used to create a sense of past, present, and future, within one constructed space. In a work such as Present Continuous Past (1974), the mirror acted as a reflection of present time, while video feedback showed the performer/spectator (in this case the public) their past actions. [.....] So on entering the constructed cube lined with mirrors, the viewers saw themselves first in the mirror and then, eight seconds later, saw those mirrored actions relayed on the video" (Goldberg, 1979, p104).

1974 Josef Beuys introduces himself to the American audience with a performance entitled "I Like America and America Likes Me". It involves him being fetched from the airport by ambulance and then spending the next three days locked in a room, on the same gurney, wrapped in felt, and interacting in slow set-pieces of action with a wild coyote. After three days he is returned to the airport still on the gurney, and flown home. Thus he had been to America but had not actually set foot there.

1974 The first episodes of Harve Bennett Productions' TV series "Six Million Dollar Man" [IMDB full plot] are screened. Central to the plot is Colonel Steve Austin, a seriously injured test pilot [Lee Majors], who body is "rebuilt" using "bionic" [= artificial] replacement parts for his right arm, both his legs, and his left eye. [You Tube video clip]. [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1974 The American installation artist Susan Hiller [Wikipedia biography] organises a prolonged group experience entitled "Dream Mapping", in which volunteers record their dreams while sleeping in the open within a fairy ring [image]. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1974 The University of Georgia academic Stanley V. Longman presents a paper entitled "The Theatre of the Grotesque" [full text online at http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal], in which he analyses Italian avant-garde literature and drama after the First World War. He identifies three defining characteristics of the genre, as follows .....

"The grotesque vision in Italy tended to entail the manipulation of three distinct realms as it was translated into theatrical terms, intended to create a 'humoristic' sensation in the minds of audiences. These three I shall call the 'marionette syndrome', the 'mirror syndrome', and the 'multiple reality syndrome' [.....] Naturally, all three syndromes enter into grotesque plays in some combination. [..... The first] refers to the impression that the characters are themselves puppets whose strings are manipulated by forces beyond themselves, or at least beyond their conscious will. [..... The second] emerges from the stunning awareness that may strike any character upon suddenly seeing himself from a vantage point outside himself. Much of what we might take to be normal, logical, and reasonable in the course of life may suddenly appear bizarre, absurd, and irrational when seen from the outside. [..... The third] refers to the sensation of two or more planes of reality that appear mutually exclusive but which exist simultaneously" (Op. cit., e5-9).

RESEARCH ISSUE - THEATRE OF THE GROTESQUE: If Longman is right, then there is an alluring similarity between his three dramatic devices [i.e., Marionette, Mirror, and Multiple Reality] and the problems of second- and third-order representation in Theory of Mind [see 1978 (Premack and Woodruff) and 1985 (Baron-Cohen et al)]. There is, however, no final integrated model of the processing involved, although the present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] successfully simulated a simple act of second-order representation in October 2010 [see 2010 (Paris Conference)].

1974 Norman White [see 1969] exhibits "Menage", his first robotic work. Until now he has worked with electronically controlled lights, where the end "behaviour" of any one component of the artwork is to be on or off, but where there is a superordinate pattern. Now he allows a number of his machines to move around independently, but influenced by signals from each other. [See next 1988]

1974 Chris Burden [see 1971] has himself nailed in place across the top of a VW Beetle in a piece entitled "Trans-Fixed".

1974 Marina Abramović [see 1973] now performs "Rhythm 0" [audio]. In this performance she lies passively in front of her audience, who are free to pick up and use any of 72 conveniently placed objects on her. These objects include a feather, honey, a whip, and a gun. As time went by the audience behaved with increasing aggression. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1975 The Italian semiotician-novelist Umberto Eco [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Trattato di Semiotica Generale" [in English the following year as "A Theory of Semiotics"], in which he explores the often illogical two-way relationship between the pool of potential objects of signification and the pool of signs available to do the signalling. Scott (2004 online) explains Eco's position this way .....

"Eco defines a 'signal' as a unit of information which may be transmitted from a source to a destination, and argues that a 'signal' may not necessarily be a communicational act. A 'signal' may be a stimulus to a particular response, but may not necessarily be intended to mean anything. Thus a 'signal' may not necessarily be a sign and may not necessarily have any signification" (e3).

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] relies on the careful navigation of a number of separate, but cross-indexed, data stores. These include separate stores of objects and signs, just as Eco describes, although the motivation for this aspect of the design comes not from Eco, but from 19th century aphasiology [e.g., 1885 (Lichtheim)]. [See next 1977] [THREAD = SPEECH ACT THEORY]

1975 Drawing upon his experience with SAM at the ICA's "Cybernetic Serendipity" exhibition [see 1968], Edward Ihnatowicz publishes a paper entitled "Towards a Thinking Machine", in which he discusses whether computer art uses the machine as tool or medium. This leads him to reflect on exactly what is involved in biological perception, and amongst the conclusions he reaches is that vision - whether of the natural world or of a painting - routinely has to "reconstitute" a three-dimensional reality out of a "two-dimensional optical projection". This in turn "can only take place in a system capable of appreciating the properties of solid objects [and] this requires an ability to move" (Source).

1975 The American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Mexican Pin Up" (1975) [image], in which the print appears to have been slashed across the upper arms and the nipples defaced. His practice then moves quickly towards subjects of dismemberment and deformity, producing works such as the self-explanatory "Indulgences; Man with no Legs" (1976) [image] and the very scary "Mother and Child" (1979) [image]. [See next 2004] [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1975 The British philosopher Colin Radford publishes a paper entitled "How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?" in which he explores the phenomenon of emotional response to situations known to be fictional [also known as "Radford's Paradox of Fiction"]. The issue will be meticulously debated over the ensuing decades, but remains largely unresolved.

1975 The British historian Phillip Knightley [homepage] publishes "The First Casualty", a history of the modern profession of war correspondent, including the use of persuasive images. [THREAD = ART, WARFARE, AND PROPAGANDA]

1975 The French performance artist Gina Pane [Wikipedia biography] performs "L'Escalade non Anesthesiée", in which she climbs a razor blade-studded ladder in her bare feet. Later works continue the self-injury theme, frequently using razor blades [images]. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1976 The British cybernetician Gordon Pask publishes "Conversation Theory", a monograph on the nature and purpose of acquiring knowledge.

1976 The American performance artist Paul McCarthy [Wikipedia biography] presents a performance entitled "Class Fool" [video], in which he "threw himself around a ketchup spattered classroom [until] dazed and injured. He then vomited several times and inserted a Barbie doll into his rectum (Wikipedia). [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1976 The performance art cooperative COUM Transmissions exhibits "Prostitution" at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. Amongst the items to hand are rusty knives, used sanitary towels, and other merry prankings. The British performance artist Genesis P. Orridge [Wikipedia biography] promotes his chosen career in confrontational performance art by forming a prankster community [see 1921 (Jung) and 1954 (Radin)] and starring in this show. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1976 The French photographer Bernard Faucon [Wikipedia biography] presents "La Grandes Vacances", a collection of photographed tableaux populated by mannequins [selected images].

1976 The American artist-photographer Laurie Simmons [Wikipedia biography] experiments with black-and-white images taken inside a dolls house [image]. She will follow these with a series of colour studies on the same theme under the title "Early Colour Interiors" [specimens]. [See next 2009] [THREADS = THE UNCANNY and SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF]

1976 The Greek-Australian performance artist Stelios Arkadiou ["Stelarc"] begins a 12-year run of "Suspension" events. The essence of each performance is that a couple of dozen hooks are pushed through his skin, attached to cords, and then used to lift him bodily off the ground. Each hook creates a pyramidal deformation of skin as it takes up the strain, which, together with the intense pain and the novel perceptual perspective, creates an experiential learning situation for the artist himself and limitless secondary learning experiences for his onlookers.

1977 Walter de Maria exhibits "Vertical Earth Kilometer" in Kassel, Germany. The onlooker sees merely the top of a 50mm diameter brass rod, and is assured [we believe genuinely] that it descends one kilometer beneath us. As with Meinong's (1902) point about imaginary objects, the artwork for contemplation is therefore more in the mind of those who behold it than on their retinas.

1977 George Lucas's movie "Star Wars" [Wikipedia full plot] is released. Our present interest is with the music hall robots R2-D2 [image] and C-3PO [image] which spend more time bickering than problem solving (and how human is that!) [You Tube video clip]. [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1977 The American photographer Cindy Sherman [Wikipedia biography] develops a style of self-portraiture based upon carefully posed movie-based scenarios. The end results are always images of types rather than specific persons. "Untitled Film Still #17" (1978) [image] is typical of her work at this time. [See next 1989 (surrogate selves)]

1977 The British academic David Bain publishes "Actors and Audience" [buy], in which he analyses the theatrical "aside" as a mechanism for creating a communication channel direct between authors and their audiences. [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1977 The American psychologist James J. Gibson [Wikipedia biography] publishes his Theory of Affordance to help bring together cognitive theory and the world of practical design. An affordance is conceptualised as a latent "action possibility", a feature of an object which invites a particular action upon or towards it.

1977 Umberto Eco [see 1975] now publishes a paper entitled "Semiotics of Theatrical Performance", in which he applies his general theory of semiotics specifically to the performative exchange. [See next 1980 (Elam)] [THREADS = SPEECH ACT THEORY and THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1977 The American researchers Stephen M. Kosslyn [Harvard University biography] and James R. Pomerantz [Rice University biography] publish a paper entitled "Imagery, Propositions, and the Form of Internal Representations", in which they defend the notion of mental imagery against accusations from rival theorists that images are so difficult to operationalise as objectively measurable variables that their very existence is to be doubted. After much consideration they conclude that there is "no reason to discard imagery as an explanatory construct in psychology" (p74), or to believe that the phenomenon is more easily accounted for "by appealing to propositional representations" (Ibid.). [See next 1978 (Anderson)] [THREAD = THE NATURE OF REPRESENTATION (VISUAL)]

1978 The Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett [homepage] publishes "Brainstorms" [buy], an introduction to the philosophical approach to the problems of cognitive science. This book includes a diagrammatic summary of cognitive modularity, showing three perceptual stages in all [show me this diagram].

1978 The Canadian-born American cognitive scientist John R. Anderson [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "Arguments Concerning Representations for Mental Imagery", in which, like Kosslyn and Pomerantz [see 1977], he defends the notion of mental imagery against "propositional theorists" who argue that imaginal and verbal material are both reduced to the same underlying "abstract propositional format" (p250). In the end, however, the arguments for a propositional representation "are far from compelling", whilst those for imaginal representation "are not convincing" (p275), and so the problem remains unresolved. [THREAD = THE NATURE OF REPRESENTATION (VISUAL)]

1978 [See firstly 1917 (Poppelreuter)] The British neuroscientist Semir Zeki [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "Functional Specialisation in the Visual Cortex of the Rhesus Monkey", in which he reports on the electrical response of the brains of macaque monkeys during visual stimulation. [See next 1992] [THREAD = MECHANISMS OF VISUAL PERCEPTION]

1978 The American comparative psychologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff publish a paper on chimpanzee intelligence entitled "Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?", in which they discuss the chimpanzee's ability "to impute mental states to himself and to others" (p515). They support this discussion with objective data obtained from a specially designed test scenario in which video footage and still photographs of humans were shown to the laboratory chimpanzee Sarah, then 14 years old. The videos showed a human in a cage struggling to get gold of inaccessible bananas (e.g., suspended out of reach overhead). The still photographs were presented in pairs, one showing a potential solution to the problem (e.g., human climbs onto box) and the other not. One three simple problems Sarah chose the "correct" solution every time. On a more difficult problem, where weights needed to be removed from the box before it could be moved, she failed on the first three of six attempts. Premack and Woodruff interpret their results as follows .....

"The view we recommend [.....] is that the chimpanzee solves problems such as the present one (and others a great deal more complicated) by imputing states of mind to the human actor. In looking at the videotape, he imputes at least two states of mind to the human actor, namely intention and purpose on the one hand and knowledge or belief on the other. The chimpanzee makes sense of what he sees by assuming that the human actor wants the banana and is struggling to reach it. [.....] The animal takes over the actor's purpose, as it were" (p518).

RESEARCH ISSUE - THEORY OF MIND: [This entry abbreviated from the present author's Mental Philosophy Glossary (Theory of Mind)] The Theory of Mind (ToM) is one of the most intriguing and far-reaching research areas in modern cognitive science, addressing not just the interactive nature of communication as overt behaviour but also the mental representation necessary to support that communication. The term "theory of mind" comes originally from Premack and Woodruff (1978) [see above], who used it to describe the higher mammalian ability to "impute mental states to himself and others" (p515). This idea was then developed by Dennett (1978) [see above, and onward link], who popularised the notion of "orders of representation", again by Wimmer and Perner (1983), who introduced the "false belief task" as a practical method of tracking the development of this skill in children (they found that at three years of age, a typical child would "fail" a false-belief task, whereas at age five that same child would "pass" it), and again by Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith (1985), who took Wimmer and Perner's method and used it to explore the ToM capabilities of children with special educational needs such as autism.

1978 Following the appeal of early living lighting works such as "First Tighten up on the Drums" (1969) and "Splish Splash 2" (1975), the Canadian new media artist Norman White begins a 25 year residency at Ontario College of Art and Design, teaching his mechanical sculpture and electronic art.

1978 [See firstly 1744 (JAMES-LANGE THEORY OF EMOTION)] The American philosopher Kendall L. Walton [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "Fearing Fictions", in which he revisits Radford's "Paradox of Fiction" [see 1975]. His personal resolution of this problem is to distinguish between genuine emotion - the factuals of a visceral response available to conscious experience - and the nature of that experience as a nameable phenomenon. Here is how that distinction works .....

"So, for instance, when a person who has watched a horror movie declares that they felt afraid, it is true that they were emotionally moved, but fictional that what they were moved to was fear. Walton refers to these fictional emotions as quasi emotions" (Wikipedia). [See next 1990] [THREADS = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE and DISTURBING ART]

1978 The British film director Richard Attenborough [Wikipedia biography] releases the movie "Magic" [IMDB entry], in which Fats, a ventriloquist's dummy, develops a mind of its own. [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

1978 The American performance artist Mark Pauline [Wikipedia biography] establishes Survival Research Laboratories [corporate homepage] to pursue all-action mechanised performance as legitimate artistic practice. Performances are typically noisy and destructive. Early offerings include "Shockwave Cannon" (1987) [details], "The Big Arm" (1994) [details], and "Hand-O'-God" (1997) [details].

1978 R. Gordon Wasson [see 1957], Albert Hofmann [see 1943], and Carl A.P. Ruck [Wikipedia biography] now publish "The Road to Eleusis" [buy], in which they bring their respective areas of expertise together in an attempt to provide an integrated explanation of what went on in the "Eleusian mysteries" [see 650BCE]. Taking the Classicist position first, Ruck reminds us of the nature of the rituals involved, thus .....

"At Eleusis, the initiates journeyed beyond this world to a place that anyone who has never been would be apt to call mythical, rather than the ultimate confirmation of reality. An outside observer - but none was allowed - would have seen only their bodies huddled in the darkened great Telesterion [Greek = "place of initiation"], while they themselves had paraded on ceremoniously [.....] down into the subterranean labyrinth" (p13). "The only requirement, beyond a knowledge of the Greek language, was the price of the sacrificial pig and the fees of the various priests and guides. [.....] Every step of the way recalled some aspect of an ancient myth that told how the Earth Mother, the goddess Demeter, had lost her only daughter [.....] It was called a mystery because no one, under pain of death, could reveal what happened within the sanctuary" (p46). "Eleusis was the supreme experience in an initiate's life. It was both physical and mystical: trembling, vertigo, cold sweat, and then a sight that made all previous seeing seem like blindness" (p61). "As the initiates passed through the lengthy proceedings, they were admitted to many secrets, but the hierophants may well have withheld from them the Secret of Secrets: the sacred water of the potion had already soaked up in the right dosage from the immersed ergot what it contained of ergine and ergonovine, as we call them today" (p63; emphasis added).

Speaking then for the hard sciences, Hofmann reviews the chemistry of the ergots - the natural fungal parasites of rye, barley, and wheat - while for his part Wasson provides little more than a dozen pages of historical anecdote to help bring the other contributions together. [See next 1998 (Ruck)]

1979 The Hungarian-Canadian performance artist Istvan Kantor starts to use his own blood to give his performances an extra frisson of distaste.

1979 Ridley Scott's movie "Alien" [IMDB full plot] is released. Ignoring the central theme - the eponymous alien life form - one of the supporting plot elements concerns Science Officer Ash [Ian Holm], who turns out to be a cyborg with a hidden agenda, until he, too, goes haywire (with visible wires) [You Tube video clip]. [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1979 John Morton [see 1964] now publishes a paper entitled "Word Recognition", in which he coins the term "logogen" to refer to a mental word store [see fuller definition]. He then includes such a store in an updated version of his 1964 diagram [see revised diagram].

1979 Supported by Westinghouse Electric, Carnegie Mellon University set up their Robotics Institute [academic homepage]. Their expressed intention is for it to become "the best place on the planet" to conduct robotic research.

1979 The American philosopher Jerrold Levinson [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "Defining Art Historically", in which he asks "What is the artness of an artwork?" His immediate answer is that "a work of art is a thing intended for regard-as-a-work-of-art" (p36), although he adds the provisos (a) that the people having that intention need to have "appropriate proprietary right" over it, and (b) that it is only true at a particular moment in time. Where the art is intended to be revolutionary, a further qualification needs to be added, as follows .....

"The art-making intention of consciously revolutionary artists may thus have to be a covertly disingenuous one, somewhat along these lines: 'My object is for regarding in any way artworks have been regarded in the past (but with the expectation that this will prove frustrating or unrewarding, thus prodding the spectator to adopt some other point of view - this being my ultimate intention)'" (p41). [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1979 The American researchers Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish publish "Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts" [buy] in which they provide a detailed working taxonomy of the speech acts available for human communication [for some of the details see the Companion Glossary (scroll to Speech Acts, the Bach and Harnish Taxonomy)].

1979 The American installation artist Robert Gober starts to acquire a reputation for installations involving familiar objects.

1979 John Searle [see 1969] now publishes "Expression and Meaning" [buy], in which he includes a discussion as to the logical status of the illocutionary acts [more on these] in fictional discourse. He observes that fiction in general and drama in particular are only possible to the extent that the normal rules of illocution can be "suspended" (p324). [THREADS = SPEECH ACT THEORY and THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1980 The 14-year-old Austrian schoolboy Virgil Widrich produces three short 8-mm home movies before starting to experiment with stop-motion animation.

1980 John Searle [see 1969] now publishes a paper entitled "Minds, Brains, and Programs", in which he introduces the "Chinese Room" thought experiment as an updated form of the Turing Test [see 1950]. Here is how the test works .....

KEY THOUGHT EXPERIMENT - THE CHINESE ROOM: In the experiment Searle imagines himself in a room, acting as a translator by following a set of rules summarising the syntax and morphology of the Chinese language, and by applying these rules to a dictionary of the characters available to him. People outside the room slide slips of paper under the door to him, on which are written Chinese characters. This input is, of course, "just meaningless squiggles". But the rules allow Searle to create and return a sensible sequence of characters of his own. A conversation ensues, to the satisfaction of the people outside the room. QUESTION: Can Searle be said to "understand" Chinese? Is understanding no more than the ability to keep the words coming?

Searle's judgement on this test [and it will be heavily criticised over the ensuing years as an impossible and therefore invalid scenario in itself] is that neither he, nor a computer which managed to "pass" the Turing Test, actually understands what they are about, despite being able to carry on a conversation to the satisfaction of the human administering the test. [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS and THE TURING TEST]

1980 The French? telecommunications engineer Hubert Zimmerman [Wikipedia stub biography] publishes an IEEE technical standard entitled "OSI Reference Model: The ISO Model of Architecture for Open Systems Interconnection", in which he lays down guidelines for the implementation of telecommunications "network protocols".

KEY CONCEPT - NETWORK PROTOCOLS: When trying to establish communication between two hierarchically layered processing systems, it is important that the sending and receiving hierarchies have been precisely co-engineered, because otherwise the receiver will be unable properly to decode what the sender has encoded. Sadly, the early decades of the telecommunications industry were plagued by precisely such problems, because different equipment manufacturers liked to protect their intellectual property by adopting marginally different standards. In fact, telecommunications was not an "open" marketplace until, as a result of consumer pressure, internationally accepted codes of practice known as "network protocols" were gradually developed. These are standard methods of (a) authenticating which stations should actually be in a network, (b) identifying which station a message is to be routed to, (c) governing when, and at what speeds, stations are allowed to transmit and receive, (d) arranging for data compression and decompression, and (e) detecting errors in transmission and arranging for their correction. In short, protocols are nothing less than vital for effective dialogue to take place. There are many highly technical network protocols now in force, published by such agencies as the International Standards Organisation. Zimmerman's "Reference Model" is a reasonably non-technical overriding guideline, recommending a seven-layered analysis for any given communication, with the physical channel (the wire, etc.) being consigned to the lowest level, and each layer communicating logically (but not physically) with the matching decoding layer(s) at other node(s).

1980 The Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Pouvoirs de l'Horreur" [in English as "Powers of Horror"], in which she pursues the thesis that there exists a domain of cognition tuned particularly to "the abject", that is to say, to blood and hurt and pain and excretion and to all the embarrassing drip-drippiness and smelliness of existence at a purely chemical level. Neither subject [i.e., me] nor object [i.e., my body] but something neither subject nor object really wants to recognise; something even the Freudian Id is ashamed of, perhaps. As such, abjection has close links with the sacred, and, through that, with the aesthetic, thus .....

"Abjection accompanies all religious structurings and reappears, to be worked out in a new guise, at the time of their collapse. Several structurations of abjection should be distinguished, each one determining a specific form of the sacred. Abjection appears as a rite of defilement and pollution in the paganism that accompanies societies with a dominant or surviving matrilinear character [and] persists as exclusion or taboo (dietary or other) in monotheistic religions [.....] The various means of purifying the abject - the various catharses - make up the history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art" (p17; emphasis added).

1980 The present author [commercial homepage] joins British Telecom as systems analyst and will spend the next nine years acquiring design and operational support skills with the CA-IDMS network database product.

KEY CONCEPT - NETWORK DATABASE: For an introduction to database technology in general, click here and scroll to Section 3.1. For the design skills involved in using CA-IDMS, and the relevance of these skills to cognitive science, click here.

1980 The German historian Berthold Hinz publishes "Art in the Third Reich", in which he advances the thesis that the Nazis systematically "deformed" nineteenth century art into "full-blown Fascist propaganda art" (Newton, p37). [THREAD = ART, WARFARE, AND PROPAGANDA]

1980 [See firstly 1967] Motivated by the death of his mother, Roland Barthes publishes his last major work, "La Chambre Claire" (available in English as "Camera Lucida [buy]), in which he explores the importance of personally painful associations in determining a photograph's impact on an individual.

