Live Encounters and Aesthetic Experience

<i>G. Gabrielle Starr</i>Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience<i>Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience</i>. G. Gabrielle Starr. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Pp. viii+259.

Students should have aesthetic experiences to be fully engaged in science learning at any level. A general education science instructor can foster opportunities for aesthetic educative learning experiences enabling student growth. Drawing on the work of John Dewey and expanding on others in the field, Uhrmacher identifies the characteristics of the aesthetic experience, which include, but are not limited to, connections, active engagement, sensory experience, perceptivity, risk taking, and imagination. I argue that if instructors are not attending to these aesthetic characteristics, then students are not doing (learning) science and will therefore fail to meet any valuable outcomes identified for general education science.

Throughout the Platonic, rationalist, and empiricist traditions in philosophy, art and poetry have been relegated to