1980 The American performance artist John Duncan [Wikipedia biography] shocks his audience with an audio presentation entitled "Blind Date" [e-review], which allows them to listen in to what is claimed as the artist having sex with a cadaver. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1980 The drama theorist Keir Elam publishes "The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama" [buy], in which he reviews the main historical attempts to provide a cognitive science of theatrical communication, not least those of the Prague School structuralists [see 1931], Umberto Eco [see 1976/7], Tadeusz Kowzan [see 1968], and Georges Mounin's application of Shannonian Communication Theory [see 1969]. Elam begins by applying basic Shannonian concepts [remind me of these] to the special case of the theatrical exchange. He finds particular value, for example, in the technical term "signal information", the amount of usable information per unit of transmission [per word of dialogue, say], because the signal in drama needs to be defined more broadly than in other application areas. Here is how he puts it .....

"In elementary communication, signal-information is purely functional and remains quite distinct from the semantic content assigned to the message. On stage, however, the physical characteristics of the signs and signals are not only ostended for their own sake (the texture of the costumes or the actors' bodies being major sources of pleasure), [.....] but contribute directly to the production of meaning. Signal-information, that is to say, becomes, in the theatre, a source of semantic information, owing to the ability of the material qualities of the message to connote a range of meanings in their own right" (p41).

Elam then explores how dramatists therefore have far more options available to them than just writing dialogue, thus .....

"It is possible, at an extreme, for dramatic information to be suppressed altogether, in order to allow a free play of sign-vehicles and signals without stable denotations. The performances of The People Show, for example, or of Meredith Monk, depend very substantially on the continual and varied ostension of gestural, scenic, and linguistic messages as material and formal constructs. The production of meaning in this kind of display occurs almost exclusively at the level of the form and substance of the expressive means. [.....] This semanticisation process extends beyond signal, message, and channel to include the very transmitters or even, in certain performances, the sources of communication. The actor's voice and body, considered as signal-transmitters, are rendered pertinent to the text in their materiality, since his personal stature, vocal qualities, and physical idiosyncracies, however incidental to the drama, will influence the spectator's perception and decoding of messages" (pp41-42).

Even the lights, the technicians, and the stagehands, can - if made visible by a bare boards production - act as transmitters of relevant information. Elam turns then to the problems of defining action .....

"Among the kinds of event possible within the drama [.....], absolute privilege has always been accorded to action. [..... This requires] a being, conscious of his doings, who intentionally brings about a change of some kind, to some end, in a given context. Six constitutive elements of action are thus identifiable: an agent, his intention in acting, the act or act-type produced, the modality of his action (manner and means), the setting (temporal, spatial, and circumstantial), and the purpose. [..... A]cts may be further combined into sequences [..... and] series" (pp121-122).

Equally - perhaps more - importantly, there is also action by inaction, as follows .....

"One can add to these 'positive' or productive acts - acts which change the state of affairs in which they are performed - two classes of negative action: the prevention of changes [.....] and the forbearance from performing a productive act, especially where it is expected" (p122).

RESEARCH ISSUE: We shall be particularly concerned with the issue of forbearance when discussing live performance with unnatural stillness.

Elam's final position is then as follows .....

"Whether individual or collective, productive or negative, [.....] the higher-order actions of the drama are, then, subject to two interpretative operations: that regarding their intentional structure (the recognition of them as acts) and that regarding what might be termed their macro-purpose and thus their long-term results. The dynamism of the drama derives from the suspension - and thus the projection into the future - of the purpose-success/purpose-failure of the sequence, so that every distinct act is replete with the possible global result" (p124; emphasis added). [THREAD = PRAGMATICS IN PERFORMANCE]

1981 The cognitive scientists Geoffrey E. Hinton [academic homepage] and James A. Anderson [Wikipedia biography] edit "Parallel Models of Associative Memory", a collection of papers on the nature of biological memory.

1982 The British cognitive neuropsychologist Andrew W. Ellis [academic homepage] produces an X-shaped explanatory diagram [see detailed précis] describing the modular organisation of cognitive resources during verbal communication (Ellis 1982). Because it showed separate processing pathways for spoken and written language, and because input in one modality could generate output in the other, it becomes known as a "transcoding diagram". Transcoding diagrams are now one of the two most popular diagramming formats in the neuropsychology of language, and typically include the four separate word stores identified by the 19th century aphasiologists whilst declining to suggest how higher cognitive functions might be subdivided, preferring to rely instead on a single undifferentiated central module.

1982 The American psychologist James E. Cutting [Cornell University homepage] publishes a paper entitled "Blowing in the Wind: Perceiving Structure in Trees and Bushes" [full text online], in which he reports data from experiments designed to replicate Gunnar Johansson's studies [see 1973] into the basic processes of visual motion perception. Instead of Johansson's human models, however, Cutting uses a battery of computer generated animated light arrays, each simulating a different configuration of tree-hung lights. When the light points are not moving they present only as a formless array; when they start moving, however, they are immediately re-interpreted, and - providing the particular configuration allows it - are re-perceived as tree branches swaying in the wind. [THREAD = MECHANISMS OF PERCEPTION (VISUAL)]

1982 Ridley Scott's movie "Blade Runner" [IMDB full plot] is released. Central to the plot is a species of genetically engineered androids known as "replicants", who prove capable of a little too much human emotion for their creators' good. [You Tube video clip]. [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1982 The American neurophysiologists Leslie G. Ungerleider [academic homepage] and Mortimer Mishkin publish a paper entitled "Two Cortical Visual Systems", in which they propose complementary "dorsal" and "ventral" visual pathways emanating from the visual cortex [see diagram]. The dorsal pathway is responsible for interfacing visual information with spatial, as might be useful, for example, with visually guided reaching. The ventral pathway is responsible for object recognition (including any emotional associations which that object might have).

1982 Monroe Beardsley now publishes a paper entitled "Intentions and Interpretations: A Fallacy Revisited", in which he admits to a fallacy in the argument previously presented (jointly with William Wimsatt) to expose the "Intentional Fallacy" [see 1946 (Wimsatt and Beardsley)]. The original argument was - he now confesses - the work of "rather youthful authors", and intended to be "designedly subversive and unpleasantly provoking" (p189). With the wisdom of the years he now observes that much of the discussion which the 1946 paper brought about [a debate which he personally followed by rarely contributed to] was down to a slackness in defining the term "intention". With the development of Speech Act Theory in the meantime [see 1962 (Austin) and 1969(Searle)], he is now able to correct that oversight. His revised position is as follows [for a reminder what illocutionary acts are all about, click here] .....

"The author's intention in producing a text is his intention to say certain things in producing that text. I use the word 'say' [.....] to cover illocutionary actions in general [..... and also] the special case of refraining from illocutionary commitment in order to produce a fiction: this is the representation, rather than the performance, of an illocutionary action" (p190).

Beardsley then reviews a number of significant pieces of literature and finds that they all have problems when it comes to deciding whether the author intended to represent or perform an action. Other works have problems knowing the intention behind heavily ironic passages, where the sign-meaning relationship is deliberately skewed. So all in all it is not that there is no such thing as artistic intention but that there is no single way of showing it the light of day. Beardsley therefore summarises his new position as follows .....

"But the term still points, sternly and unwaveringly, at a small cluster of errors in inference that centre around the concept of the author's intention. The errors can be formulated as confusions: of illocutionary-act performance with illocutionary-act representation, of authorial meaning (what was intended to be said) with textual meaning (what was actually said), of the ostensible speaker of a poem with the biological author, [etc.]" (p198).

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] is designed to respond to an ironically stated message. It achieves this by analysing both the literal and the dramatic meaning of the propositions suggested by the input stimulus (be it textual or pictorial) and either selecting the most appropriate or else requesting additional input.

1982 Two years after his death, representatives of David C. Marr [see 1970] now publish "Vision", in which they have collected his fuller theory of visual perception. This theory is characterised by more or less ignoring what is known about the visual pathways of the brain, and by focussing instead on the computation being carried out (for which reason the theory will soon become known as Marr's "Computational Theory of Vision"). In so doing, the theory makes some very precise assumptions as to (a) the "stages" of perceptual processing - the stages of perception - and (b) the nature of the representational forms being passed from each stage to the next [more on this].

1983 [We are indebted to our correspondent John Cummins for bringing this author's work to our attention.] The British literary historian Anne D. Wilson [homepage] publishes "Magical Thought in Creative Writing", in which she analyses the psychodynamics of narrative literary plotting. [See next 1988] [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART and THE NATURE OF NARRATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS]

1983 The developmental psychologists Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner take Premack and Woodruff's (1978) notion of Theory of Mind and apply it to the ability of human children to understand false beliefs. They devise a test scenario capable of illustrating what was at stake. Here are the key stages in the false belief scenario involving the characters Maxi and his mother, and some chocolate .....

"In order to test subjects' comprehension of the other person's wrong belief, stories like the following were constructed. A story character, Maxi, puts chocolate into a cupboard x. In his absence his mother displaces the chocolate from x into cupboard y. Subjects have to indicate the box where Maxi will look for the chocolate when he returns" (p106).

Wimmer and Perner tested 36 children, 12 each at ages 4-5, 6-7, and 8-9 years, and found that performance improved dramatically in the two older groups.

1984 The British conceptual artist Helen Chadwick [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "In Ego Geometria Sum" [image], an installation consisting of ten plywood sculptures "whose forms suggest a cradle-to-grave procession of familiar objects" (Morton, 2004 online) [See next 1992] [THREAD = CONCEPTUAL ART]

1984 James Cameron's movie "The Terminator" [IMDB full plot] is released. Central to the plot is the eponymous Terminator [Arnold Schwarzenegger], a cyborg assassin unhampered by all human emotion [You Tube video clip]. [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1984 The Spanish performance artist Marcellí Antunez Roca [Wikipedia biography (Spanish)] founds an urban theatre group under the name "La Fura dels Baus" [more on these]. Their street theatre "Accions" in and around Barcelona soon earn them cult status. [See next 1994 (Epizoo)] [THREADS = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART and AKTIONISMUS]

1985 The American artist-sculptor Kiki Smith [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "How I Know I'm Here" (1985-2000), a 16-foot linocut depicting bodily organs [image], and starts to develop a reputation for producing art as social comment.

1985 The American researchers James L. McClelland [academic homepage] and David E. Rumelhart [Wikipedia biography] set up a large inter-University research team known as the Parallel Distributed Processing Research Group, whose basic beliefs are brought out in the following manifesto statement .....

"..... the processing system is assumed to consist of a highly interconnected network of units that take on activation values and communicate with other units by sending signals modulated by weights associated with the connections between the units ....." (McClelland and Rumelhart, 1985, p173.)

1985 The American painter Frank Garvey starts to release his "Wall of Ashes" series [images], a set of eight large canvases filled with garish scenes of hell, nuclear warfare, and abominations ancient and modern. [See now 1988 (Omnicircus)] [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1985 Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan Leslie, and Uta Frith publish a paper entitled "Does the Autistic Child Have a 'Theory of Mind'?" in which they suggest that a crucial component in the social impairment observed in autistic children is a deficit in the "metarepresentational" skills needed to exercise the sort of Theory of Mind described by Premack and Woodruff. They tested children using a variant of Wimmer and Perner's (1983) false belief scenario, this time involving two dolls, Sally and Anne. The experimenter sat opposite the child being tested across a small table, and the task involved hiding a marble in either a basket or a box set on the table top. Here is the core method .....

"Sally first placed a marble into her basket. Then she left the scene, and the marble was transferred by Anne and hidden in her box. Then, when Sally returned, the experimenter asked the critical Belief Question: 'Where will Sally look for her marble?' If the children point to the previous location of the marble, then they pass the Belief Question" (p41).

The test was applied to 27 normally developing children, 14 Down's Syndrome children, and 20 autistic children, all broadly matched for mental age. 23 of the normal children passed the false belief question, 12 of the Down's, but only 4 of the autistic. The authors interpreted this differential impact as indicating "that the autistic children did not appreciate the difference between their own and the doll's knowledge" (p43).

1985 Intrigued by the debate surrounding Manet's "Olympia" (1865) [q.v.], the IFAR director Sharon Flescher publishes a paper entitled "More on a Name" in which she explores the history of that name. She concludes .....

"'Olympia', it should be noted, is not a French name. The French version of the name is 'Olympe', and it was not uncommon. The suffix '-ia' gives it a classical or Italianate flavour [.....] but the nuance is decidedly different. Significantly, the numerous nineteenth century French theatrical and literary works using the name, often (but not exclusively) to refer to a woman of easy virtue, always use the French variant, 'Olympe', except when a foreign or classical allusion was specifically intended. [.....] The rarity of the name 'Olympia' makes Manet's use of it all the more noteworthy" (p27).

1985 The postmodernist theorist Rosalind Krauss reminds us that painters are faced with the physiological fact that while it is easy to measure physical colour humans can only "experience" its ultimate effect upon us, namely "'seen' colour" (Krauss, 1985, p15).

1986 The South African artist Jane Alexander [Culturebase biography] exhibits "The Butcher Boys" [image], a trio of spineless (literally) chimerae - young men with rams' heads - intended as a coded protest against the Apartheid system. [THREADS = ART AS PROTEST and DISTURBING ART]

1986 The Brazilian robotics-artist Eduardo Kac [Wikipedia biography] contributes a remotely controlled seven-foot tall robot to the "Brasil High Tech" exhibition in Rio de Janiero. He uses this installation to study the interaction of spectators with an (albeit remotely) animated mechanical entity. [See next 1989] [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1986 The British researchers Vicky Bruce [academic homepage] and Andrew W. Young [academic homepage] publish a paper entitled "Understanding Face Recognition", in which they propose a theoretical model of the separate cognitive modules which would have to be involved in order to account for the empirical evidence in the face recognition literature. As has been typical with box-and-arrow diagrams since their invention in the late 19th century [see, e.g., 1885 (Lichtheim)], the proposed processing resources require particular types of information to flow between them. With their face recognition model, Bruce and Young identify no less than seven contributing types of information, as follows: (1) Structural codes describing (a) the face currently presenting itself to the eye, and (b) the expression it is currently wearing; (2) "Face Recognition Units", that is to say, stored structural codes describing the faces with which we are already familiar; (3) "Person Identity Nodes" containing the principal propositional truths about the person in question; (4) A Name Generation Node capable of generating the name of the person identified by (3); (5) An Expression Analysis Node capable of identifying the biological significance of any emotion being signalled by the face in question; (6) Facial Speech Nodes containing the recognisable mouth movements associated with heard speech; (7) A general purpose processor capable of receiving input from the other processors, and of making some sort of total sense thereof.

ASIDE: It is because (3) and (4) work separately that we often "know" who someone is without being able to recall their name. The technical term for making "some sort of total sense" out of a jumble of separated inputs is "perceptual binding".

1987 The American photographer Andres Serrano [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Piss Christ", a photograph of a plastic crucifix immersed in a glass of his own urine [image], the first in a series of works involving excreta, bodily fluids, corpses, etc.

1987 Paul Verhoeven's movie "Robocop" [IMDB full plot] is released. Central to the plot is Officer Alexander Murphy [Paul Weller], wickedly shot to death in the line of duty in order to provide a corpse capable of being rebuilt with bionic components. Well-deserved bionic vengeance follows [You Tube video clip]. [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1987 Paramount releases Brian de Palma's movie "The Untouchables" [IMDB entry], the story of the FBI's fight against Al Capone's gangsterism in 1920s Chicago. The movie includes a final slow motion shoot-out centred upon a pram bouncing out of control down the steps at Union Station [You Tube video clip]. [THREAD = SLOW MOTION ACTION]

1987 Drawing on two decades of close collaboration with Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky [see 1951] now publishes "The Society of Mind" [buy], in which he takes a highly modular view of mental architecture. He treats each identifiable module as a processing "agent", whose job it is to work with other agents in delivering a higher order processing ability. Cognition, in other words, is all about tasks and subtasks and their final integration into something more holistically powerful. This approach has been commonplace in aphasiology since the work of the nineteenth century "diagram makers" [e.g., 1885 (Lichtheim)]. [See next 2006 (Minsky)]

1988 The Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett reopens the Qualia Debate.

1988 The American mathematician Larry Wos [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "An Overview of Some Obstacles to the Automation of Reasoning", in which he sets out a "basic paradigm for machine reasoning. This consists of a sequence of linked propositions called "clauses", each derived from those already generated, and from which further propositions can be derived by inference. Major waypoints in this process may be noted as "canonical clauses". He then identifies eight enduring problems for the artificial intelligence community to overcome. These are as follows .....

1 Clause Retention: This is the problem of managing intermediate propositions - clauses - during the reasoning process. This Wos describes as "perhaps the most significant obstacle" (p23). Ideally only intermediates which are actively going to assist should be retained, but practically this is more easily said than done.

2 Inadequate Focus: This is the problem of topic drift during the generation of successive clauses.

3 Redundant Information: This is the problem of generating the same clause over and over again.

4 Clause Generation: This is the problem of deducing "far too many conclusions, many of which are redundant and many of which are redundant" (p41).

5 Size of the Deduction Steps: This is the problem of clause size, which - if too small - encourages many small steps in reasoning rather than fewer, larger, ones.

6 Choice of Transformations: This is the problem of correctly identifying canonical clauses, since these are not re-validated in the event of a processing retrace; if they are wrong, then they will stay wrong.

7 Metarules: This is the problem of choosing the most appropriate reasoning strategy from those available. "No adequate guidelines" exist for this.

8 Database Indexing: This is the problem of actually getting hold of intermediate clauses quickly when needed. The generic cure is to employ "sophisticated indexing" (p46)

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] is built around a CA-IDMS network database and implements a data model designed to allow for all main features of human memory, biochemical and functional. It accesses this memory using the full variety of the database indexing options available under CA-IDMS [see Companion Resource (Section 1.1)]. See Smith (2010) for a published example of sensory input activating higher contextual understanding, or simply replay the conference PowerPoint.

1988 Anne Wilson [see 1983] now publishes "The Magical Quest: The Use of Magic in Arthurian Romance", in which she continues her analysis of narrative plotting. [THREAD = PSYCHODYNAMICS IN ART and THE NATURE OF NARRATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS]

1988 The New Zealand born animator Erica Russell [British Film Institute biography] screens "Feet of Song" [see video], her debut piece as director. This 5½ minute movie is full of simple figures, boldly coloured, moving to insistent African rhythms, which together hold the viewer enrapt. As with Shiryaev's much earlier work [see 1906], Russell's animation allows a frame-by-frame microanalysis of the relationship between movements - repetitive and otherwise - and their role as "kinemes" [see 1952 (Birdwhistell)] in communication. [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1988 The American roboticist Rodney A. Brooks [Wikipedia biography] demonstrates "Ghengis" [image and detail], a robot that walks and navigates. [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

1988 The young British artist Damien Hirst takes part in the "Freeze" and helps form the Young British Artists. In 1991 Hirst obtains commercial patronage from the Saatchi Gallery, and in 1992 exhibits a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde under the title "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living".

1988 The Carnegie-Mellon roboticist Hans Moravec predicts that by the middle of the 21st century it will be possible to download human consciousness into a machine.

1988 Norman White [see 1974] exhibits HLR [= Helpless Robot] [image], a robot which interacts in increasingly assertive tones with human passers-by. He also reveals "Them Fuckin' Robots" [image], a robotic performance complete with simulated sex. [THREADS = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE and ANIMISM]

1988 Frank Garvey found the OmniCircus performance art space in San Francisco [website, images, and video]. Events include a purpose-assembled "Robotic Ensemble", "a troupe of mechanical beggars, hookers, junkies, and street preachers" (Wikipedia).

1989 Along with Cindy Sherman [see 1977] and Laurie Simmons, the American photographer David Levinthal [Wikipedia biography] contributes to the "Surrogate Selves" exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The idea of the exhibition is to show the power of properly staged toys and dolls as photographic subjects.

1989 [See firstly 1925 (Margairaz and Piaget)] The American psycholinguist and applied psychologist Daniel G. Morrow [Beckman Institute biography] publishes a paper entitled "Prominent Characters and Events Organise Narrative Understanding", in which he considers the mental processing involved in building up a narrative-level understanding from a sequence of component sentences. He observed subjects making sense of a battery of cleverly designed seven-sentence stories requiring pronoun resolution.

KEY CONCEPT - PRONOUN RESOLUTION: Pronoun resolution is the act of identifying the true noun referent of a pronoun, and is thus one of several cognitive processes involved in anaphora and deixis [more on these]. With sentences which have been carelessly constructed in the first place it is not always possible to resolve some of the pronouns. Pronoun resolution problems of this sort account for many ambiguous sentences.

Here is an example of such a story, involving the protagonist, Paul, and his non-protagonist son, Ben .....

1. Paul caught the flu and was feeling pretty awful.

2. He told his eldest son Ben to keep the house quiet.

3. He got up from bed to go to the bathroom, irritated by the noise.

4. Traffic was rushing by the house.

5. The kids were arguing in the den.

6A That noisy Ben was messing up the kitchen.

7 The floor felt cold on his feet.

Probe Question: Whose feet are referred to?

The reason the sixth sentence is shown as 6A is that there are deliberately three versions of what can occur at that point in the narrative. Version 6A is as shown, Version 6B reads "Noisy Ben was tramping around in the kitchen", and Version 6C reads "Ben was wondering when his father would feel better as he ate in the kitchen". Each test story thus controls the prominence of one of the characters, in the expectation that this will affect the pronoun resolution required for understanding Sentence 7. The nonprotagonist is deemed more prominent "if his perspective is relevant for interpreting the narrative", as in Version 6C above. Data from four separate experimental procedures support the following conclusions .....

"The first three experiments demonstrate that when the protagonist of a narrative participates in a foreground event and the nonprotagonist in a background event, readers choose the protagonist as referent and adopt his perspective in order to interpret the critical sentence. This strategy is used regardless of the order of mention of the critical events. [.....] The present results are best explained by the theory that readers understand a narrative by constructing a model to represent the world the narrative expresses. [.....] Readers must identify and keep track of what the writer indicates is the most prominent part of the world at each point in the narrative. This ensures that relevant parts of the model will be most accessible for interpreting referring expressions, so that the developing model can be continually updated with new information" (pp316-317; emphasis added). [THREAD = DECODING COMPLEX NARRATIVE]

1989 The American film director David Schmoeller releases the movie "Puppet Master" [IMDB entry], in which "A box of little toys has just become a gang of little terrors". [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

1989 Simon Baron-Cohen follows up his 1985 study with a paper entitled "The Autistic Child's Theory of Mind", in which he reports results obtained with a new test scenario for second-order belief. This uses yet another false belief scenario, this time involving two dolls, John and Mary, and a tabletop toy village. The test was applied to ten normally developing children, ten Down's Syndrome children, and ten autistic children, all broadly matched for mental age. Nine of the normal children passed the false belief question, six of the Down's, but none of the autistic. Baron-Cohen interpreted this as indicating a specific difficulty in autistics processing "second-order beliefs".

RESEARCH ISSUE: The act of an artist communicating deliberately with his/her public requires ToM skills, but has been little investigated.

1990 The American cognitive scientist Donald A. Norman produces a variant of the cognitive hierarchy diagram. [Many of the proposals in this architecture have been incorporated into the Konrad software.]

1990a The British clinical psychologists Neil O'Connor and Beate Hermelin [The Times obituary] publish a paper entitled "The Recognition Failure and Graphic Success of Idiot-Savant Artists", in which they investigate the relationship between "artistic talent" and intelligence. Since superior draughtsmanship is often a striking feature of the "idiot-savant" syndrome [see 1947 (Tredgold)], they wondered whether this skill was automatically accompanied by skill at recognising pictures.

KEY CONCEPT - DISSOCIATION OF FUNCTION: One of the fundamental principles of neuropsychology is that some [but only some] brain functions are sufficiently specifically localised in the nervous system to be selectively lost when the nervous tissue in question is damaged by accident or disease. Thus if we cut the auditory nerve we become deaf, whereas if we cut the optic nerve we become blind. Localisable functions such as these are said to "dissociate"- that is to say, move away from the remaining intact abilities - when impaired. One of the classic examples of a dissociation is the disproportionate damage to the fluency of language production produced by lesions in Broca's Area [see 1861]. The related term "double dissociation" was coined by Bagshaw and Pribram (1965) and popularised by Warrington and Rabin (1970) to refer to two in-some-way complementary dissociations. The classic example of a double dissociation is that between the sentence production deficits found with lesions in Broca's Area and the sentence comprehension deficits subsequently found with lesions in Wernicke's Area. O'Connor and Hermelin are here suggesting that drawing skills are dissociable from visual recognition skills and general intelligence skills.

O'Connor and Hermelin therefore selected three groups of eight subjects, namely an E-Group of mentally retarded savants with an average age 25.7 years and an average verbal IQ of 67 but "outstanding drawing ability", a C1-Group of eight subjects with a similar average age and verbal IQ but only average drawing ability, and a C2-Group of eight school-age subjects of normal intelligence and outstanding drawing ability. Each subject was tested for same-different judgement on being shown two shapes, one immediately after the other; also for "cross-modal" transfer of information when given fingertip tactile exploration of shapes only to be then tested for visual recognition. The data collected support the following conclusions .....

"These results thus confirm and extend previous findings that whereas the memory comparison of two inputs was intelligence dependent, the conversion of such visual as well as tactual input into subsequent motor output was a function of graphic ability. However [.....] when tactually presented shapes were reproduced graphically from memory, all subject groups did worse than they had done on visual memory reproductions, but the idiot-savant artist group was showing an even higher percentage error increase than the other two groups. Thus the conclusions are that the idiot-savant artists' graphic skill rests on their superior output ability rather than on a particularly competent perceptual analysis" (pp214-215; emphasis added).

1990b O'Connor and Hermelin [see 1990a] now publish a paper entitled "Art and Accuracy: The Drawing Ability of Idiots-Savants", in which they further investigate the drawing ability of idiot-savant gifted artists. The present issue is as follows .....

"Assuming that a talent for drawing [may] be independent of the general level of cognitive development, the question arises whether such independence applies equally to all the various components which make up drawing skill. Two such components, which might be referred to as 'representational accuracy' and 'artistic-aesthetic value' respectively, are distinguished in the present investigation" (p218).

The authors illustrate this difference by commending the painter George Stubbs for his representational accuracy, and his contemporary William Turner [see 1842] for his "atmospheric and artistic" skills. Their subjects were a group of eight idiot-savant artists with "outstanding drawing ability", average age 25.7 years, and average verbal IQ 67.0. Each subject was asked to make drawings of a three-dimensional array of four toy objects, (1) from memory after a 20 second exposure, (2) from continuous observation, but as it would appear from the side, (3) from sight as seen, and (4) from an elevated vantage point. The findings are .....

"..... while representational accuracy is associated with intelligence level, artistic merit is not. On all dimensions scored for accuracy [.....] the normal children were more accurate than the idiot-savants. On the other hand, regardless of the conditions in which the drawings were executed, their artistic quality was equal for the two groups" (p226).

1990 The American neuropsychologists Paul M. Churchland [Wikipedia biography] and Patricia Smith Churchland [Wikipedia biography] publish a paper entitled "Could a Machine Think?", in which they discuss whether Alan Turing's "Turing Test" of machine intelligence [see 1950] remains a valid test in the light of 40 years of progress with neural networks. They begin by acknowledging Hubert Dreyfuss's analysis of things machines will probably never be able to do [see 1972] and John Searle's "Chinese Room" thought experiment [see 1980]. Then they identify three properties of biological nervous tissue which erode AI's chances "of solving the problem of conscious intelligence" (p29). These troublesome properties are (1) the fact that brains are "parallel machines", (2) the fact that the neuron is an analog unit, not a digital one, and (3) that many neural outputs receive immediate feedback from the destination tissue by means of "recurrent" pathways.

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] accounts meticulously for multiple streams of feedback during simulated acts of cognition. See Smith (2010) for a published example, or simply replay the conference PowerPoint.

1990 [See firstly 390BCE (Plato on Mimesis)] Kendall L. Walton [see 1978] now publishes "Mimesis as Make-Believe", a more developed statement of his Make-Believe Theory of theatrical identification. He draws parallels between children's make-believe play and the adult theatrical exchange. By emphasising the role of "point of view" he comes close to the modern "Theory of Mind" [see 1978 (THEORY OF MIND)], and by including the emotional correlates of mimesis he is addressing one of the longest standing problems of psychologically grounded aesthetics. [THREADS = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE and DISTURBING ART]

1990 The South African-born British painter and performance artist Lennie Lee [Wikipedia biography] stages a series of performances in London in which he explores things taboo. [See next 1994] [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1990 The American roboticist Ronald C. Arkin [academic homepage] produces a variant of the cognitive hierarchy diagram [click here and scroll to Figure 7]. It is cognate to the diagrams put forward by Craik (1945) and Dennett (1978), save that it reflects the structure of a typical robotic brain, not a human one!

1990 The present author delivers his first lecture on cognitive science to a class of Speech and Language Therapy undergraduates.

1990 The computing pioneer George Stibitz [see 1937], now one of computing's honoured seniors, uses his PC to produce "computer art" [specimens]. [THREAD = ART AND COMPUTING]

1990 The British physician/actor/director/neuropsychologist Jonathan Miller [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled ***** "Moving Pictures" *****, in which he turns his neuropsychologist's eye to the problems of dramatic movement. The result is a thoughtful and highly interdisciplinary analysis of movement (a) in painting, (b) in single images, and (c) in cinema. With a painting his point is that the painter has frozen a complex dynamic narrative into a complex static composition, but that the one is not always clearly apparent from the other. It is one thing, he argues, to be able cleverly to paint the momentary appearance of silk, say, but you have to choose your moment very carefully if you wish to do justice to some underlying action. You have to understand what your likely spectator already knows of the subject matter, and you have to depict postures as "emblems of action" rather than as representations of them, as is done in Jacques-Louis David's "Intervention of the Sabine Women" (1799) [image]. Similar considerations apply to still photography, where motion blur is now more or less totally under the artist's control. With cinema, however, there arrives an extra dimension of information, and it is one which cannot itself be "pictorially represented" (p189). Cinematic movement, in short, is an illusion. As to "what glues the shots together?" Miller concludes .....

"Try to image what the cognitive problem is. Think of a conversational sequence in which two talking heads alternate with one another [.....] As far as the naive viewer is concerned, each face is looking in the same direction, i.e. out of the screen, so that [..... each] has to be mentally rotated around its vertical axis and then placed at a speaking distance from the other. One can only assume that the intact brain creates a notational space [.....]. We know from the traditions of movie editing that the film-maker does everything he can to facilitate this model making by presenting the viewer with a so-called establishing shot" (p192; emphasis added). [THREAD = THE CINEMATIC ILLUSION]

1991 The British neuroscientist Jeffrey A. Gray publishes a paper entitled "Neural Systems, Emotion, and Personality", in which he explores "the activities of separable subsystems in the brain" (p273) insofar as they might relate to emotional behaviour and personality. Following Eysenck and Eysenck (1985) he adopts a "three-dimensional space [.....] bounded by the axes of introversion-extraversion (E), neuroticism (N), and psychoticism (P)" (p278), and explicitly proposes that "individual differences in personality reflect in the main differences in emotional responses" (p279). He then identifies three separate subsystems for the control of emotional behaviour. These are (1) an "Approach System" sensitive to a range of "appetitive stimuli" such as food and water, (2) a "Fight/Flight System" sensitive to both pain and the removal of reward, and of responding with either aggressive of escape behaviour, and (3) a "Behavioural Inhibition System" controlling the direction of behaviour and probably also the subjective experience of anxiety [indeed, "the type of anxiety that is sensitive to the anti-anxiety drugs is most simply understood as indicating excessive activity in the behavioural inhibition system" (p300)].

1991 [See firstly 1984 (The Terminator)] James Cameron's follow-up movie "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" [Wikipedia full plot] is released. This time the baddie is a T-1000 cyborg [Robert Patrick], and the original T-800 [Arnold Schwarzenegger] is cast to protect humans against it. The closing scene has the increasingly sympathetic T-800 sacrificing its own existence for the benefit of human others [You Tube video clip]. [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1991 The classicist Dennis D. Hughes publishes "Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece", in which he explores the variety of classical sacrifice rituals. The one which presently interests us is an annual Spring ritual known as "the expulsion of the pharmakos. This ritual involved the casting out, scourging, and even murder, of one or two scapegoats - pharmakoi - from a community once a year in order to keep bad luck at bay, cleanse the polis "from all defilements" (p140), and prevent epidemic [whence the modern word "pharmacy"]. After reviewing many fragmentary and contradictory accounts of the practice, Hughes concludes that it was the act of expulsion which was essential to the perceived efficacy of the ritual, not the shedding of blood.

1991 Together with a group of like-minded enthusiasts, Tony Sale [see 1949] begins a campaign to save the Bletchley Park estate - the hub of Britain's WW2 code-breaking effort - from commercial redevelopment. [See next 2007] [THREAD = HISTORY OF COMPUTING]

1991 The American computer graphics engineers Tom deFanti [Wikipedia biography] and Daniel J. Sandin [Wikipedia biography], of the Electronic Visualisation Laboratory at the University of Illinois in Chicago, develop CAVE [= CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment]. CAVE is a combination projection and audience observation room [history and image], and will be heavily used in the "Presence Project" [see 2005].

1991 The American researchers Lee X. Blonder [University of Kentucky homepage], Dawn Bowers [University of Florida homepage], and Kenneth M. Heilman [Wikipedia biography] publish a paper entitled "The Role of the Right Hemisphere in Emotional Communication", in which they compare the ability of patients with left- or right-lateralised brain damage to judge the emotional content of sentences. They report as follows .....

"RHD [= right-hemisphere damage] patients with documented impairments in the perception of facial expression and prosody were also unable to discern the meaning of facial, prosodic, and gestural expressions of emotion when these displays were described using verbal language. [.....] These findings support two competing interpretations regarding the role of the RH in emotional communication. First, there may be two independent systems that are impaired following RHD: one system which is important in decoding the complex auditory and visual patterns present in nonverbal emotional expressions, and another which associates nonverbal behaviour with emotions. A second and more parsimonious hypothesis is that a hierarchical system mediates the comprehension of nonverbal communicative stimuli" (p1124).

1991 The American academic Donna Haraway [Wikipedia biography] publishes an essay entitled "A Cyborg Manifesto", in which she adopts the role of a cyborg in order to obtain a detached commentary on the world and its nasty oppressive ways, and thereby escape them more effectively. Here is how she justifies the explanatory potential of the cyborg metaphor .....

"[In our time], a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics" (Haraway, 1991 online, e3). [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

1992 The Slovakian photographer Tono Stano [Wikipedia biography] exhibits an iconic black and white photograph entitled "Sense" [image] which makes him instantly famous.

1992 The American psychologist David McNeill [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Hand and Mind", in which he reviews the use of gesture as an adjunct to verbal communication. He recognises David Efron's system of gesture classification [see 1941] as historically significant, and notes two later variant systems other than his own. All four systems distinguish between literal gestures (both pictorial and pantomimic), metaphoric gestures, deictic [= pointing] gestures, and emphatic gestures (known variously as "beats", "batons", "rhythmics", etc.). [THREAD = NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION]

1992 Semir Zeki [see 1978] now publishes a paper entitled "The Visual Image in Mind and Brain", in which he reviews what has so far been established about the structure and function of Area V1, the primary visual cortex, compared to areas close by. His own research identifies an Area V5 where the tissue is responsive to directional movement, an Area V4 responsive to aspects of colour and form, and Areas V3 and V3A responsive to form regardless of colour. His conclusion is as follows .....

"These facts allow us to delineate four parallel systems concerned with different attributes of vision - one for motion, one for colour, and two for form. The two that are computationally most distinct from each other are the motion and colour systems" (p47). [THREAD = MECHANISMS OF VISUAL PERCEPTION]

1992 British installation artists Jake and Dinos Chapman [visit their webshite (sic)] begin a career together specialising in various forms of shock art, including Nazism, nudity, sex, and death. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1992 The German academic Elisabeth Bronfen [Wikipedia biography (German)] publishes the difficult but at all times fascinating "Over Her Dead Body" [buy], in which she explores "the conjunction of death, art, and femininity" hoping to explain (amongst other things) why there are so many "representations of beautiful dead women" in 19th century art. [THREAD =PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ART]

1992 The American online media consultant Jonathan Steuer [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "Defining Virtual Realities", in which he proposes that the defining experience provided by a virtual reality system has to be a "sense of presence". [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

1992 Floyd Ratliff [see 1950] rounds off a long and successful academic career by publishing "Paul Signac and Colour in Neo-Impressionism" [buy], in which he explores how Pointillism [see 1885 (Signac)] successfully exploits the visual system's ability to turn a cleverly prepared surface of coloured points of light into a phenomenally integrated scene perception. [THREAD = PATTERN RECOGNITION MECHANISMS (VISUAL)]

1992 The American artist Chico MacMurtrie [Wikipedia biography] founds a company called Amorphic Robot Works to promote collaborations between artists and engineers. Indicative credits include "Inner Space" (2010) [image] and "Inflatable Architectural Growth" (2007) [image]. [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

1992 Helen Chadwick [see 1984 above] adds "Piss Flowers" [image], an installation of mushroom-like plaster casts, each a negative image of a urination melthole in snow, to her achievements.

1993 Gordon Pask follows up his 1976 Conversation Theory with "Interactions of Actors Theory", an interpretation of human social behaviour as a continuous conversational exchange between people playing parts.

1993 The American neuroscientist Mark Beeman [Northwestern University homepage] publishes a paper entitled "Semantic Processing in the Right Hemisphere May Contribute to Drawing Inferences from Discourse", in which he explores the role played by the human right hemisphere in drawing inferences from multi-episode stories. He has measured the "coherence inference" abilities of a group of eight patients with right-hemisphere stroke, and has compared this with the performance of eight matched normal elderly people.

KEY CONCEPT - COHERENCE INFERENCE: Coherence inference is the process of filling in the gaps in an incomplete narrative with judgements of your own based on contextual cues and your own general knowledge of the world. Beeman gives the following two sentence narrative as an example: "Sally approached the movie star with pen and paper in hand. She was writing an article about famous people's views on nuclear power" (p84). When normal comprehenders hear these linked sentences they make them cohere by inferring that Sally is engaged in interviewing the movie star for her article. RHD patients, on the other hand, might conclude that Sally was seeking the movie star's autograph.

He reports as follows .....

"Patients with damage to the RH were less able to draw coherence inferences than normal elderly subjects. [..... They] were much better at remembering information explicitly mentioned in the text" (p105).

As to why this should be the case, Beeman suggests that RH semantic coding is "coarser" [the term "fuzzy" is also often seen in this context - Ed.] than that carried out in the LH, and therefore activates more diffuse representational fields, which are in turn more likely to physically overlap and thereby inform each other. [THREAD = ART AND THE RIGHT HEMISPHERE]

1993 The Polish-born British psychotherapist Hanna Segal [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Dream, Phantasy, and Art" [buy], in which she applies Kleinian theory [see 1926/1929] to the act of symbol formation in schizophrenia and other psychoses. [Compare 1930 (Adrian Stokes)]

1993 [See firstly 1936 (Morton Bartlett)] Marion Harris, a New York art dealer, chances upon Morton Bartlett's collection of 15 child-dolls, three male and 12 female, aged from around 8 years to adolescence. These "exquisitely realistic" artefacts are accompanied by "stacks" of meticulously posed photographs [see examples]. Deeply intrigued she purchases the collection and begins to research their history, publishing her findings in 1994 in "Family Found: The Lifetime Obsession of Self-Taught Artist, Morton Bartlett" [buy]. For an introduction to this intriguing story see Johnson (2007 online). [THREADS = DISTURBING ART; THE UNCANNY]

1993 New York's Whitney Museum gives the name "Abject Art" to depictions of human bodily fluids and visceral processes.

1994 The American kinetic sculptor Jon Kessler [website] presents "The Last Birdrunner" [image], "a stuffed bird outfitted in a parachute pack and perched on a ledge that slowly travels up and down while a motor-driven apparatus plays out a haunting dirge on a toy piano" (Wikipedia).

1994 Marcellí Antunez Roca [see 1984] now presents "Epizoo", a mechatronic performance in which the audience is allowed to control not just his position in space but his subsequent experience of it, including pleasure and pain [see video].

1994 Lennie Lee [see 1990] now sets up the Rich and Famous Gallery to promote the work of like-minded progressive artists. Dutt (1994 online) reassures us that Lee may not be as mad as he appears because his production-lined "factory paintings" ["some take five minutes, some three hours"] sell well at the bottom end of the market. He will retain his interest in taboo subjects, however, in the belief that "blood, shit, and vomit remind people of their own mortality". [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

1994 The Australian philologist Michael O'Toole publishes "The Language of Displayed Art", in which he "explores the 'grammar' of the visual arts" (Amazon sales blurb). In so doing, he identifies three simultaneous levels of meaning, namely (1) "Representational Meaning", the conventional meaning of the objects and events being represented, (2), "Modal Meaning", how a work engages with us, and (3) "Compositional Meaning", meaning which derives from the way an artwork is composed.

1994 The American performance artist Ron Athey [Wikipedia biography] stages "Four Scenes in a Harsh Life", including the following scene which many viewers found disturbing .....

"The scene at the centre of the storm is performed calmly and without words. In it Mr. Athey, a 32-year old HIV positive gay man who practises sadomasochistic ritual as a personal religion, carves patterns into the back of another performer, [name], with the preoccupied serenity of a pharmacist filling a prescription" (Brantley, 1994 online).

Over the coming years Athey will build successfully upon this early publicity with performances such as "Deliverance" (1996) and "The Solar Anus". [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1994 The anthropologist Pascal Boyer publishes "The Naturalness of Religious Ideas" in which he identifies five classes of cognitive content of primary importance to the evolving hominid mind. These are persons, animals, plants, artefacts, and inanimate objects.

1995 In a paper entitled "The Puzzle of Conscious Experience", the philosopher David Chalmers articulates "the Hard Problem" of Consciousness, namely that of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience.

1995 The Mexican social-activist-in-art Teresa Margolles [external biography] exhibits "Dermis", an installation based on bloodstained hospital linen. The blood in questions comes from drug crime victims, often no more than children, from Mexico City's violent underclass. In 1999 she will follow this with "Entiero" [= burial], a concrete coffin containing a dead child's body, and in 2006 she will add "Untitled", a floor-mounted hotplate onto which is dripped the corpse washing water from the morgue where victims are end up, thus inviting the public to breath in intimate physical traces of the crime, the better to reflect upon it. [See next 2009] [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1996 The Italian performance artist Franko B [Wikipedia biography] stages his first major performance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. This ushers in a period of "blood art" artworks including "Oh Lover Boy" (2001) [image]. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1996 The British psychologist Guy Claxton [academic homepage] publishes a paper entitled "Structure, Strategy, and Self in the Fabrication of Experience", in which he illustrates the sort of processing which is involved in "the fabrication of experience" and remarks upon "the role in that process of the 'self system'" (p101). He begins with the following anecdote .....

"We might imagine [.....] an event I took part in the other day - a surprise birthday party in which Pete, the 'Birthday Boy', was blindfolded and carried silently into a room that had been prepared as a 'pleasure dome', with a giant bed covered with a silk awning [.....] and ringed with flowers - and with all Pete's female friends dressed voluptuously as his concubines and equipped with large makeshift fans. We laid him on the bed and took the blindfold off. His 'double-take', followed by the gales of laughter, attested well to the way in which perception is retarded when deprived of the contextual cues that allow the unfolding of conscious experience to be anticipated" (p99).

Claxton next adopts David Marr's theory of perceptual stages [see 1982], only to extend it beyond the immediate scene by adding in a final stage, that of the "4D Sketch". He introduces this as follows .....

"[As Pete's] eyes open, neural activity in the retina is relayed along the ascending visual pathways, through the lateral geniculate nucleus (the LGN), to the primary visual cortex, and on to the visual association areas, being transformed by the network at each stage. Recognisable features are extracted, and combined into what Marr (1982) famously called the 'two-and-a-half D sketch'. [.....] In addition, as more features of the input are isolated, and the sketch becomes more elaborate, even though the scene as a whole has not yet been definitively parsed, nor any element of it labelled, whole areas of a priori possibilities are being excluded [..... so that] the network can use its vast store of knowledge progressively to narrow the range of options that is being actively entertained. The involvement of the 'top-down' tipping of the scales towards what is increasingly plausible reduces the amount of 'bottom-up' processing that has to be done, and cuts the time before an acceptable, meaningful but preliminary '4D' sketch of 'What's out there' and 'What's going on' is extracted" (p100). [THREAD = MECHANISMS OF VISUAL PERCEPTION]

RESEARCH ISSUE - DRAMATIC ANALYSIS: Claxton's notion of the 4D sketch as a perceptual stage responsible for repeatedly guessing "What's going on" in the outside world strays into the same area of cognition as do theories of performance in general [e.g., 1980 (Elam)] and of second order cognition in particular [e.g., 1978 (Premack and Woodruff)]. All rest on the ability of the mind to construct an explanatory narrative out of a sequence of constituent images, and all more or less explicitly consider the resulting narrative as a sequence of component propositions. [CAUTION: There is no simple one-to-one relationship between the images and the propositions!] The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] dedicates an entire processing module to the function of "dramatic analysis", and another to "propositional analysis". See Smith (2010) for a published example of these modules cooperating in making sense of the world, or simply replay the conference PowerPoint.

1996 The American physicist-philosopher Arthur I. Miller [academic homepage] publishes "Insights of Genius", in which he examines the role played by imagery in scientific creation. To see, as he puts it, is to understand, whether in art or science.

1996 Jerrold Levinson [see 1979] now publishes a paper entitled "Intention and Interpretation in Literature", in which he adds his voice to the Intentionalist Debate [see 1982 (Beardsley)]. As with the Beardsley paper, Levinson finds value in Speech Act Theory. His problem is that the meaning of a creative piece is many-layered, from the superficially obvious to the unpredictably deep and idiosyncratic. He calls the deepest layer of meaning "ludic meaning", and defines it as follows .....

"Ludic meaning, finally, comprises any meanings that can be attributed to either a brute text (a word-sequence-in-a-language) or a text-as-utterance, by virtue of interpretive play constrained by only the loosest requirements of plausibility, intelligibility, or interest" (p200).

1996 In a paper entitled "Psychology and Mime", the psychologist Kieron O'Connor reviews different explanations of the mime illusion.

1996 The British painter-theorist Stephen J. Newton [homepage] publishes "The Politics and Psychoanalysis of Primitivism", in which he argues (a) that "the primitive impulse" is nothing short of vital to the creative process, and (b) that psychodynamic theory is the best placed of all the schools of psychology to understand Primitivism. [THREAD = THE UNCONSCIOUS IN ART]

1996 The Museum Tinguely is established in Basel [website], to celebrate the work of Jean Tinguely as pioneer of Kinetic Art.

1996 The American historian Jonathan Petropoulos [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Art as Politics in the Third Reich", in which he traces the Nazi Party's cynical use of art in furthering its political aims. [THREAD = ART, WARFARE, AND PROPAGANDA]

1997 The British sociologist David Gauntlett releases "Video Critical", in which children were enabled to learn more about societal issues, and ultimately themselves, by creating videos on an issue.

1997 The Department of Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University hosts an "Interdisciplinary Workshop on Robotics, Biology, and Psychology" [event archive]. The roboticist John C.T. Hallam [no convenient biography] delivers the opening address and begins by admitting that the basic problem in robotics is that roboticists do not really know what they are doing. There is a major gap between their dreams of an autonomous, reliable, and versatile robot, and the reality of a needing-to-be-supervised, unreliable, and invariably special-purpose robot. The fault lies, he suspects, in the fact that no "general theory" of robotics exists, merely an accumulation of best practice. Robots are "built empirically", he says, like the cathedrals of old: when they fail, a bit of additional strengthening is put in to stop the same thing happening again! There is no prior calculation, nor guarantee of success. The morning session then gets under way with a paper by Iain M.L. Donaldson [Edinburgh University biography], whose main point is that if we want to understand cognition in general we need to study organisms in motion, not least because the main processing load during motion is information feedback, not perceptual input per se. After this Tony Prescott [Sheffield University homepage] talks on the insights available to robotic designers from the study of biological evolution. He emphasises that the problem of motion seems to have been the first to have been solved, enabling as it does predation, avoidance, and foraging competitively for resources. During the lunch break, the present author [homepage] exhibits a poster entitled "Codasyl traversals in animals and animats", in which he notes many promising similarities between the navigation of CA-IDMS industrial semantic network databases and the navigation of biological conceptual memory. The afternoon session begins with a paper by Oxford University's David McFarland [Wikipedia biography] concerning the relationship between "motivational autonomy" (MA) and "energy autonomy" (EA).

KEY CONCEPT - MOTIVATIONAL AUTONOMY: Motivational autonomy is the ability of an organism to direct its own behaviour rather than be reactive to external factors. A system with low MA will display the sort of "automatism" seen in small metazoan organisms or mechanical toys, whereas a system with high MA will display the sort of internal control seen in higher vertebrates or guided missiles.

KEY CONCEPT - ENERGY AUTONOMY: Energy autonomy is the ability of an organism to provide its own energy. A low EA is characteristic of parasitic organisms and mechanical toys. A high EA shows relative independence, as seen in plants and solar panels.

Systems which want to combine high MA with high EA need to be more cognitively and structurally complex than those which do not. Thus a deep-space probe cannot afford to wait for its command decisions to be made back on Earth, due to the telecommunications delay which that would involve; just as it cannot afford to take all its fuel and supplies along with it if there is any alternative. [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS MECHANISM]

1997 The American robotic artist Christian Ristow [commercial homepage] founds RoboChrist Industries [detail] to promote robotic performance around Los Angeles. [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

1997 The American philosopher Robert Stecker [academic homepage] publishes a paper entitled "The Constructivist's Dilemma", in which he discusses problems with the view "that artworks are constructed not merely by the artists, but also by other people who interpret these objects" (p223). What he describes as "moderate constructivism" holds that our interpretation of a work is coloured by the body of prior interpretations already on record. He sees some - but not universal - value in this position.

1997 The Canadian academic Susan Bennett [departmental homepage] publishes "Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception", in which she examines the "centrality of the spectator's role" in effective theatre. She sees two basic "frames" of influence at work here, one "outer" and one "inner". The outer frame treats theatre as a "cultural construct", whilst the inner looks at the more immediate production strategies and performance parameters. [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1997 The American performance theorist Bryan Reynolds [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "The Devil's House", in which he sets out his Theory of Transversal Poetics. This theory derives from the fundamental proposition that all "iconic subjects" possess a greater or lesser "affective presence", and that the resulting "articulatory space" can only effectively be explored by paying meticulous attention to where you presently stand within it. We must be particularly on our guard against "dominating authorities", that is to say, against past constraining analyses and conventional wisdoms. Instead we must be "fugitive explorers" and remain constantly aware that there is no inherent, absolute, or unmediated meaning to any text.

1997 The Royal Academy of Art in London stages a shock art exhibition of 110 pieces from the Charles Saatchi collection of Young British Artists. The show is entitled "Sensation" and comes complete with the official disclaimer that some visitors might find some of the works "distasteful". Several of the works went down particularly badly, not least "Myra", a straightforward enough portrait of the child murderess Myra Hindley until it is noted that it has been pixelated out of thousands of miniature child hand prints!

1998 The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, organises a major touring exhibition entitled "Out of Actions" to celebrate a half century of "the relationship between visual and performance art in the postwar era".

1998 [Readers unfamiliar with Freudian theory will probably benefit by pre-reading the definitions of "defense mechanisms" here, and "Freudian Theory" here, noting especially the term "libido".] The Swiss researcher Stéphane Zrehen [no convenient biography] presents a paper entitled "Psychoanalytic Concepts for the Control of Emotions in Robots" [full text online], in which he considers the minimum set of Freudian components which would be necessary to construct a "believable pet robot". He includes (a) a pleasure principle, directing behaviour towards positive goals and away from negative ones, (b) a reality principle, in order to aid problem solving in the real world, and (c) an Ego, whose job it is to "find compromises between the pleasure principle and the reality principle" (e2). He also allows for "displacement" (pointing out that in the final analysis this is no more than the representation of an event by different symbols at different times) and "psychical energy" of some sort. He then considers how a robotic design might simulate the many months of trial-and-error learning which can characterise infant human development. The main elements in a cognitive system capable of "learning to wait in the face of an important need such as hunger" (e5) are then listed as follows .....

H - A homeostatic state, such as blood sugar level

D - A physiological drive, such as hunger, evolved to manage H

PS - The present external sensory state

ES - The expected external sensory state

PE - The present emotional state, typically pain or pleasure

EE - The expected emotional state

A - The actions available to the organism

[See the online text for the explanatory diagram]

Using this architectural framework, Zrehen models the ego as follows .....

"The ego is modelled as a group of neurons with a priori connections to and from D, ES, PE, EE, and A. It receives information about sensory-motor event sequences, and outputs predictions about sensory states." [THREADS = ANIMATED MECHANISM and AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

1998 R. Gordon Wasson [see 1967] is now lead author on the production text of "Persephone's Quest", an interdisciplinary drawing together of the themes introduced in his earlier works. [See next 2007] [THREADS = ART, RITUAL, AND BELIEF]

1998 The British performance artist Kira O'Reilly [Wikipedia biography] sets out on a career in challenging performance art. Her practice often includes cutting herself because she is concerned with demonstrating that "the permeable boundaries of the skin membrane defy it as an impenetrable container of a coherent or fixed 'self'" (homepage, 12th June 2011). [See next 2006] [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

1998 The Director of Research at Sotheby's Institute of Art [commercial homepage], Tony Godfrey, publishes ***** "Conceptual Art" ***** [buy], an historically grounded investigation of the relationship between ideas and artistic media. His first point is fundamental .....

"Because the work does not take a traditional form it demands a more active response from the viewer, indeed it could be argued that the Conceptual work of art only truly exists in the viewer's mental participation" (p4; emphasis added).

This in turn dramatically affects the propositionality underlying the artwork. For example, with Duchamp's readymade urinal [see 1917] .....

"A work of art normally behaves as if it is a statement: 'This is a sculpture of [X] by [Y]'. We accept it both as a representation and as being ipso facto art. In contrast the readymade is presented not as a statement, 'This is a urinal', but as a question or challenge: 'Could this urinal be an artwork?'" (p6).

Godfrey then identifies four categories of Conceptual Art, as follows .....

(1) The Readymade: This category of Conceptual Art relies on "an object from the outside world which is claimed or proposed as art" (p7).

(2) The Intervention: In this category "some image, text, or thing is placed in an unexpected context, thus drawing attention to that context" (Ibid.).

(3) Documentation: In this category "the actual work, concept, or action can only be presented by the evidence of notes, maps, charts, or, most frequently, photographs" (Ibid.).

(4) Words: In this category "the concept, proposition, or investigation is presented in the form of language" (Ibid.).

1998 Richard Wollheim [see 1965] now publishes a paper entitled ***** "On Pictorial Representation" *****, in which he laments the abundance of confused theories of representation, many of which fail to address the minimal requirements of a scientific theory. He insists that theories of representation must address a picture's "appropriate experience" (p396), by which he means those elements of the visual experience occasioned by that picture which determines its ability to represent anything. The key to having such an appropriate experience is to have a spectator who is "suitably sensitive, suitably informed, and, if necessary, suitably prompted" (p396). But if aesthetic experience often needs to be led by the nose in this way, it makes pictorial representation difficult to fit into the strict image-meaning pairings insisted on by semioticians. Thus .....

"..... on any Semiotic theory, the grasp of representational meaning is fundamentally an interpretative, not a perceptual, activity. In consequence no appropriate experience is postulated, and it is thus that the Semiotic theory fails the minimal requirement" (p397).

In attempting to reconcile interpretation and perception Wollheim then brings intentionality into the analysis, because knowing the "psychological factors in the artist which cause him to work as he does" (p404) is part of being suitably informed. He invites his readers to engage in the following thought experiment, in order to focus their minds on exactly what pictorial representation involves and how it can be led by prompting .....

"If we now ask 'How is this so?' we are asking for a general account of what it is for something to be visible in a surface. Consider the following experiment: I look at a picture that includes a classical landscape with ruins. And now imagine the following dialogue: 'Can you see the columns?' 'Yes.' 'Can you see the columns as coming from a temple?' 'Yes.' 'Can you see the columns that come from the temple as having been thrown down?' 'Yes.' 'Can you see them as having been thrown down some hundreds of years ago?' 'Yes.' 'Can you see them as having been thrown down some hundreds of years ago by barbarians?' 'Yes.' 'Can you see them as having been thrown down some hundreds of years ago by barbarians wearing the skins of wild asses?' (Pause.) 'No.' At each exchange, what 'Yes' means is that the prompt has made a difference to what has been seen in the scene, just as the 'No' signifies that, for at least this spectator here and now, the limits of visibility in this surface have been reached. [.....] It is the permeability of seeing-in to thought that accounts for the wide range of things that can be represented and for the wide range of properties they can be represented as having" (pp402-403; bold emphasis added).

Things get even more complicated when scenes include figures with whom the viewer can identify. Consider .....

"I too find a place for imagination in my account of representational meaning, but it [.....] is relevant only to certain paintings. These are paintings in which the suitable spectator is offered a distinctive form of access through the presence in the represented space [.....] of a figure, whom I call the Spectator in the Picture. [.....] What then happens is that the suitable spectator, the suitable external spectator we might say, starts to identify with the internal spectator: that is, to imagine him, the internal spectator, centrally, or from the inside, interacting with the represented scene [.....]. The net result will be that the external spectator will find himself in a residual state analogous to that of the internal spectator, and this state will in turn influence what he sees in the picture when he reverts from imagination to perception" (pp403-404; bold emphasis added).

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: We reproduce opposite one of the most famous Spectator in the Picture paintings, namely Caspar David Friedrich's "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" [see 1818]. The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] is presently [July 2011] investigating (a) how this picture generates the sort of second- and third-order representations discussed by Daniel Dennett [see 1978 (Theory of Mind)], and (b) how these representations can be encoded as a string of simpler propositions within a computer system.

1998 WOLLHEIM RESEARCH ISSUE - THE SPECTATOR IN THE PICTURE: By drawing attention to the problems of higher-order representation in framing both the artist's intention-to-depict and the viewer's ability-to-interpret, Wollheim is pushing cognitive theory to its very limit. The best cognitive science has to offer, we submit, is Speech Act Theory [see 1962 (Austin)] as a theory of intention, Perceptual Stages Theory [see 540BCE (Perceptual Stages)] as a theory of pattern recognition and early interpretation, and Theory of Mind [see 1978 (Premack and Woodruff)] as a theory of advanced interpretation. Performance Theory [see 1980 (Elam)] does it best to integrate the parts into a coherent whole, but is doomed to struggle because cognitive science is simply too big and far too interdisciplinary. If you study visual perception, for example, you rapidly grow out of touch with your colleagues studying auditory perception. Similarly if you set out to study pragmatics in the clinic you will only be tangentially aware of those studying pragmatics in the media or the workplace. The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] was designed from the outset with Speech Act Theory in mind, and Smith (2005) provides a convenient animated PowerPoint to show how speech acts are progressively fleshed out into the relatively fluent stream of articulated sounds that we know as "speech" [link to PowerPoint].

1999 The British artists Billy Childish [Stephen Hamper] and Charles Thompson found the "Stuckist" movement. Their "Stuckist Manifesto" appeals for modernity without the superficiality of Postmodernism and Conceptual Art, and free from cynical commercialism of the established gallery world. They protest regularly against the Turner Prize.

1999 The British performance theorist Susan Broadhurst [Brunel University homepage] publishes "Liminal Acts", in which she argues that traditional and contemporary theories of performance are ultimately deficient in interpreting liminal [see 1909 (Van Gennep)] performance. [See next 2001] [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

1999 The British academic Mel Slater [academic homepage] begins to publish on the topic of "presence" in human-computer interaction. [See next 2005 (Presence Project)]

1999 The British artist Tracey Emin submits "The Bed" for this year's Turner Prize.

1999 The Hungarian-born Canadian performance artist Istvan Kantor [Wikipedia biography] stages "Executive Machinery Intercourse", a performance in which items of office equipment like filing cabinets engage in mechanical interaction with humans. [THREADS = DISTURBING ART and ANIMISM]

1999 To round the 20th century off in good style, Luc Steels [academic homepage] and Frédéric Kaplan [academic homepage] exhibit "The Talking Heads" [video] at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris. The performance involves two equally capable "visually grounded" robots observing and then "talking" about their surroundings. The critical design requirement here is that the robots should develop a "shared lexicon", and this is enabled by their control software progressively eliminating synonymy and ambiguity of reference. [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

**************** 21ST CENTURY ****************

2000 Stelarc [see 1976] now exhibits an "inverse motion capture system" entitled "Movatar" [gallery and technical specifications from the artist's website]. This system allows the movements of an on-screen avatar [see 1991 (Jeremiah)] to be transmitted downline to a physical mechatronic apparatus. Since the avatar can itself be controlled by whoever has been given access to it, this arrangement therefore gives that person control over the movement of the artist's body. [See next 2002] [THREADS = ANIMATED MECHANISM and AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

2000 Gerald Edelmann's Neurosciences Institute [see 1981] starts work on the latest Darwin robot - Darwin VI going on VII. One member of the research team - Jeffrey L. Krichmar explains progress thus .....

"NOMAD starts with a naive brain and learns from its own experience. It has an inborn preference for light and a predisposition for a certain taste, but no other experience or programming. It is connected to a realistic model of a brain that is simulated on a network of powerful computers" ("Telecommunications", 30th November 2000, p8C).

Amongst the problems now being addressed is how to run several "sense-perceive-act" cycles simultaneously to give the system dividable attention and the facility for "multi-tasking". [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

2000 After 20 years involvement with technologically inspired art, the American artist-academic Stephen Wilson [San Francisco Chronicle obituary] delivers a paper entitled "Myths and Confusions in Thinking about Art/Science/Technology" [full text online], in which he laments the tendency to dismiss the possibility of "genuine innovation or insight" in this sector. The most interesting developments, he suspects, will only come "when science and technology begin to be seen as the cultural activities they really are" (e5). [See next 2002] [THREAD = TECHNOLOGY AND ART]

2000 Alan Baddeley [see 1974] now updates the earlier Working Memory Theory with a paper entitled "The Episodic Buffer". He is especially concerned that memory theory should better account for the relationship between working memory and long-term memory, and more precisely state the role of the Central Executive in managing same. He therefore proposes a new memory component - the "episodic buffer" - to allow for this. See Companion Resource for fuller details. [THREAD = MEMORY THEORY]

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] uses its Medium-Term Event entity type to set up temporary episodic memory records during the execution of a cognitive task, and then arranges for these to be consolidated into appropriately interlinked Long-Term Memory records as appropriate.

2000 The University of Western Australia (UWA) establishes its SymbioticA research laboratory, to enable "enabling artists and researchers to engage in wet biology practices in a biological science department" [website]. Their best-known project is MEART [= Multi-Electrode Array Art], "a geographically detached bio-cybernetic research and development project exploring aspects of creativity and artistry in the age of broadband interconnectivity. Much of the development work gets to be carried out collaboratively at the Potter Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA. It follows that MEART's "brain" is automatically separated from its "body"; indeed that there is no single "body" at all, but rather a collection of effector subsystems communicating electronically with the thinking hub. As profiled by the UWA website, the system has "a technologically created identity", a "brain" located in Steve Potter's laboratory in Atlanta, and a "multi-body" anywhere on Earth which can connect an effector system (an on-screen avatar or physical robot or robotic system) to the brain.

2000 The Chinese performance artist Yang Zhichao [Wikipedia biography] contributes "Planting Grass" to Shanghai's Eastlink Gallery's "Fuck Off" exhibition [detail]. The grass in question was picked live from the banks of the Suzhou River, and then surgically implanted without anaesthetic into the flesh of his shoulder [image]. The exhibition also includes Zhu Yu performing "Eating People", during which he apparently ate a human foetus. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

2000 The American techno-artist Ken Rinaldo exhibits "Autopoiesis", a robotic installation commissioned by the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki. It is in fact a collection of 15 separate robots connected over a communication network, and designed to evolve a group response to external disturbance [more].

2000 The American art critic Donald Kuspit publishes "Psychostrategies of Avant-Garde Art", in which he sets out an innovative psychoanalytic interpretation of that genre. Amongst his key suggestions are the central role of anxiety. If things are new - modernist art, for example - then they will invoke anxiety as well as offering some opportunity to reject or reshape the whatever is conventional at the time. To understand any form of avant-garde art, therefore, we have firstly to understand psychodynamics. Thus of Manet's Olympia he writes "Manet's woman castrates man in the act of servicing him" (p17).

2001 [See firstly 1907 (Ferrari)] The British cognitive neuropsychologist John E. Harrison [no convenient biography ] publishes "Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing", in which he explains how modern neuroscience is helping to unravel the complexities of synaesthesia. He cites the case of painter-synaesthete Elizabeth Stewart-Jones, who sees colours when she hears spoken words and letters. [THREAD = SYNAESTHESIA]

2001 Martin Creed's "The Lights Going On and Off", an installation in which the lights go on and off, wins the Turner Prize.

2001 The British researchers Hadyn D. Ellis [Cardiff University obituary] and Michael B. Lewis [Cardiff University homepage] publish a paper entitled ***** "Capgras Delusion: A Window on Face Recognition" ***** [full text online], in which they discuss how specific cognitive neuropsychological models of modular cognition - not least that by Bruce and Young (1986) [q.v.] - might throw theoretical light on the condition and its possible treatment. [THREAD = FACE PERCEPTION]

2001 Peter Brugger [see 1994] now publishes a paper entitled "From Haunted Brain to Haunted Science", in which he carries the flag for cutting-edge cognitive science in a volume targetted at believers and non-believers alike. [See next 2002] [THREAD = AUTOSCOPIC PHENOMENA]

2001 [See firstly 1907 (Ferrari)] The American artist-synaesthete Carol Steen [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "Visions Shared", in which she shares her personal experience of seeing colours when viewing letters or numbers, and listening to music. [THREAD = SYNAESTHESIA]

2001 The German neuropsychologist Georg Kerkhoff [Ludwig Maximilien University homepage] publishes a paper entitled "Spatial Hemineglect in Humans", in which, having reviewed the literature, he concludes as follows .....

"To summarise, the hemianopic patient without neglect has a largely intact abstract spatial representation of both hemispaces (left, right), including his own body, while the neglect patient without hemianopia may have an intact peripheral visual system apparently sufficient to perceive his environment and own body but fails because this sensory information is compromised at a higher level of space representation" (pp9-10). [THREAD = SPATIAL HEMINEGLECT]

2001 The Canadian researchers Allison B. Sekuler [McMaster University homepage] and Richard F. Murray [York University homepage] publish a paper entitled "Amodal Completion", in which they examine the role played by the process of amodal completion [see 1962 (Michotte et al)] in the perception of partly occluded [= behind something else] objects. They begin by noting how "amazingly robust" the process of object perception actually is, thanks to the efficiency of the visual system at turning retinal confusion into mental order. There is, however, a discernible time penalty to this processing, thus .....

"Partly occluded objects have a long microgenetic time course relative to unoccluded objects. In other words, the visual system takes a relatively long time to arrive at a final visual representation" (p266).

The authors then review some of the variables at work during this process, noting that time-to-completion depends on context and complexity, and summarising their conclusions as follows .....

"Research over the past few decades has provided convincing objective evidence that the visual system does in fact treat partly occluded objects as though they are complete" (p289). [THREAD = THE VISUAL SYSTEM]

2001 Susan Broadhurst [see 1999] directs the first performance of Elodie Berland in Phil Stanier's "Blue Bloodshot Flowers", a dance interpretation of a voiced-over text, followed by an unscripted audience interaction, all conducted under the all-seeing electronic eye of Brunel University's Jeremiah giant avatar system [see 1991]. She will report on this experience in detail in a 2004 paper entitled "The Jeremiah Project", in which she has this to say concerning the performance itself .....

"[The piece] was written by Phil Stanier (2001) and invokes the remembrance of a love affair. There is some ambiguity regarding whether the affair is between two adults or an adult and a child, or if the narrator is dead" (Broadhurst, 2004, p48).

This on the embedded technology .....

"Jeremiah is a computer-generated animated head [technical detail]. He (It) has a simple bone structure that allows him to express himself and emotions such as anger, sadness, or happiness [.....] During the performance a video camera fitted with a wide-angle lens was used to capture movement, which was relayed to Jeremiah's 'emotion' engine. [.....] Jeremiah's emotion engine determines the current state of his apparent emotions from simple parameters extracted from objects of interest within his visual field. [.....] For instance, Jeremiah like visual stimulus: high rates of movement make him 'happy'. He likes company: a lack of stimulus makes him 'sad'. He does not like to be startled: high rates of change in the size of objects surprise him [etc.]. [.....] Therefore the performance is a direct and real-time interaction between performer, audience, and avatar (technology)" (p50).

And this on the nature of the resulting audience interaction .....

"Most people, when they first see Jeremiah, find him 'spooky'. Then, after the initial contact leads to a degree of familiarity, people tend to treat him as they would a small child or a family pet. They usually try to make him smile and generally to please him. For instance, his face demonstrates sadness when he is left alone, so much so that many people find it difficult to walk away" (p51). [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE (HYBRID)]

2001 The Canadian researchers Cristina M. Atance [University of Ottawa homepage] and Daniela K. O'Neill [University of Waterloo homepage] publish a paper entitled "Episodic Future Thinking", in which they promote that term as a way of describing some at least of the IF-THEN planning activity carried out in the frontal lobes. [THREAD = COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY (NARRATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS)]

2001 [See firstly 1907 (Ferrari)] The American academic and synaesthete Patricia L. Duffy [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens", in which she describes how "personally coded" sensory input can create aesthetically fascinating anomalies of the sort referred to in the title of her book. [See next 2001 (Harrison)] [THREAD = SYNAESTHESIA]

2001 The British cognitive neuroscientist Patrick Haggard [Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience homepage] publishes a paper entitled ***** "The Psychology of Action" *****, in which he summarises a century of progress in motor theory and identifies the following theoretical issues .....

"Actions are what our minds do to our bodies. There are several reasons why action is and should be a central topic in scientific psychology. First, psychology is often seen as the study of behaviour, and all behaviour involves some kind of bodily movement. Secondly, action requires considerable information-processing (albeit often unconscious), as attempts to build intelligent robots have shown. [Example given] Thirdly, over half the neurons in the brain are located in areas directly involved in the control of action. Fourthly, the ability to control our bodies voluntarily is central to our sense of self" (p113; emphasis added).

After conducting a short historical review, Haggard identifies the following stages of action-related cognitive processing as requiring close attention in the coming years .....

Movement Planning: The problem here is that "there are almost always an infinity of possible movements which will achieve the goal" (p122). In other words, our limbs are "kinematically redundant" and require additional processing investment at the planning stage in order to cope.

Movement Selection and Optimality: This stage of action requires "heuristics for selecting among actions which have equal or roughly equal costs" (p123).

Processes During Movement Execution: Movement invariably produces sensory feedback, and therefore calls for systems which can cope not just with the throughput, but also with the inevitable fact that movement feedback is by its nature delayed.

Internal Models: Here, with due reference to Miall et al's paper on the subject [see 1993], Haggard names Otto Smith's linear predictor system [see 1959] as a likely candidate for using feedback effectively.

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] follows Kenneth Craik's cyclical model of cognition [see 1945], processing the feedback from one cognitive cycle as one of the possible inputs to the next.

2001 The British artist / art therapist / academic David Maclagan [publisher's biography] publishes "Psychological Aesthetics", in which he draws attention to the intimate connection between an aesthetic experience, our individual emotionally sensitive selves, and our ability to articulate same consciously and reflectively.

2002 Stelarc [see 1976] now exhibits a software installation entitled "Prosthetic Head", a 3D avatar head [see 1991 (Jeremiah)] capable of lip-synch'd synthesised speech and lifelike facial expressions [gallery and technical specifications from the artist's website]. [See next 2006] [THREADS = ANIMATED MECHANISM and AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

2002 [See firstly 1580 (Montaigne on defining monstrosity of bodily form)] The Australian artist-sculptor Patricia Piccinini [professional homepage] exhibits "The Young Family, 1" [image] and "Still Life with Stem Cells" [image], deliberately disturbing sculptures featuring dreamed up - and often deeply disturbing - chimerae, "critters who were not on earth before now" (Haraway, 2007 online) and who threaten most when they snuggle up - perhaps innocently, perhaps not - alongside our children as in "The Long Awaited" (2008) [image]. Popular responses range from "f$£&%$g sick s%$t" to "very very cool indeed". [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

2002 The American cognitive scientist Ron Sun [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute biography] publishes "Duality of the Mind", in which he promotes the design concepts built into his department's CLARION [= Connectionist Learning with Adaptive Rule Induction Online] cognitive simulation software.

2002 Peter Brugger [see 1994] now publishes a paper entitled "Reflective Mirrors" [full text online] in which he reports that three of the main types of "autoscopic phenomena", namely autoscopic hallucinations, heutoscopy [= encounters with doppelgangers], and out of body experiences (OBEs), often (but not always) include mirror reversal. Brugger suspects that autoscopic phenomena are part of a highly complex process of personal representation, including one's own person. He also reports a relationship between a subject's belief in the paranormal and high levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the blood. [See next 2005 (Kyriacou and Brugger)] [THREAD = AUTOSCOPIC PHENOMENA]

2002 Stephen Wilson [see 2000] now publishes "Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology", in which he stresses that one of the roles of the artist as a mirror on the present is to help steer the way to a better future. With technology, for example, it is not enough merely to use this or that piece of kit to produce art, but rather to use that practice to help direct where science might take us next. [THREAD = TECHNOLOGY AND ART]

2002 Rodney Brooks [see 1988] takes an important critical position on the issue of machines ever having emotions. The problem as he sees it is not with a robot having emotions per se but with how we are going to know if it is experiencing them (interviewed in Wood, 2002). [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

2002 The American psychologist Derek E. Montgomery [Bradley University homepage] publishes a paper entitled "Mental Verbs and Semantic Development", in which he argues that mental verbs do not acquire their meaning by being associated with a referent object concept, but rather by their having a pragmatic purpose to serve. [See Companion Resource for further discussion.]

2002 The American robotics engineer and hi-tech artist-designer Bruce Cannon [homepage] pursues a practice which includes designing and building stylish "electronic sculptures" [gallery], and does his best to overcome the inherent weakness of any performing machine, namely its failure to transcend its own artificiality (Wilson, 2002).

2003 Luc Steels [see 1999] now publishes a paper entitled "Language Re-Entrance and the 'Inner Voice'", in which he considers the technical problems of simulating inner voice in a robot. The problems, he feels, are "technically not so difficult" because they require merely that speech output be routed back to the perceptual system. Harder to cope with are the problems of context and inference. Steels' own robotic projects follow a precise "semiotic cycle" in which all these elements play a part. His two-robot "guessing game" studies [see 1999] involve two conversing systems taking turns as "speaker" and "hearer" to solve a common problem, and provide evidence that such cooperation encourages the active evolution of vocabulary and grammar (the grammar being the harder of the two to acquire). [THREAD = INNER SPEECH]

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] also implements re-entrant language output pathways [see 2010 (Smith)], although in our experience the resulting dataflows are highly complex and exceptionally difficult to integrate with the stream of information still coming in in real time from the externally directed senses. What is priceless, however, given our inability to tap into this type of data when using human subjects, is that Konrad's progress can be frozen in time at any chosen millisecond within a given simulation, and the contents of its memory banks extracted at will. With re-entrant language, for example, Smith (2010) actually tapped into the re-entrant sound stream at the point where it is re-presented for re-perceiving, and it sounded like this - click here. Whilst it is not possible to hear another person thinking, it becomes possible if that other "person" is a machine!

2003 The British robotic artist Andy Gracie exhibits "Small Work for Robots and Insects" [image], in an attempt "to establish communication between a colony of insects [one of the most ancient of all lifeforms] and a robot [rapidly becoming one of the most advanced]" (advertising material). [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

2003 Thomas Metzinger [see 1995] now publishes "Being No One", in which he explores the problems of the "First-Person Perspective", that is to say, that basic property of consciousness which centres all experience on the individual possessing it.

KEY CONCEPT - "MINE-NESS": Metzinger uses the term "Mine-ness" to refer to "the consciously experienced quality of 'inwardness' accompanying bodily sensations" (Metzinger, 2003, p267), seeing it as requiring a "prereflexive sense of ownership" (ibid.), and as manifesting itself "continuously, automatically, and independently of any high-level cognitive operations" (ibid.).

2003 Concerned at the inconsistencies of diagrammatic modelling within cognitive science, the present author mounts an Internet tutorial entitled "How to Draw Cognitive Diagrams" [take me there].

2003 Paul Locher [see 1987] now publishes a paper entitled "An Empirical Investigation of the Visual Rightness Theory of Picture Perception", in which he reports on the ability of adults untrained in the visual arts to discriminate between reproductions of original abstract and representational paintings by renowned artists. He finds as follows .....

"Accuracy of detection was found to be a function of style of painting and a viewer’s way of thinking about a work as determined from their verbal reactions to it. Specifically, hit rates for originals were highest for abstract works when participants focused on their compositional style and form and highest for representational works when their content and realism were the focus of attention. Findings support the view that visually right (i.e., “good”) compositions have efficient structural organizations that are visually salient to viewers who lack formal training in the visual arts" (Abstract). [See next 2003 (Nodine and Krupinski)] [THREAD = VISUAL SCANNING]

2003 Calvin Nodine [see 1987] and Elizabeth Krupinski [see 1993] publish a paper entitled "How Do Viewers Look at Artworks", in which they promote a model of aesthetic vision which posits a preliminary scan for overall impression - a picture's "gist" - followed by a period of more detailed sequential analysis. [See next 2005 (Locher et al)] [THREAD = VISUAL SCANNING]

2003 Marcellí Antunez Roca [see 1984] now presents "Project Daedalus" at London's Royal Institution. The presentation is partly performance, partly concert, and partly lecture, and makes much use of his "Dreskeleton" [images].

KEY CONCEPT - THE "EXOSKELETON": (1) In general biological terms, an exoskeleton is a set of stiffening and support structures situated externally to the body's key organs, as in insects. It gets its name from the EXternal placing of the SKELETON, and may be contrasted with the endoskeleton characteristic of mammals and fishes, where the body's key organs are suspended from an inner bony framework. (2) The term has also been used within performance art by practitioners such as Stelarc [e.g., 1998] to apply to mechatronic body extensions.

KEY CONCEPT - THE "DRESKELETON": A dreskeleton is Antunez Roca's recently coined (and not yet widely accepted) term for exoskeletons in sense (2) above.

2003 London's Tate Modern stages an exhibition entitled "Live Culture" [more on this] to showcase the work of intense performance artists such as Frank B [see 1996] and Ron Athey [see 1994]. [THREADS = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART and DISTURBING ART]

2003 The British psychologist Jamie Ward [University of Sussex homepage] publishes a paper entitled "Synaesthesia", in which he argues that synaesthesia research has the potential to help close the reductionist gap between the genetic and physiological literature on the one hand, and the experiential and phenomenological literature on the other. [THREAD = SYNAESTHESIA]

2003 A British undergraduate named Jason Oliver [homepage] publishes an essay entitled "Contemporary Blood Letting" (2003 online), in which he reviews the practice of both Franko B [see 1996] and Ron Athey [see 1994], before attempting to set their constant challenging of taboo subjects into the broader framework of aesthetic theory. He makes the following interesting observation .....

"The spilling of blood, whatever the connotation intended by the artist, has the effect of rendering the audience impotent. [.....] They cannot help the performers even though they feel their natural reaction is to do so. There is also a sense that the performers are acting 'privately' and the viewer is intruding into a sacred shamanic ritual" (e7). [THREADS = DISTURBING ART and THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

2004 [See firstly 1865, Manet's "Olympia"] The American academic Phylis A. Floyd [academic homepage] publishes a paper entitled "The Puzzle of Olympia" in which she proposes a possible explanation of the controversy which greeted Manet's "Olympia" when first exhibited.

2004 The American philosopher Mark Rollins [Washington University homepage] publishes a paper entitled "What Monet Meant", in which he argues that paintings succeed to the extent that their painters control the viewer's attention.

2004 Susan Broadhurst [see 1999] now publishes a paper entitled "The Jeremiah Project", in which she describes her collaboration with the systems engineer and academic Richard Bowden [university homepage] on a performance entitled "Blue Bloodshot Flowers". She is interested in what really goes on during "physical/virtual interaction" (p47), and thereby in establishing "the aesthetic potential of digitalised technology for performance". Her working hypothesis is as follows .....

"My main argument is that in the digital, the physical and virtual are accentuated and, hence, current theory needs to be adjusted to allow for this technical interface and accompanying corporeal prominence. Conventional [interpretations leave] the body a secondary phenomenon. [.....] Therefore I am arguing for an 'intersemiotic' mode of analysis, that is, one that includes but also goes beyond language" (p48; emphasis added).

Broadhurst takes a very precise position on the role of representation in this sort of virtual performance. All bodies, she insists, including virtual ones, will be "(re)presented" (emphasis original), and that (re)presentation will create "tension-filled spaces" in the wake of any performance which invite being thought about after the event as part of their being resolved. Any spaces which exist because some things are "unrepresentable" simply become "the sublime of the physical/virtual interface" (p48). [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE (PART VIRTUAL)]

2004 The British actor, director, and academic Steve Dixon [Wikipedia biography] publishes a paper entitled "Metal Performance", in which he examines a number of "cyborgic performances featuring human bodies with metal prostheses" (p15), in a search for the secrets of their power to fascinate. Having studied works by such practitioners as Donna Haraway [see 1991] and Norman White [see 1969], he accuses them of "metallic camp" (p15), that is to say, of overdoing performative irony and being guilty of behavioural exaggeration. Here is his point .....

"..... some degree of camp seems inherent in almost all 'performing' anthropomorphic and zoomorphic robots I have seen. Their movements are one key to this. Since robots currently fail to accurately mimic human and animal movement, their exaggerated gait and gestures emphasise the same sense of theatricality and artificiality in movement that we find in camp" (p17). [THREADS = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE and AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

2004 The German art historian Pamela Kort publishes "Comic Grotesque" [buy], in which she analyses the use of the pictorial jibe, allegory, mild allusion, and downright caricature as tools of political comment in German society at the height of its militaristic psyche (in the years 1870 to 1940 covered by the book the Germans invaded France no less than three times). [THREAD = ART, WARFARE, AND PROPAGANDA]

2004 After 30 years in the genre, Joel-Peter Witkin [see 1975] offers "Severed Leg - Weathervane" [image] to prove that advancing age is not dimming his interest in compassionate sadomasochism. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

2004 The American psychologist Paul M. Camic [Canterbury Christ Church University homepage] publishes a paper entitled "Assemblage as Rorschach", in which he promotes projective methods in the study of aesthetics.

2004 Rinaldo follows up the success of his 2000 "Autopoiesis" with a "fish-driven robot" [video] entitled "Augmented Fish Reality".

2004 Dixon (2004) calls for "metal performance", and sees it as routinely "camp" [by which he seems to mean situationally intrusive and in your face].

2004 [See firstly 1948 (Mathematical Theory of Communication), noting the weakness of that theory at analysing the minds at either end of the performative exchange] The Dutch researchers Stephan Wensveen [link], Tom Djajadiningrat [Northumbria University homepage], and Kees Overbeeke [link] publish a paper entitled "Interaction Frogger" in which they analyse the performative exchange as a "design framework". The main elements of this framework are (1) a "person context", reflecting the current state of the observing mind, (2) an "artefact context", reflecting the physical parameters of the observed object and its immediate setting, and (3) an "ongoing interaction space" reflecting the flow of information during the visual scanning process and the emergence of aesthetic experience. These somewhat arbitrary elements are then grounded in the universal elements of Shannon and Weaver's "theory of communication [see 1948] to produce an interpretive framework which is all-encompassing psychologically as well as technically. [See also 2008 (Locher et al) and 2009 (Locher et al)] [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

2005 The Rumanian conceptual artist Mircea Cantor [Wikipedia biography] exhibits "Deeparture", a thought-provoking three-hour video record of a staged encounter between a deer and a wolf in a plain white cube [details (courtesy of the Walker Arts Centre)]. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

2005 [Readers unfamiliar with the layout of the vertebrate motor pathways should pre-read the Companion Resource before proceeding; note especially the distinction between primary and supplementary motor areas, and premotor cortex.] The Italian cognitive neuropsychologist Sergio Della Sala [University of Edinburgh homepage] publishes a paper entitled "The Anarchic Hand", in which he reports the behaviour of Patient "GP", a woman whose left hand behaved as though it had a mind of its own, thus .....

"One evening we took our patient, Mrs. GP, to dinner with her family. We were discussing the implication of her medical condition for her and her relatives, when, out of the blue, her left hand took some left-over fish bones and put them into her mouth. A little later, while she was begging it not to embarrass her any more, her mischievous hand grabbed the ice cream that her brother was licking. Her right hand immediately intervened to put things in place and as a result of the fighting the dessert dropped on the floor" (p606).

ASIDE: This sort of behaviour was famously camped up by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's movie "Dr. Strangelove" (1964) - see video clip [Sellers would have to have been right-hemisphere dominant and left-hemisphere anarchic because it is his right arm which is at odds with his communicating self, not (as with Mrs GP) the left.] The anarchic hand is actually something of a dramatic trope - see TV Tropes, under "Evil Hand". Della Sala mentions the following movies: "Mad Love" (1935), "The Beast with Five Fingers" (1946), "Dr. Strangelove" (1964), "Evil Dead 2" (1987), and "Me, Myself, and Irene" (2000).

As to the causes of Anarchic Hand Syndrome, Della Sala reviews 39 cases reported in the neurological literature and notes as follows .....

"Most of the patients showing anarchic hand had a lesion encroaching upon the medial wall of the frontal lobe contralateral to the wayward hand. In particular, lesions seem to be centred on an area known as the supplementary motor area (SMA) [show me where this is lower diagram, roughly areas 6ab, 8, and 32]. Each SMA lies in the medial surface of one of the frontal lobes[, where] it plays a role in the execution of movements. It is thought to be responsible for converting intention into self-initiated actions" (p607).

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: The SMA is therefore close to the anterior cingulate gyrus [show me where this is lower diagram, roughly area 24], an area involved with inhibiting inappropriate behaviours. The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] dedicates an entire processing module to the continued authorisation of potential motor actions.

Della Sala also mentions that bilateral SMA lesions [the ones described above are unilateral to the non-dominant hemisphere] are often associated with the sort of utilasation behaviour reported by Lhermitte (1983) - see Companion Resource [scroll to Sections 6 and 12] for a fuller discussion. He sees anarchic hand as an example of the mind's "inability to inhibit actions triggered by the environment" (p609), thus encouraging us to search for the normal mind's "free won't", rather than its free will! Finally, Della Sala warns that careless Internet scholarship has wrongly conflated anarchic hand syndrome with alien hand syndrome, which is a substantially different neurological disorder.

2005 The present author [see 1980] delivers a paper entitled "On Database Keys, with an Application to the Praxisproblem" at the Ninth World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics, Orlando, FL. The presentation explains in detail how the CA-IDMS database keying options work, and then provides a pseudocode example of how a propositional network built on these principles might be accessed in the execution of a simulated speech act. The author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] has since successfully put these principles into operation. The conference PowerPoint is available for private study - click here to download.

2005 The present author [see 1980] delivers a paper entitled "The Problem of Context in Sentence Production - Surely a Case to Reconvene the Data Base Task Group?" at the Third International Conference on Computing, Communications, and Control Technologies, Austin, TX. The presentation gives a detailed history of the CA-IDMS approach to database design, and then suggests how the database currency mechanism might be applied to artificial intelligence. The conference PowerPoint is available for private study - click here to download.

2005 The present author [see 1980] delivers a paper entitled "How Ideas Evolve into Speech" at the 2005 Annual Conference of the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society. The presentation includes an animated PowerPoint flow diagram showing the flow of information down through the levels of the motor hierarchy, beginning at the level of Speech Acts and ending at the level of overt muscular contraction [play this PowerPoint].

2005 The American robotic artist David Karave [Wikipedia biography] takes to the road with an installation entitled "Home Automation" in which a family of crash test dummies respond to a progressively deteriorating series of events [video]. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

2005 The American neuroscientists Rebecca Saxe [Wikipedia biography] and Anna Wexler [homepage] publish a paper entitled "Making Sense of Another Mind", in which they report fMRI analysis of the brain's activity in subjects engaged in social cognition tasks. Twelve subjects had been tested across a number of 80-word stories, and results reveal four commonly activated brain areas, as follows .....

1 The Right Temporo-Parietal Junction (RTPJ) [see where this is]

2 The Left Temporo-Parietal Junction (LTPJ) [as (1), but on other side]

3 The Medial Prefrontal Cortex (MPFC) [see where this is (lower diagram, roughly areas 10 through 13 and 32)]

4 The Posterior Cingulate Cortex (PC) [see where this is (lower diagram, roughly area 23)]

The authors conclude as follows .....

"One brain region - the RTPJ - fulfilled each of the predictions for the neural substrate of Theory of Mind: (1) the BOLD [= "Blood-Oxygen Level Dependence"] response in the RPTJ was low while subjects read descriptions of a protagonist's social background, and increased only once the mental state of the protagonist was described, (2) the low response to background information was not modulated by the familiarity of the described background, and (3) once mental state was available, the BOLD response in the RTPJ was enhanced when the protagonist's background and mental state were incongruent [.....] None of the other brain regions investigated here (the LTPJ, PC, and MPFC) showed as clear and unambiguous a response profile"

2005 [See firstly 1991 (CAVE)] A University of Exeter team led by Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye, Mel Slater [see 2002], and Michael Shanks begins work on "The Presence Project" [project homepage], a four-year investigation of what factors need to be brought together to create a performer's "presence" and an audience's "co-presence". [THREADS = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE and ANIMATED MECHANISM]

2005 [See firstly 1962 (Performative Utterances)] The American philosopher Judith Butler [Wikipedia biography] publishes "Giving an Account of Oneself" in which she discusses the limits of self-knowledge in general and of our inability to give a "narrative account" of ourselves in particular. The reason for this limited awareness, she proposes, lies ultimately in the performative nature of the speech acts which would have to be involved. [THREAD = SPEECH ACT THEORY]

2005 The Swiss EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne) recognises three distinct "Grand Challenges" within Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, as follows: (1) "novel bio-inspired computing machines and programs", displaying such various natural phenomena as adaptation, evolution, growth, healing, replication, and learning [separate website], (2) reconfigurable systems capable of adapting to changing environments or incomplete specifications [separate website], and (3) biologically inspired robots with dextrous locomotion and coordination [separate website]. [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

2005 Paul Locher [see 1987], Kees Overbeeke [see 2004], and Pieter J. Stappers [Delft Technical University homepage] publish a paper entitled "Spatial Balance of Colour Triads in the Abstract Art of Piet Mondrian", in which they systematically varied the area fill colouring in Mondrian's "Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue" (1929) [image] before comparing the scanpaths and subjective response for each. Results indicated that the perceived weight of a colour varied as a function of its area. [See next 2006 (Locher)] [THREAD = VISUAL SCANNING]

2005 Andreas Kyriacou [no convenient biography] and Peter Brugger [see 1994] present a poster entitled "Divergent and Convergent Thinking in Persons with Varying Degrees of Magical Ideation", in which they use Eckblad and Chapman's Magical Ideation Scale [see 1983] in conjunction with a measure of divergent versus convergent thinking [see 1959 (Guilford)] to investigate the relationship between gullibility [our term - Ed.] and cognitive style. Their results indicate as follows .....

"Persons scoring high on the Magical Ideation scale tend to see more links between concepts and thus seem better able to generate potential solutions to a problem, presumably due to a more intense spreading activation in their semantic network. However, they seem to be less well able to control this activation in order to find appropriate solutions if specific requirements must be met." [See next 2009 (Brugger)] [THREAD = AUTOSCOPIC PHENOMENA]

2006 The Australian Dance Theatre stages "Devolution", a collaboration between their resident artistic director Garry Stewart and the robotics designer Louis-Philippe Demers, at the Adelaide Festival of Arts. The performance is based around a troupe of non-humanoid robots [images] and offers a number of experiential insights into the relationship between man and machine. [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

2006 Susan Broadhurst [see 1999] now goes co-author with Josephine Machon [Brunel University homepage] on "Performance and Technology", a collection of papers from across the technological art genre, in which the contributing authors reflect on their practice in such areas as game choreography, virtual world choreography, digital audience participation, and the virtual enablement of the disabled. [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

2006 On behalf of the American Dance Festival, Douglas Rosenberg [see 1998] now organises a four-day conference at Duke University, under the title "Screendance: The State of the Art". The event is designed to encourage "a serious discourse relating to screendance", and features contributions from a dozen or so reflectively minded practitioners. Rosenberg's own substantive contribution is a paper entitled "Proposing a Theory of Screendance" [full text online], in which he suggests a number of intellectual paradigms calculated to give greater theoretical weight to screendance as an area of practice. He notes, for example, that there is a dearth of "identifiable authorship" in this area, and that it therefore "teeters on marginality" (p12). Here is the heart of the problem as he sees it .....

"Art in general aligns itself with numerous categories and sub-categories offering infinite combinations of inter-textuality [.....] They conjure works that are tethered to knowable historic moments that inform both the maker and the viewer about process, substance, materiality, and content. They also inform the critic, historian, or scholar. And that is perhaps most important. Without the participation of the third party whose job it is to inscribe a cultural reference to the work of art, the circle is incomplete. Art feeds on itself" (p12).

Deirdre Towers [Dance Films Association homepage] then follows with a paper entitled "Inventions and Conventions" [full text online as above], in which she notes with concern how easy it is for a screendance director to deliver little more than a commercial. Directors should be particularly cautious, she writes, of "that expensive sheen" and any attendant "obsession with beauty" (p18).

Robert A. Haller [Robert Haller Productions homepage] presents "Some Propositions about Cinema Dance" [full text online as above], in which he considers how and why screendance can sometimes be more effective than live dance, thanks (a) to the camera's power to focus on detail, "fracture the body", and make movements of its own, and (b) to the editor's power to snip and clip and cross-cut. In the end .....

"What sets cinema apart from live dance is the way the camera commands the viewer. If it takes apart a human movement and then reassembles it, what emerges can be different, can be more than the sum of its parts" (p30).

Karen Pearlman [Wikipedia biography] presents "Editing as a Form of Choreography", in which she reminds screendance choreographers that editing is an often-overlooked part of effective creative cinema, thus .....

"I propose that what an editor is doing is analogous to what a choreographer does because they shape movement's direction, shape, time, emphasis, and so on into significant form. Further, that the movement being shaped through choreographic principles is not just the physical movement, but the movement of emotions and of story" (p52).

Editors have a lot to learn, Pearlman suspects, from the choreographic skill known as "phrasing", that is to say, "compositions of movement into perceptible and intentionally formed rhythmically expressive sequences" (p53).

2006 A team of researchers led by Giles St.J. Burch [academic homepage] publishes a paper entitled "Schizotypy and Creativity in Visual Artists", in which they apply a battery of personality measures to a sample of 53 visual arts students and a control group of 54 non-arts students. They found that "the largest difference between the visual artists and non-artists occurs on unusual experience scores" [the "positive schizotypy" measure of having unusual ideas - Ed.] "[as well as] cognitive disorganisation, impulsive non-conformity, neuroticism, openness, and divergent thinking" (p182). [THREAD = PERSONALITY AND ART]

2006 Paul Locher [see 1987] now publishes a paper entitled "The Usefulness of Eye Movement Recordings [etc.]", in which he reviews the literature on artwork scanning [e.g., 2003 (Nodine and Krupinsky)] and concludes that the ability to collect objective scanpath data at the same time as subjective commentary is critical to effective research in this area. [See next 2008 (Locher et al)] [THREAD = VISUAL SCANNING]

2006 Marvin Minsky [see 1951] now publishes "The Emotion Machine", in which he applies his Society of Mind Theory [see 1987 (Minsky)] to the selection of mental processing states capable of generating emotional behaviour. [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

2006 The Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris, stages Atau Tanaka's "Net Dérive", an interactive internet experience [details]. [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

2006 The Australian performer-writer Catherine Fargher [academic homepage] unveils "BioHome: The Chromosome Knitting Project" at Australia's University of Wollongong. The performance/installation is presented as part home/part laboratory in which the public engages with a number of role-playing accomplices. These experiences include "wet biology", cell cultures, and salmon DNA you can knit with! Fargher explains the thinking behind BioHome thus .....

"During the storytelling in BioHome there is a moment when I feel all faces are not only watching me and hearing the story, but engaged in a shared intimacy. [.....] I create a space that is large enough for my audience to share with me. I become a body that can be read, a site of emotions that can be shared. [.....] That moment of caring, of contact, is a pure space [in which] I hold the audience [and which] exists only in performance" (Fargher and Narushima, 2007 online, e2-3). [THREADS = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART and THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

2006 Stelarc [see 1976] now exhibits "Partial Head" [gallery and technical specifications from the artist's website], a flattened digital face printed in three dimensions onto thermal plastic and seeded with living cells until it becomes contaminated after a few days. [See next 2007] [THREADS = ANIMATED MECHANISM and AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

2006 Kira O'Reilly [see 1998] creates a minor reactionary media storm with a performance at the Newlyn Art Gallery entitled "Inthewrongplaceness" [image]. This performance requires her to writhe around the floor for ten minutes at a time, naked, and hugging - and cutting - a dead pig; and all at the taxpayer's expense, moans The Daily Mail. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

2006 The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek publishes "The Parallax View", a discussion of the relative merits of the Idealist and Materialist positions on ontology.

ASIDE: Readers unfamiliar with the issue here should read the entry on reality in the Companion Glossary before proceeding. The explanatory allusion is to the optical phenomenon known as "parallax", the relative movement of the items making up a three-dimensional visual scene as the viewing position changes.

Žižek's account of visual perception begins conventionally by requiring a perceiving subject, but then proposes a novel solution to the centuries old problem of having to be blessed with a Cartesian "cogito" in order to fulfil the role of perceiver. [THREAD = VISUAL DRAMATIC ANALYSIS]

2007 Programming begins on the present author's Konrad artificial consciousness software (August).

2007 The British cognitive scientist Robert Clowes [University of Sussex homepage] publishes a paper entitled "A Self-Regulation Model of Inner Speech and its Role in the Organisation of Human Conscious Experience", in which he calls for a greater recognition of the role played by inner speech in conscious experience. This requires taking a particular opening position, as follows .....

"The starting assumption for this work is that the cognitive role of language needs to be understood as one of sculpting or regulating cognitive activity rather than exhaustively representing the world [.....] This is combined with a second idea: that to understand how linguistic episodes come to play a role in conscious mental life we need to understand their development and origin" (p63).

Clowes then reports experience with neural network architectures for "minimal cognitive agents", some equipped with, and some without, word re-entrant loops. He continues .....

"Some of the agents have architectures that allow the re-triggering of command reception systems internally. This re-triggering is controlled by a gating neuron that can switch re-entrance on or off. When the gating neuron is switched on, activity from the output of the network is fed back through the nodes that are used to receive input instructions. In this way, agents have the dynamical possibility to 'command themselves'" (p64).

Clowes reports that agents with the re-entrant capacity "perform considerable better on the given task than those without" (p64).

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] is an instantiation of Kenneth Craik's cyclical cognitive control hierarchy [remind me], and can operate on a silent re-entrant speech basis [see 2010 (Smith)].

2007 The Dutch cognitive scientist Julian Kiverstein [University of Amsterdam homepage] publishes a paper entitled "Could a Robot Have a Subjective Point of View". In this paper he proposes a "dynamic sensorimotor" (DSM) account of consciousness, which, properly implemented, might get around the argument put forward by those cynical about the promise of robotics that "there could never be something it is like to be a machine". The essence of his proposed approach is as follows .....

"According to the DSM account, conscious experience is an activity of perceptually exploring the world in which one exercises one's sensorimotor knowledge. Sensorimotor knowledge is a form of practical knowledge where what the subject has mastery of are the dynamics which govern sensorimotor behaviour. Sensorimotor dynamics consist of laws or regularities which relate changes in sensory input to changes in motor output, and to changes in environmental conditions more generally. [Example given] The DSM account claims that it is exercise of sensorimotor knowledge which is constitutive of conscious experience" (p128; emphasis added).

Kiverstein argues that the sort of subjectivity which characterises human "first-person" cognition requires a "point of view" and "comes more or less for free in creatures that can acquire and exercise a mastery of sensorimotor knowledge" (p132). He continues .....

"Representations that are produced from a point of view are 'location dependent representations' (LDRs). LDRs are from a point of view because they have contents which are indexed to locations: the particular spatial and causal point of origin from which they have been produced. The content of a LDR will vary with the location from which it has been produced. As you move about and your location changes, so does what you experience [.....] To say that a point of view is first-person is to capture the sort of epistemic access enjoyed by the creature which occupies a particular point of view. [.....] We normally think of objects and their properties as what is 'given' in experience [..... and] it is this property which, I am suggesting, accounts for an experience being knowable in a first-person way" (p133)

As to what most defines this all-important "givenness" of experience - the pain of a pain, for example, or the sourness of lemon - Kiverstein argues that we are somehow aware of such experiences as "being mine". Nothing needs identifying and nothing needs judging.

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] approaches sensorimotor knowledge (as defined above) at a sub-propositional level of analysis, that is to say, broadly as shown in the two left-to-right information flows on Kenneth Craik's canonical three-layer cognitive hierarchy [remind me]. All outputs generate as many levels of efference copy as there were processing levels involved in their generation. However, the Konrad software is not yet able to simulate the givenness of an experience in the sense described above.

2007 The American psychologists Daniel T. Gilbert [Harvard University homepage] and Timothy D. Wilson [University of Virginia homepage] publish a paper entitled "Prospection: Experiencing the Future" [full text online], in which they draw attention to the peculiarly human ability to "predict the hedonic consequences" of [= anticipate the niceness-nastiness of] events despite having no direct experience to apply to them. The key mechanism is described as follows .....

"The brain combines incoming information with stored information to build 'internal representations', or internal models, of the external world. The mental representation of a past event is a memory, the mental representation of a present event is a perception, and the mental representation of a future event is a simulation. One way to predict the hedonic consequences of a future event is to simulate it, and the brain's frontal regions appear to play a critical role in the process" (p1352). "Mental simulation is the means by which the brain discovers what it already knows" (p1354; emphasis added). [THREAD = COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY (NARRATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS)]

2007 The cognitive neuropsychogists Daniel L. Schacter [Wikipedia biography] and Donna R. Addis [University of Auckland homepage] publish a paper entitled "The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future". Constructive memory, they argue, uses fragments of past episodes as material to piece together possible future scenarios, thus helping us evaluate possible lines of future action more effectively. [THREAD = COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY (NARRATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS)]

2007 The German neurologists Hansjörg Bäzner and Michael G. Hennerici publish a paper entitled "Lovis Corinth: Integrating Hemineglect and Spatial Distortions", in which they resurrect the case of Lovis Corinth [see 1911] for reconsideration in the light of the latest theories of neglect. [THREAD = SPATIAL HEMINEGLECT]

2007 The American cognitive neuroscientist Moshe Bar [Harvard Medical School homepage] publishes a paper entitled "The Proactive Brain: Memory for Predictions" [full text online], in which he attacks the "implicit but not entirely accurate" presumption that perception and cognition can be analysed in isolation from each other. The task of the visual system, he suggests, is not to decide what an external object "is" but, more importantly, what it "is like"; and this, he emphasises, "relies on memory as much as it does on incoming information" (p1235).

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] is built around a CA-IDMS network database and implements a data model designed to allow for all main features of human memory, biochemical and functional. See Smith (2010) for a published example of sensory input activating higher contextual understanding, or simply replay the conference PowerPoint.

2007 The Dutch academic Elvin Karana [academic homepage] publishes her thesis under the title "Meanings of Materials". In this work she explores how materials seem to acquire the meanings popularly associated with them. [THREAD = MATERIALS AND AESTHETICS]

2007 An interdisciplinary team of scholars led by Carl Ruck [see 1978] now publishes "The Hidden World", in which they promote the thesis that a society's ancestral shamanic practices survive in its folktales. [THREAD = ART, RITUAL, AND BELIEF]

2007 The University of the West of England's Alan Winfield stresses the difference between robot autonomy and robot intelligence. His concern is that "we will have autonomous dumb robots very soon" (The Times, 24th April 2007). Among the practical concerns here is the question who would be to blame should an autonomous robot cause injury. The designer? The manufacturer? Nobody?

2007 The American film director Craig Gillespie [Wikipedia biography] releases the comedy movie "Lars and the Real Girl", in which the hero falls in love with a sex doll. [THREAD = IMAGINARY FRIENDS]

2007 The Japanese "doll-artist" Katan Amano [no convenient biography] publishes "Fantasm", a collection of doll photographs, and continues in her explicit attempt to create dolls which are simultaneously "elegantly beautiful and hauntingly disturbing" [sample images]. [THREADS = FROZEN MOTION and THE UNCANNY]

2007 The British animater Barry Purves publishes "Stop Motion: Passion, Process, and Performance", in which he sets out the science behind the craft of animation.

2007 [See firstly 1991] The National Museum of Computing opens in Building H at Bletchley Park [see museum homepage], housing - in pride of place - a rebuilt Colossus computer [see 1943].

2007 Susan Broadhurst [see 1999] now publishes "Digital Practices", in which she analysises the impact of new technologies on performance and art practice. [THREAD = TECHNOLOGY AND ART]

2007 The American art historian David Freedberg [Columbia University homepage] and the Italian neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese [University of Parma homepage] publish a paper entitled ***** "Motion, Emotion, and Empathy in Aesthetic Experience" ***** [full text online], in which they explore the problem of "empathetic responses" both to images in general and to artworks in particular. Noting that works like Gombrich's "Art and Illusion" [see 1960] spend a disproportionate amount of time on the workings of the cognitive system compared to the emotional and empathetic systems, they take as their lighthouse text the following quotation from Alberti (1972) .....

"The painting will move the soul of the beholder when the people painted there each clearly shows the movement of his own soul ... We weep with the weeping, laugh with the laughing, and grieve with the grieving. These movements of the soul are known from the movements of the body" (p80).

The authors then whet our appetite by highlighting a number of specific emotive works. These include Goya's "Que Hay Que Hacer Mas?" [= "What More is There to Do?"] [image], and Caravaggio's "Incredulity of St. Thomas" (1602) [image]. In the first of these, a prisoner of war has been stripped naked and is being held upside down to be emasculated with a scimitar.

ASIDE: For the present author, at least, Goya successfully got the juices of fear and visceral sympathy running - even the loss of balance is deeply disturbing. Readers who have not yet clicked on the link above may care to introspect their own responses when eventually they do so.

As for the Caravaggio, the painting shows St. Thomas placing his finger to the wound in the risen Christ's side, that he should doubt no more. Freedberg and Gallese have selected this image because it illustrates modern research into "empathetic simulation", that is to say, obtaining sympathetic somatic neural activity from visual input rather than somatic. They regard this as a clear example of Rizzolatti et al's (various from 1996) "mirror neuron" concept.

KEY CONCEPT - THE MIRROR NEURON: This is Rizzolatti et al's (various from 1996) notion of a localised neural system which is selectively responsive to commonalities of behaviour between a host animal and other animals (or objects) in that host animal's perceptual environment. Such neural systems were first identified by implanted electrode recording from the brains of macaque monkeys, but have now been tentatively located non-invasively in humans as well [see Winerman (2005/2007 online) for a review of the methodologies]. For the brain to behave in this way, there has to be some sort of overlap between the neural subsystem for one's personal action schemas and the subsystem for coding the behaviour of others in our mental model of the world. Hurley (e.g., 2005) refers to the extent of this putative overlap as a "shared circuit".

The authors conclude as follows .....

"All this evidence shows that our brains can reconstruct actions by merely observing the static graphic outcome of an agent's past action. This reconstruction process during observation is an embodied simulation mechanism that relies on the activation of the same motor centres required to produce the graphic sign. [.....] Automatic empathetic responses constitute a basic level of response to images and to works of art. [.....] This basic level of reaction to images becomes essential to any understanding of their effectiveness as art" (p202). [THREAD = PSYCHOLOGICAL IDENTIFICATION AND ART]

2007 Stelarc [see 1976] now famously reveals his "Ear on Arm" [YouTube video], a soft-tissue ear-shaped prosthesis surgically implanted onto his upper forearm. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

2007 The Chinese scenario photographer ***** Zhang Peng ***** [Saatchi Gallery biography] begins to exhibit a series of eerie prints of young girls in stunningly interesting - and often somewhat disturbing - poses [gallery]. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

2008 The Australian-born Art historian Catherine Mason [homepage] publishes "A Computer in the Art Room", in which she reviews the personalities and art schools who pioneered computer-mediated art in Britain. [See next 2009 (Le Meur)] [THREAD = COMPUTERS IN ART]

2008 Engineered Arts exhibits an interactive life-sized robot named "RoboThespian". The software allows onlookers to program the mechanism's movements online, and then see them performed. [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM and THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

2008 Peter Brugger [see 1994] and Christine Mohr [University of Bristol homepage] publish a paper entitled "The Paranormal Mind", in which they update the available definitions of "paranormal" phenomena and review some of the latest research. Their definition emphasises that a paranormal belief should be based upon an unconventional explanatory framework, and that paranormal experiences - such as the "meaningfulness of a coincidence" - are real enough for those who experience them. Their taxonomy of paranormal beliefs runs as follows .....

(a) Beliefs Based on a Misinterpretation of Normal Experiences: Under this heading we find beliefs in extrasensory perception, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, feelings of being stared at, astrology, divination, dowsing, trance channeling, and spirit communication.

(b) Beliefs Based on a Misinterpretation of Anomalous Experiences: Under this heading we find beliefs in life after death, reincarnation, ghosts, fairies, and the existence of "frightening others". [See next 2009] [THREAD = AUTOSCOPIC PHENOMENA]

2008 [Before continuing with this entry readers should remind themselves how subtle is the smile of Leonardo Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" - image]. The British researchers Emma Bould and Neil Morris [academic homepage] publish a paper entitled "Role of Motion Signals in Recognising Subtle Facial Expressions of Emotion", in which they examine changes in the importance of movement for conveying "subtle" versus "intense" expressions of emotion. They presented subjects with full face still photographs of six emotions at varying stages of intensity and either the right way up or upside down, and note as follows .....

"For the subtle emotions of anger, fear, sadness, and surprise, and the intense emotion of surprise, inversion disrupted perception of the facial expressions [whether moving or not]. [.....] For intense emotions, the motion signals seem to be less important. [.....] A possible explanation as to why we are often less accurate recognising subtle emotions and require additional motion information might be due to [.....] everyday interactions. For instance, an extreme expression of sadness signals a need for comfort. Conversely, we have no obligation to respond to a subtle emotional signal" (pp186-187). [THREAD = EMOTION AND ART]

2008 In a paper entitled "Visual Interest in Pictorial Art during an Aesthetic Experience" Paul Locher [see 1987], Elizabeth Krupinski [see 1993], Claudia Mello-Thoms [University of Pittsburgh homepage], and Calvin Nodine [see 1987] report experimental evidence that viewing a painting takes place in two distinct stages, the first a rapid holistic appraisal of the painting's "gist", and the second a slower and more exhaustive serial scanning of its detailed content. The gist processing was confirmed by exposing paintings for a mere 100 milliseconds and was enough to support a reasonably accurate estimate of what the painting was of or about. The serial scanning was confirmed using data from an eye tracking system alongside verbal report. [See next 2009 (Locher et al)] [THREAD = VISUAL SCANNING]

ASIDE: It was recognised as long ago as WW1 that neurological assessment for visual performance following head injury needs to look at holistic picture scanning separately from serial scanning [see 1917 (Poppelreuter)], and the theory of serial scanning itself goes back at least to Descartes [see 1662]. The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] follows these precedents and uses the initial gist to create a "top-down" pre-sensitisation of the perceptual pathway, thus facilitating the detailed serial scanning which follows.

2008 The present author [homepage] announces the first successful trial run of the Konrad artificial cognition software [tell me more].

2008 The American photographer Shimon Attie exhibits "The Attraction of Onlookers", a five-channel video record of five months working closely with the people of Aberfan, South Wales, 40 years after the 1966 disaster in which claimed the lives of 144 people, mostly schoolchildren. [THREAD = ART AS THERAPY]

2008 A team of researchers led by the Princeton psychologist Uri Hasson [Princeton University homepage] publish a paper entitled "Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film", in which they describe a research technique known as "Inter-Subject Correlation Analysis" (ISC). ISC is similar in principle to the averaged evoked potential methods of the 1970s [more on this], in that it calculates an average brain response to an identical stimulus over many trials. This allows the "noise" inherent to those responses to cancel itself out gradually, leaving the true response contour visible for the first time. Unlike the earlier studies, however, which worked only in milliseconds, ISC averages 30 minutes or more of focal attention at a time. Results clearly and consistently indicate that different viewers will attend to much the same aspect of the screening at much the same time. Here is how the impact of this work will soon be assessed .....

"Our engagement with artworks, like natural vision more generally, is messy. It doesn't reduce neatly to the kinds of contexts that yield successful neuroimaging experiments [..... for] this method is poorly suited to spatiotemporally complex, dynamic stimuli whose content is constrained by a range of ill-defined contextual features (e.g., film, dance, and natural vision). Hasson has developed a means to overcome this problem [..... which is at the same time] also a valid method for a neuroscience of film" (Seeley, 2011, pp2-3 [see 2010 (Seeley)]).

2008 The present author [see 1980] delivers a poster entitled "Initial Experiences with a CA-IDMS^® Implementation of a Freely Willing Robotic Mind" at the British Psychological Society's Workshop on Conscious Intention, Agency, and Free Will, London. The presentation demonstrates the frightening interdisciplinarity of cognitive science, and exhibits the real-time control architecture currently being used by the Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this]. [THREAD = PROJECT KONRAD]

2008 The Dutch cognitive scientists Gert Kootstra [homepage], Arco Nederveen [no convenient biography], and Bart de Boer [University of Amsterdam homepage] publish a paper entitled "Paying Attention to Symmetry", in which they note the powerful effect of visual stimulus symmetry on eye fixation pattern. [THREAD = VISUAL SCANNING]

2008 GV Art [corporate homepage] found a London gallery to promote avant-garde and experimental performance and installation art [see, for example, 2009 (Marron)]. [THREAD = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

2008 The American philosopher Noel Carroll [Wikipedia biography] publishes "The Philosophy of Motion Pictures", in which amongst other things he stresses the power of cinema to pre-select what the audience is to attend to.

2009 The French painter Anne-Sarah Le Meur [homepage] extracts a still image entitled "Red to Come" from a larger project entitled ***** "Beyond-Round" *****. This latter is a digital art installation which envelops the viewer in a 360º wrap-around cylindrical screen [image and specification] and then does its best to keep the focus of the display sufficiently off to one side to explore the role played by peripheral vision in defining the three-dimensional extent, nature, and content, of one's visual world. [See next 2011 (Mason)] [THREAD = COMPUTERS IN ART]

2009 The British artist David Marron [homepage] exhibits "On Life and Death" [more on this] at GV Art's gallery in London. [See next 2011] [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE (MULTIPLE NARRATIVES)] //

2009 The Royal Academy of Engineering publishes "Autonomous Systems" [full text online], an exploration of the social, legal, and ethical issues surrounding robotic technology. The report identifies two main issues, namely (1) whether autonomous systems are different from other "complex controlled systems", especially insofar as becoming blameworthy in the event that they cause injury, and (2) whether society at large is ready for the loss of privacy which the associated system logs would bring about. [THREAD = AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

2009 The University of Shanghai inaugurates "The ShanghAI Lectures" [homepage], to provide a global virtual world for the showcasing of cutting edge science. [THREADS = ANIMATED MECHANISM and AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

2009 The Australian engineer Reuben Hoggett [homepage] sets up the ***** Cybernetic Zoo ***** website, and starts to load it with historical facts, insightful anecdotes, and fascinating images pertaining to the history of robotics. [THREADS = ANIMATED MECHANISM and AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

2009 The present author [see 1980] delivers a paper entitled " A computer simulation of Meinong's (1902) Objektiv stage of object perception" to the Annual Conference of the History and Philosophy of Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society, Edinburgh. The presentation reminds delegates of the stages of perception and conceptualisation, and then presents output from the Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] as a way of slowing that processing down so that it can be examined at leisure after the event. The conference PowerPoint is available for private study - click here to download.

2009 The University of Münster researcher Melanie L. Glocker is lead author on a paper entitled "Baby Schema in Infant Faces Induces Cuteness Perception and Motivation for Caretaking in Adults", in which digitally engineered photographs of infants are rated both for "cuteness" and "caretaking motivation". Such features as a generous forehead, eyes spaced widely apart, and a short narrow nose, are found to increase both monitored behaviours. These data are taken as supporting Konrad Lorenz's notion of a Kindchenschema releasing mechanism for nurturing [see 1943]. [THREAD = THE NATURE OF BEAUTY]

2009 Paul Locher [see 1987], Kees Overbeeke [see 2004], and Stephan Wensveen [see 2004] publish a paper entitled "A Framework for Aesthetic Experience" [full text online], in which they recommend that Wensveen, Djajadiningrat, and Overbeeke's model of the performative exchange [see 2004] be adopted as "a general theoretical framework for understanding the nature of a user's aesthetic interaction with design projects". [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

2009 The Canadian performer-theorist Erin Manning [Wikipedia biography], founder of SenseLab [homepage] - "a laboratory for thought in motion" - at Concordia University, Montreal, publishes "Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy", in which she examines the phase of artistic movement prior to any physical displacement of the body. She calls this the phase of "incipient movement", and sees it as the good choreographer's task to understand "thought in motion". [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

2009 Laurie Simmons turns from photographing dolls house drama [see 1976] to working with life-sized sex dolls instead [image and Harper's Bazaar commentary].

2009 Peter Brugger [see 1994] now presents a conference paper entitled "Phantomology", in which he adopts Stanislaw Lem's term "phantomology" [see 1964] and takes his audience on "a clinical tour through virtual body space". He is particularly interested in phantom limb phenomena [see 1871 (Mitchell)] and spatial hemineglect [see 1978 (Bisiach and Luzzatti)] (a) because these involve the same sort of hallucinatory perception which is seen in other autoscopic phenomena, and (b) because they can be extended to reflect upon very serious issues such as the causes of self harm and hostile semiphantoms. Brugger's view on hemisphericity are also interesting, in that he posits that the right hemisphere has acquired a responsibility for threat detection and therefore is more concerned with negative emotions than positive - hence, thanks to the contralaterality of brain-body control, the "sinister" nature of leftness. The left hemisphere monitors the more positive emotions. [THREAD = AUTOSCOPIC PHENOMENA]

2009 The British artist Richard Wright [Wikipedia biography] wins the Turner Prize by turning the entire exhibition room at the Tate into a single golden "canvas". [THEME = AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL ART]

RESEARCH ISSUE - MULTIPLE NARRATIVE: Readers unfamiliar with what cognitive science has to say about metaphor should preread the Companion Resource [scroll to Section 8] before proceeding. Not only does cognitive science know relatively little about the processes involved in transmitting a single narrative thread from a semiotic source to a semiotic destination, it has even less to say about the possibility of deliberately multiplexed narratives. Take for example the literary device we know as the "parable" - a short and apparently straightforward tale, which, upon further consideration, reveals a far deeper figurative meaning [Greek parabole = "comparison, illustration, analogy"]. Such works have long been used to put complicated messages across to a generally unsophisticated audience, as with parables used in Sunday schools. More complex works of allegory and satire make ever deeper allusions, by co-aligning both a surface and a figurative narrative. As dutiful audiences we are be able to cope with multiple narratives at least some of the time, but a definitive model of the processing involved has not yet been devised.

2009 Therese Margolles [see 1995] exhibits "What Else Could We Talk About?" at the Venice Biennale. As with her previous work she bases her installation around mortuary detritus in an attempt to give the victims of drug crime a voice of sorts. Here is how one commentator reported the event .....

"[The exhibition room] packed an unmitigated punch which assaulted all my senses as soon as I crossed the threshold. The room stank. It was warmer and slightly fetid. It was darker: crimson dark. The walls of the room were hung with blood-soaked shrouds. It was a sweet, cloying, humid, and claustrophobic chamber which stopped me in my tracks ....." (Garrett, 2009 online). [THREAD = DISTURBING ART (TABOO)]

2010 The University of Aberystwyth's Heike Roms [homepage] begins work on "It Was Forty Years ago Today", a research project looking at the history of performance art in Wales, 1965 to 1979 [project homepage].

2010 Louis-Philippe Demers [see 2006] contributes an event entitled "Embodiment and Robotic Arts" [details] to this year's ShanghAI Lectures. [THREAD = ANIMATED MECHANISM]

2010 The present author [see 1980] delivers a paper entitled "The Forensic Ergonomics of Distraction Errors: A Computer Simulation" to the Annual Conference of the Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors, Keele. The presentation begins by reminding delegates of the sort of hierarchical control models seen in cognitive science [e.g., 1990 (Norman)], and then demonstrates how an amalgam of such models have been implemented in the Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this]. The conference PowerPoint is available for private study - click here to download.

2010 The present author [see 1980] delivers a paper entitled "The Human Operator Revisited: Autonomous Machines as Equals (or not quite) in the Control Room of the Future" to the International Control Room Design Conference, Paris. The presentation begins by reminding delegates of the real-time control architecture provided by the vertebrate nervous system, and then demonstrates how the Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] uses second-order representation of mental states to make machine-autonomous decisions. The presentation PowerPoint is available for private study - click here for details.

2010 The British performance artist Anna Dumitriu [Wikipedia biography] performs "The Emergence of Consciousness" at the Brighton Lighthouse. In this performance she is blindfolded and wrapped in gaffer tape like an Egyptian mummy, so that her only contact with the outside world is through a single tapping stick [see images and write-up]. She then navigates a room alongside a mobile robot programmed to do the same. Neither the artist nor the machine are particularly effective when constrained to a single sensory channel, and the audience learns experientially by becoming just additional objects "in the way" of the performers.

RESEARCH ISSUE - MULTIPLE CHANNEL AESTHETICS: Dumitriu's performance invites many interesting variations. She could, for example, compare her blind-navigational abilities - both objectively and in terms of any accompanying thoughts and emotions - under different conditions. For example she could use touch sensors of different lengths, or perhaps even do without one altogether and rely on actual bodily contact. In the latter case, her movements would be no better informed than those of an amoeba, and her response repertoire would be simplified to a two-way choice between rapid withdrawal (if the stimulus is chemically or physically noxious) and envelop-and-eat (if the stimulus is chemically attractive). Such an experiment could be extended to include two equally ill-equipped agents in the same performance arena, whose task it is in the interest of the survival of their species to communicate the goodness (= beauty?) of items located in that arena. If this was done using a numeric scale of one to ten, say, then we would have a better insight into the sort of communication which in more complex animals emerges as aesthetic preference. It would be also be interesting to simulate this study using the present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this].

2010 The American psychologist Flip Phillips [academic homepage] is lead author on a paper entitled "Fechner's Aesthetics Revisited", in which the effect of stimulus complexity is factored in alongside the effect of simple proportion. Given ten pebble-like images to choose from, graded in surface rippling but of equal proportion, subjects showed a clear preference for #1, the smoothest, and #9 and #10, the most convoluted. [THREAD = THE NATURE OF BEAUTY]

2010 The art historian and academic Steven Jacobs [departmental biography] publishes a paper entitled "The History and Aesthetics of the Classical Film Still", in which he explores the ability of this category of images to convey the action of the moving picture it relates to.

2010 Ken Rinaldo [see 2000] unveils the Paparazzi Bots, five life-size robots [image] who track onlookers by their body heat and take their picture.

2010 [See firstly 1949, George V] A much older Tony Sale retrieves the robot George V from the garage it has been stored in since 1950, cleans it up and fits new batteries, and finds to his credit that it still works [report; video]. [STOP PRESS: We note with regret that Tony Sale died 28th August 2011 - see Guardian obituary.]

2010 [See firstly 1934 (pragmatics) and 1979 (Bach and Harnish)] At the 4th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics, Madrid, the Russian researcher Svetlana Bochaver presents a paper entitled "Pragmatics of Theatre Performance" in which she demonstrates how two hitherto separate theories - speech act theory [more on this] and Shannonian communication theory [more on this] - might be applied to something as complex as the theatrical exchange. Bochaver's point is that theatrical propositional speech cannot be judged as true or false in the usual philosophical sense, but only from the virtual point of view of the fictional speaker. Bochaver refers to this sort of communication as "double coded" (firstly by the author and then by the players) and "double decoded" (firstly by the audience at face value, and then by the audience having "identified" psychologically with the players). [THREAD = SPEECH ACT THEORY; THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE]

RESEARCH ISSUE: Bochaver also notes that it is difficult to apply strict scientific experimentation to the performative exchange. As a result explanatory models tend to remain relatively superficial "context diagrams" - approximations but not specifically testable [more on context diagrams]. The present author is attempting to develop a more powerful cognitive model using the Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this].

2010 Monaghan et al publish a report on the state of the art with Artificial Intelligence research, noting immediately that "we are still waiting for truly effective computer models" (p642). One particular problem is that software tends to lack "adaptability and flexibility" (as when you have to re-tune speech recognition systems every time the speaker changes). They continue to see great promise in the neural network genre of AI because each simulation is based on operationally derived "statistical associations" between hardware units rather than upon hard-and-fast rules. They are particularly hopeful about neural networks which support some degree of modularity, especially where this modularity is not established until run time. They term this property "emergent modularity" (p645).

2010 Oliver Sacks [see 1973] now publishes "The Mind's Eye", in which he presents five more case histories in neurogenic cognitive disorders - one of them, his own Asperger's Syndrome and face blindness. [See next 1985] [THREAD = POPULAR NEUROPSYCHOLOGY]

2010 The American cognitive scientist William P. Seeley [Bates College homepage] presents a conference paper entitled "Seeing How Hard it Is" to the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, and follows this up with a formal manuscript entitled "How Smooth it Looks" [full text online (draft only)]. In these papers he looks at how multiple sensory inputs come to be integrated by the brain's attentional systems. He is particularly concerned with this sort of "crossmodality" when the inputs derive from artworks rather than from everyday external scenes, and in an attempt to ground his approach in hard neuroscientific data he adopts two major pre-existing bodies of attentional theory, namely the "Diagnostic Recognition Framework" [see 1998 (Schyns)] and the "Biased Competition Model of Attention" [see 1989 (Duncan and Humphreys)]. These general-purpose theories become specifically relevant to the philosophy of art because artworks can be regarded as "stimuli intentionally designed to trigger perceptual, affective, and cognitive responses diagnostic for their content in viewers, spectators, listeners, and readers" (p2). After due consideration of evidence, he summarises the workings of this system as follows .....

"The range of attentional processes that I have identified here can be thought of as common working memory strategies that facilitates the integration and maintenance of salient information over iterations of perceptual processes via a form of tacit rehearsal. [.....] Crossmodal sensory interactions contribute to these processes via a circuit that links the same prefrontal areas to [the inferior and superior colliculi] respectively [and] the circuits involved in emotional attention can be thought of analogously as supporting an emotional working memory" (pp16-17).

Seeley then closes with a mention of Peter Kivy's "Contour Theory" [see 1980 (Kivy)] concerning which he makes the following observation .....

"How can a piece of music sound like the bodily expression of an emotion? [.....] Dance movements carry the same expressive information, and thereby can be used to induce the same emotional responses, as the music they were set to. [..... Research] demonstrates that bodily movements carry expressive information and are alone sufficient to enable perceivers to recognise the moods and emotions of individuals. Further, since dance movements and musical compositions carry the same expressive information, we can perceptually recognise the expressive qualities of a musical composition in the visual appearance of dance movements set to that music. [.....] This suggests that there is an abstract dynamic quality, a contour, which is generally constitutive of the content of an emotion and can potentially be realised in any of a range of media" (p18; emphasis added). [See next 2011 (Seeley)] [THREAD = NEUROAESTHETICS]

2011 William Seeley [see 2010] now publishes an article entitled "What is the Cognitive Neuroscience of Art?", in which he explains how cognitive neuroscience has of late been deploying its methods in the service of aesthetic enquiry. This has been happening so quickly, indeed, that field is expanding faster than the supporting definitions. Upon investigation, for example, the terms "philosophy of art", "empirical aesthetics", the "cognitive neuroscience of art", and "neuroaesthetics" turn out to be less synonymous than one might have imagined, thus .....

"The cognitive neuroscience of art is a subdivision of empirical aesthetics devoted to [.....] the application of neuroscientific methods to the study of our engagement with artworks. [.....] I am not sure there was a neuroscience of art a decade or so ago. There is a branch of experimental psychology called empirical aesthetics. This field traces its roots back to a book published in 1871 by Gustav Fechner [q.v.] [..... and] is as old as psychology itself. [.....] Nonetheless, a decade ago the idea of a genuine experimental neuroscience of art was only just emerging as a productive possibility [..... but] it was missing the marks of a true experimental science: empirically testable hypotheses and associated experimental research" (p1).

Seeley then explains that the neuroscience of art has perforce to be a cognitive neuroscience because it deals constantly and directly with the interplay of sensory information and higher cognition. He cites Noel Carroll's argument [see 2008] that part of the power of movies is their ability to control the direction of the audience's attention, and Mark Rollins' argument [see 2004] that painters do likewise by manipulating the saliency of selected features of the image. However he then argues that it would be better to study the artworks themselves as "attentional engines" rather than search for "attentional strategies" in the minds of the artists responsible for those artworks. He is also impressed by the "ISC" research technique developed by Princeton University's Uri Hasson [see 2008 (Hasson et al)]. Finally, in attempting to bring all these diverse threads together he adopts also Duncan and Humphreys' (1989) "Biased Competition Model" of selective attention [see 1989 (Duncan and Humphreys)], whose key points can be seen in the following .....

"A biased competition model of selective attention can be used to model the associated behaviours. In ordinary contexts, selection is a critical problem for perception. The environment is replete with information, only a small subset of which is salient in any given context. Add the fact that our basic processing resources are limited, and we can readily see that we need a means to selectively filter information on the fly in order to efficiently collect the information necessary to achieve our immediate goals in real time. Biased competition models describe fronto-parietal attentional networks that direct eye movements, bias the sensitivity of populations of neurons in sensory cortices to goal-related features of the environment, and thereby explain the influence of task relevance, semantic salience, and affective salience in perception and attention" (p3).

2011 The Canadian philosopher Brian Massumi [homepage] publishes "Semblance and Event", in which he promotes the notion of "semblance" as the key to understanding the dramatic force of time-extensive artworks such as interactive installations and happenings.

KEY CONCEPT - SEMBLANCE: A "semblance" is Massumi's term for the "lived abstraction" of continuous experience, a continuously evolving "best-guess" interpretation of the perceptual deluge.

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] simulates semblance by cyclically updating a central dramatic interpretation of the world in the light of the latest perceptual input. This updating cycle operates about six to eight times a second, and an entire "dramatic analysis" module is devoted to the process.

2011 In an interview introducing her latest collaboration, "The Threat of Silence", the British academic and "theatre-maker", Jill Greenhalgh [University of Aberystwyth homepage] reflects upon the artistic process. Here is the core argument .....

"Each performance I make starts with a question - something I am trying to solve. A thought that needs unravelling - understanding. The tool that I use to answer the questions that haunt me is performance. It is the language that allows me to transform the thought, the question, into three dimensions [.....] I use performance because words, or at least my ability to use them, cannot articulate the thought. [.....] [As far as 'The Threat of Silence' is concerned] I would be satisfied if they have experienced an uncomfortable beauty, that they are left with a resonance of the weave of image, text, and sound that invokes a reflection of the chaos of contemporary living [.....] I want to evoke the power, wisdom, and potential of quietness. The strength in this. I hope my images and sounds will remain and return as glimpses of a remembering of a place of powerful stillness" ...." (Chapter website; emphasis added). [THREAD - THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF PERFORMANCE]

RESEARCH ISSUE: Greenhalgh's personal reflection neatly restates the entire issue of artistic intent [see 1946 (Wimsatt and Beardsley)], and goes a long way towards establishing the intentional as far from fallacious. Cognitive science has yet to decode the mental mechanisms responsible for the long-term storage of "images and sounds" of the sort referred to above.

2011 Under the title "Talk to me?", New York City's Museum of Modern Art stages an exhibition exploring the communication between people and objects [follow their progress]. [THREADS = THEORY OF MIND, IMAGINARY FRIENDS, and ANIMISM]

2011 As spokesperson for the BCS Computer Arts Society, Catherine Mason [see 2008] now features the work of the digital artist Anne-Sarah Le Meur [see 2009] in an article entitled "Computer Art". [THREAD = COMPUTERS IN ART]

2011 The British researcher John Cummins [no convenient biography] delivers a paper entitled "Do the Origins of Biological General Intelligence Lie in an Adaptation of the Stress Response?", in which he explores the evolutionary justification of biological intelligence in cybernetic terms. He sets out his understanding in a ten-element flow-of-control diagram, and one of the keystone elements in this model is concerned with keeping records of past control decisions, in order that their relative success can inform future decision making. He calls this element the "Narrative of Control".

RESEARCH ISSUE - LOGIC VERSUS MODULARITY IN COGNITIVE MODELLING: Flow-of-Control diagrams express the logical purpose of a process but say nothing about the modular architecture of the machine which is to implement said process. We may illustrate what is at stake here by considering the simplest flow of control system of all, namely the "homeostat", the components of which are (1) a controlled device with a pre-set output requirement, (2) a controller capable of adjusting that device's output, (3) a sensor capable of reporting the current output value, and (4) a comparator to report differences (if any) between the actual and the pre-set value back to the controller for action [see diagram in Companion Resource (Figure 1)]. These four components can, for practical reasons rather than logical, be allocated to four separate modular structures, or three, or two, or one. Moreover if two or more modules are decided upon, and if communication between them is by wire, then those components need not even be on the same continent! So to cut a long story short, if we want to understand a complex system we need to know at least as much about its physical structure as its logical.

2011 The Australian/New Zealand academic Kathy Cleland [homepage] sets up the "Robots as Theatre" website, to examine the role of embodied software as "actors and performers" in the world at large. She will be studying how audiences "read" robotic performance and, when appropriate, how one robotic performer interacts with robotic others. [THREAD = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE and AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS]

2011 The Italian-born researcher-performer Dario Magnani, delivers a lecture entitled "What is the place of the non-human" [see synopsis] at the University of Western Australia's SymbioticA Centre. [THREAD = THE UNCANNY]

2011 The Canadian choreographer Dave St. Pierre presents "A Little Bit of Tenderness" at Sadler's Wells. Highlights include an audience invasion by the players, in your face nudity (literally), masturbation, and - to paraphrase one critic - general vulgarity and witlessness. Defenders of the performance see the work as very much in the spirit of Marinetti's Variety Theatre Manifesto [see 1913]. Detractors worry that there exists a level of trust between performer and audience which you breach at your peril. [THREAD = DISTURBING ART]

2011 The Canadian artist Chris Salter, Director of the Hexagram Institute at Concordia University, Montreal, [departmental homepage] delivers a SymbioticA seminar entitled "Alien Agencies", in which he explores how artists work with "new performative materialities" such as hybrid studio-laboratories, and considers how best to study impromptu performance in a scientific context. [THREADS = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE and THE UNCANNY]

2011 David Marron [see 2009] now exhibits "The Physician" [image], a life-sized sculpture in wood and plaster of a nightmarish plague-doctor. [THREADS = THE PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGE (MULTIPLE NARRATIVES) and THE UNCANNY]

***** STATE OF THE ART, OCTOBER 2011 *****

This timeline has woven together together a number of disparate academic threads, not least mental philosophy, robotic science, semiotics, performance theory, fine art history, and aesthetics. The overall goal has been to improve our understanding of art's ability to induce affective states by the movement, real or implied, of representations. It does not matter whether the representations in question are painted, carved, modelled, photographed, filmed, posed, acted-out, or animated; or - if animated - whether that animation is of a two-dimensional screen sprite, a three-dimensional virtual world, or a tangible physical apparatus; or - if the animation is of an apparatus - whether that apparatus is anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, or robomorphic. For the questions are always the same, namely (1) why we are affected emotionally, and (2) to what end did the artist in question want us to be affected emotionally. For reasons which we do not ourselves yet fully understand, we are particularly interested in those cases where the affect in question is that of unease, hence the tendency to dwell on Gothic art and literature, the darker side of symbolism, and the "uncanny" as it has been formally defined [see 1906 (Jentsch)]. As for the exploratory resources available to us from cognitive science's research toolbox, we take the position that surprisingly few experimental paradigms are capable of properly informing the sort of interdisciplinary debate we are concerned with here - the world's research dollars go to single-discipline professors in highly specialised departments, this being how most [but not all] scientific problems get solved. The following methods either already are crossing disciplinary boundaries, or are eagerly expected to do so soon .....

Gestalt Analysis: The system of visual scene parsing developed by Rudolf Arnheim and described in his book "Art and Visual Perception" [see 1954] is arguably the most important single datastream in visual aesthetics. Not only is it grounded in the empirically demonstrable Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organisation [see 1923 (Wertheimer)] and the literature on visual illusion [e.g., 1913 (Ponzo)], but its findings also co-validate, and are co-validated by, the research into Gaze Tracking, Stabilised Retinal Images, and Thematic Apperception discussed below. In other words, it is only when your visual system has given you a Gestalt to be getting on with [and this includes the sort of makeshift and fleeting Gestalten you get with gestalt-free art] that can you start to draw out any sort of narrative from an artwork.

Gaze Tracking: This datastream is important because line of sight is the most accessible indicator of momentary visual attention. The technology is now widely available and relatively inexpensive. The present author worked with Arrington Research Inc., Scottsdale, AZ [homepage] when modelling Meinong's theory of an Objektiv stage in visual perception [See Smith (2009) for the textual report, or simply replay the conference PowerPoint]. The technology has also been effectively applied to the scanning of works of art by Paul Locher and his associates [see 2006].

Michottian Causality [see 1950 (Michotte)]: This datastream is important because it focuses attention on the low-level mechanisms involved in the interpretation of movement, that is to say, before any conscious processes of dramatic interpretation have taken place.

Thematic Apperception Test [see 1935 (Morgan and Murray)]: This datastream is important (a) because it shows the spectator's full narrative understanding of what was intended by an artist, and (b) because it fully expects said narrative understanding to be more or less autobiographically coloured. As Magda Arnold [see 1962] explained it, the TAT is simultaneously relevant (a) to the theory of fantasy, per se, (b) to individual fantasy structures, and (c) to any personality theory hoping to explain these fantasy structures.

Stabilised Retinal Images [See 1956 (Ditchburn and Pritchard)]: This datastream is important because it reflects objectively on the unconscious building blocks of a visual scene by inducing them to fail consciously. It is therefore an important source of insight and covalidation for stage theories of visual perception.

Cognitive Modelling: This datastream is arguably the most important single aid to effective mental philosophising. As noted previously [see 2003 (present author)], some sort of modelling is always involved in theorising and sometimes includes the use of diagrams to convey the resulting theoretical propositions more elegantly than in words. With the notable exception of Daniel Dennett [see 1978] philosophers model with words, whilst cognitive scientists prefer diagrams [compare, for example, 1891 (Freud) with 1982 (Ellis)]. To understand a natural phenomenon, in other words, is to have modelled it in some way, naming the parts you suspect are involved, stating their purpose, and describing the processes you suspect of linking them together into some functionally greater whole. Even if your understanding is as-yet-incomplete, a partial model at least allows you to point to the critical terrae incognitae in either the parts or their relationships, and thus helps direct future investigation to where it is most needed. Models are thus akin to "design specifications" in the engineering sense, that is to say, the knowledge invites physical exploitation in some way, as when our understanding of atomic structure [which has never ever been seen, only ever modelled!] was used to develop nuclear power. When the model is a model of the mind then that knowledge can be exploited in a number of ways - to design better instrument panels, for example, or to make us better golfers, or detectives, or magicians, or educators, or psychotherapists, or salespeople, liars, advertisers, dictators, snipers, and so on. The mind is also explicitly modelled in artificial intelligence software or autonomous robotics, although in this respect cognitive science does not do modelling at all well. It is also exceptionally poor at modelling the cognition involved in aesthetic appreciation and artistic intent. The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] draws upon a large number of influential - but as-yet-unintegrated - cognitive models, pooling their strengths and addressing as many of their weaknesses as possible.

Hemisphericity Tests: It is a relatively straightforward task to determine objectively whether a person is left brain dominant, right brain dominant, or somewhere in between [see 1978 (Lindgren) and 1983 (Strub and Geschwind)]. It is also well-established that a lot of "right-brainedness" is involved in appreciating the visuo-spatial world, in responding to aesthetic emotions, in fuzzy and metaphoric cognition, and - above all - in taking a second-person perspective in pictorial interpretation [see 2005 (Saxe and Wexler)]. A person's hemisphericity is thus a useful classifying variable, along with such things as gender, education, and class, in any independent measures experimental design with an aesthetic measure as dependent variable.

Propositionality and Metarepresentation: The topics of propositionality and metarepresentation are so fundamental to understanding human cognition that - like the wood for the trees - it is easy overlook them, presuming instead that their respective problems have been solved when in fact the science is as thin and inconsistent as the phenomena themselves are ubiquitous. To start with, every act of perception involves at least one proposition, namely that which acknowledges a current sensory stimulation.

ASIDE: [Readers unfamiliar with the term taxis should pre-read the entry in Glossary 1 of the Companion Resource before proceeding; the paragraph also presumes a working familiarity with the notion of perceptual stages - see 1874 (Wernicke).] The ability to respond selectively to the presence of a particular external stimulus emerges remarkably low down in the phylogenetic scale. Amoebae for example, as basic as they are, are able to withdraw from "bad" or attempt to engulf "good" chemical signals. Such chemotaxes require no nervous system and involve no propositional processing at all. Even in more complex organisms possessed of nervous systems, behaviour consists predominantly of reflexes and automatisms and requires no thinking about. In using the word "proposition", therefore, we fully intend that it be regarded as something which can only happen in nervous systems with at least two levels of hierarchical complexity; specifically, that you can only achieve propositionality in a cognitive system - living or artificial - when a higher cognitive module needs to be kept informed about what its lower modules are up to.

Representations of current sensory stimulation are the atoms out of which all higher cognitive content is built, and may conveniently be thought of as fitting the generic phrase structure shown below (where S is the sensory modality in question, and α..ω describe the physical vectors - direction, tone, intensity, etc. - by which the channel in question is encoded) .....

<SENSATION {s} VECTORS { α..ω }>

[E.g., "SENSORY ALERT: redness hue 27 at azimuth 271º and elevation -16º"]

[E.g., " SENSORY ALERT: redness hue 29 at azimuth 270º and elevation -15º"]

[E.g., " SENSORY ALERT: redness hue 31 at azimuth 269º and elevation -14º"]

ASIDE: [Readers unfamiliar with the "bit" as the industry standard unit of information should pre-read the Companion Resource (Section 1) before proceeding.] It has been estimated that some 100 billion bits of raw information fall upon the body per second (Frank, 1963 - check it out). This contrasts starkly with a higher cognitive system which can cope with only about 16 bits per second! The nervous system deals with the necessary data reduction in two stages. Firstly it deliberately totally ignores 99.99% of what is available to it at the periphery. This reduces the information load on the sensory system to about 10 million bits per second. It achieves this reduction by selectively directing attention away from some sources of information, or by selectively attenuating the sensitivity of as many sensory receptors as possible. Secondly it recodes and simplifies away 99.9999% of the information which remains - the information which actually made it into a sensory nerve - by recognising known patterns whenever possible. Starting with the 10 million bits of information left over from stage one above it selects figure(s) at the expense of ground and does its best to identify conceptually rather than by physical description the object(s) which generated all the input in the first place. This "pattern recognition" process is now further explained .....

Where multi-channel inputs reliably occur together it can usually be safely deduced that there exists some single external entity responsible for it [Ramachandran and Hirstein - see 1999 - describe this process as "perceptual grouping"; as to how many external entities can be coped with at a time, see 1988 (Pylyshyn and Storm on Multiple Object Tracking)]. This is a judgement which can only be made by higher cognition, for the simple reason that only higher cognition has access to all the sensory channels involved. This higher level cognition may conveniently be thought of as fitting the generic phrase structure shown below (where X is the "semantic subject", that is to say, the thing in question) .....

<{X} AT HAND>

[Read as "SENSOR ALERT: entity X at hand"]

[E.g., "There's a lion about]

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: Note that the VECTOR data elements have now disappeared. This is because the Konrad design presumes that tactical tracking - the real-time monitoring of self and others as physical entities in three-dimensional space - is such a biologically vital function that it warrants a dedicated processing module all to itself, complete with priority access to the motor system. Konrad calls this specialised tracking module TTRK, and allows it to take control over behaviour whenever tactical emergencies render higher cognition an unnecessary luxury. It is possible that many of the differences remarked upon by Peter Brugger [see 2009] between spatial and psychological perspective taking are due to this divergence of the subsystems involved.

A still more powerful class of propositions - predicating propositions - permits complex scene constructions to be internally represented. Predicating propositions start with one or other of the generic phrase structures shown below, according to whether they are describing some exceptional quality, Q, of the semantic subject [first example below] or its behaviour, B [second example below] .....

<{X} AT HAND IS {Q}>

[Read as "(The) X is Q"]

[E.g., "(The) lion is big"]

<{X} AT HAND IS {B}>

[Read as "(The) X is B-ing"]

[E.g., "(The) lion is stalking"]

ASIDE: We have inserted the determiner "the" into our above examples because it is standard English to have it so. We have parenthesised them, however, because in processing terms we suspect that determiners are not strictly needed at this juncture, noting that they are regularly omitted in case-inflected languages such as Latin and the modern Slavics. We say exceptional quality Q because most Xs have a standard set of qualities associated with them which can therefore be safely left unsaid. There are a number of good online tutorials on the subject of the hierarchical structuring of semantic memory, most of which go back to a seminal paper by Collins and Quillian (1969) - try this one for starters.

The question now arises as to what X is B-ing towards. The fundamental issue here is that the individual elements of grammatically straightforward sentences - a subject, a verb, a direct object, and (where appropriate) an indirect object, do not appear instantly in cognition. Instead they have to be built up over time out of a succession of individually elemental propositions, and no firm decision can be made until the final element has been processed. Here is a string of such elemental propositions, now involving a second external element, Y .....

<{X} AT HAND; {X} AT HAND IS {B}; {Y} AT HAND>

[Read as "(An) X is at hand; (The) X is B-ing; (A) Y is at hand"]

[E.g., "There's a lion about; (The) lion is stalking; There's a zebra about"]

ASIDE: Note that we have used semicolons to separate the individual propositions within a multiple-proposition thought, and have <bracketed off thus> the thought as an attempt at an overriding interpretation - one in which the semantic subject and the semantic object are precisely identified. It may also help to explain the relevance of propositional structures to visual aesthetics if we mention at this juncture that the all-important propositional sequence seems to be determined in large part by the sequence of eye scanning fixations [see THREAD = VISUAL SCANNING]. We create propositions concerning the objects we fixate upon, but we also fixate upon objects when the propositions we already have are not yet one hundred percent definitive. It is a cyclical real-time process which constantly creates a need for its own renewal. In other words, when we know a viewer's scanpath for an artwork, it helps us understand what that viewer is thinking and feeling about it.

Here is how the three concatenated propositions shown above can be compressed into a single more informative one, in which by some process of dramatic inference Y has been selected as the grammatical object rather than the grammatical subject .....

<{X} AT HAND IS {B {Y}}>

[Read as "(The) X is B-ing Y"]

[E.g., "(The) lion is stalking (the) zebra"]

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] dedicates an entire module to the process of Dramatic Analysis. This module sits atop the perceptual-conceptual information stream but also closely monitors what is going on in the tactical tracking pathway. This allows it to know an entity (a) for what it is and customarily does [a judgement which requires access to the mind's semantic network], and (b) for what it is currently up to [a judgement which requires access to its present coordinates and movement vectors]. Readers who require convincing of the need for these two aspects to be kept separate should check out typical Air Traffic Control screens - try this one - all of which sacrifice semantic information by using only the briefest of identifying codes, and give pride of place instead to positioning data.

Now that we know who are the doers and who are the done-untos in the world around us, we may define higher cognition as the generation and constant evaluation of the "best set" of propositions describing that world. Remembering that propositions are by definition the smallest units of thought which can be adjudged as true or false, higher cognition is where an assemblage of individually minor truths becomes something of distinct practical utility. And because the individual truths are constantly coming and going, we shall henceforth be taking it as axiomatic that some sort of "stack processing" has to be involved in their management [for more on which see the Companion Resource (scroll to Section 1.4)].

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] implements the sort of cyclical cognitive processing described by Kenneth Craik [see 1945] and updates its best set of propositions once every pass around the cycle [in practice, six to eight times a second]. The resulting dataset provides both a "gist" for the processing already carried out and the "context" for that which is to follow, doing for the mind what the "CIC" [USN term = "Combat Information Center"] does for a warship.

We encounter a whole new order of propositional complexity once mental verbs such as "want", "intend", "think", "know", "doubt", etc., are encountered, that is to say, when the predication is of a state of X's mind rather than merely of its appearance or behaviour. Such representations-of-representations are known as "metarepresentations", and metarepresentations are important because they enable a cognitive system to process a thing's existence, nature, and intention all in one thought. Metarepresentational propositions fit one or other of the generic phrase structures shown below, according to whether the mentated behaviour B has a direct object or not .....

<{X} AT HAND{MENTAL STATE {B}}>

[Read as "(The) X mentates B-ing"]

[E.g., "(The) lion intends eating"]

<{X} AT HAND{MENTAL STATE {B{Y}}}>

[Read as "(The) X mentates B-ing Y"]

[E.g., "(The) lion intends eating the zebra"]

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] is designed to switch from representational to metarepresentational content as present input dictates [and will inevitably be metarepresentational when that present input is re-entrant inner speech]. When the system detects no "agency" in the object presently being attended to, it treats it as having no state of mind and allocates it to one of the representational propositional forms previously discussed. When, however, it recognises that object as animate, it allocates it to the most appropriate metarepresentational form. For a fully detailed comparison of these two basic processing options, see Smith (2010) [see 2010 (Smith)].

Even at this stage, cognition still lacks perspectivalness and mine-ness in Thomas Metzinger's use of those words [see 1995 and 2003, respectively], because there is no experiencing ego to do the experiencing. We may illustrate what is at issue here by staying with our existing example and asking how we might propositionalise the situation where the lion is looking directly at you for its lunch. Now the semantic object, Y, is not some external entity, but ME myself, and this duly affects the make-up of both the long and short sentence structures from above. Here is the uncompressed format, revised to reflect the new element of mine-ness .....

<{X} AT HAND; {X} AT HAND IS {B}; {ME} AT HAND>

[Read as "(An) X is at hand; (The) X is B-ing; I am at hand"]

[E.g., "There's a lion about; (The) lion is stalking; I am about"]

..... and here is the compressed format .....

<{X} AT HAND{MENTAL STATE {B{ME}}}>

[Read as "(The) X mentates B-ing me"]

[E.g., "(The) lion intends eating me"]

Of course, mine-ness can show itself just as easily with ME as the semantic subject, as would be the case if I were the predator and the zebra my prey, not the lion's. Here is the I-form of the structure immediately above .....

<{I} AT HAND{MENTAL STATE {B{Y}}}>

[Read as "I mentate B-ing (the) Y"]

[E.g., "I intend eating (the) zebra"]

ASIDE: Note how the propositional processing module of any artificial intelligence system is forced not just to take a first person perspective in constructing a complex proposition, but also to allow for that first person to take either the agent or the object role. Many of the mysteries of phenomenal subjectivity in the biological mind will be resolved, we feel, once this information processing nicety is fully understood.

Propositional processing becomes more complicated again when the external object is a painting or sculpture. This is because there is always at least one more mind to analyse (i.e., that of the artist h/self ) than there are actual agents depicted. With no agents in an artwork - a landscape painting, for example - the canonical form of the metaprepresentation has to acknowledge the invisible presence of an artist, A, perhaps long dead, and it does so as follows .....

<{I}{MENTAL STATE #1 <{A}{MENTAL STATE #2{B{Y}}}}>>

[Read as "I mentate that (the) artist mentates B-ing (the) Y"]

[E.g., "I think (the) artist wanted to depict the Garden of Eden"]

ASIDE: We have included the subordinating conjunction "that" [bold, red] because mental verbs always involve subordinate clauses of the form <...<...>>. We have already discussed in detail [see 1970 (Miller et al)] how "recursive representations" of this sort often totally command the interpretation of an artwork.

With one agent, Z, in an artwork - for example Caspar Friedrich's "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" (1818) [image] - the representation needs to reflect the viewer's guess at the artist, A's, expectation of his/her response to the work, thus calling for a response of the form "I guess the artist wanted me to [experience the depicted scene] from the depicted agent's perspective", as follows .....

<{I}{MENTAL STATE #1 <{A}{MENTAL STATE #2<{I MENTAL STATE #3 {etc.

[Read as "I mentate that (the) artist mentates that I mentate etc."]

[E.g., "I think that Friedrich wanted I should share the Wanderer's awe at etc."]

ASIDE: In the system of recursive representation championed by Miller, Kessel, and Flavell [see 1970] this is an example of a three-loop recursion.

With several agents, Z₁ to Z_n, in an artwork - for example Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" (1498) [image] - the representation needs to reflect the viewer's guess at the artist's narrative intention. This calls for a response of the form "I guess the artist wanted me to contemplate [such-and-such event] from all possible perspectives, one by one, the better to understand the overall drama", as follows .....

<{I}{MENTAL STATE #1 <{A}{MENTAL STATE #2 <{I}{MENTAL STATE #3 <{Z₁} etc.

[Read as "I mentate that (the) artist mentates that I mentate that Z1 is B-ing etc.]

[E.g., "I think Leonardo wanted me to understand that [Judas etc.]"]

ASIDE - PROJECT KONRAD DESIGN FEATURE: In the system of recursive representation championed by Miller, Kessel, and Flavell [see 1970], this structure begins as a four-loop recursion but needs a number of follow-up clauses [not shown] to do justice to the complexity of the narrative. This processing will take time because each apostle needs to be identified and his role in the overall drama retrieved from long-term memory. The present author's Konrad cognitive simulation software [more on this] recently successfully experimented with two-loop recursive cognition [see 2010 (Smith)] and has work in progress with more complex structures such as that shown above.

Which brings us, at long long last, to the topic area we have really been interested in all along, namely "The Uncanny". This topic emerged from an academic exchange in the early 20th century between Ernst Jentsch [see 1906] and Sigmund Freud [see 1919] concerning situations where we are momentarily uncertain at a deeply visceral level what a depicted figure - a statue, a painting, or one of humankind's many types of puppetry - intends towards us. Does it, or does it not, mean us well? Is it, indeed, alive at all? Is it, in other words, an agent, to be processed with a meta-representational propositional structure, or an inanimate object, to be processed with one of the more straightforward representational structures? For example with Henri Matisse's "Portrait of Madame Matisse" [see 1913 (Matisse)] there are two possible interpretations and they flip back and forth from one look to the next, producing a kaleidoscopic parade of felt emotion as they do so - check it out here. The simplest interpretation assumes that the work is an exercise in colour balance and compositional effect rather than a retinally accurate portrait, and takes a propositional form in which only the artist and the onlooker are agents .....

<{A}{MENTAL STATE {B{ME}}}>

[Read as "(The) A mentates B-ing ME"]

[E.g., "Matisse intends impressing me"]

The more complex interpretation is that the mask-face is a more considered statement, concealing we know not what beneath. The processing structure is now accordingly more convoluted because we now have a third agent, namely the one in the picture .....

<{I}{MENTAL STATE #1 <{A}{MENTAL STATE #2 <{I}{MENTAL STATE #3

<{Z} MENTAL STATE #4 <etc.

[Read as "I mentate that (the) artist mentates that I mentate that Z is mentating etc.]

[E.g., "I think Matisse wanted me to understand that Z is feeling [bored, say]"]

RESEARCH ISSUE: DECODING ARTISTIC INTENT: In the system of recursive representation championed by Miller, Kessel, and Flavell [see 1970], this last structure begins as a four-loop recursion. It, too, will take time to process as the alternative explanations are considered on their respective merits to be the definitive explanation. Ultimately, of course, we are trying to work out what was in Matisse's mind at the time. Was he, perhaps, in too much of a hurry to execute a proper face? Or was the mask-like effect a joke, or an insult, or what? It is important to understand these mechanisms because we also see them at work when we interact with avatars [see 1991 (Jeremiah)], robots-per-se [see 2011 (Demers)], robot-performers [see 2011 (Magnani)], fetish-dolls [see 1757 (de Brosses)], demon-dolls [see 1989 (Child's Play)], oddity art [see 2007 (Zhang Peng)], screendance [see 2006 (Rosenberg)], mime [see 1963 (Decroux)], not to mention theatre in general [see 1980 (Elam)] and performance art in particular [see 2011 (Slater)]. For our own part we hesitate to follow the full Freudian line on the uncanny, preferring instead to explore the information flows involved.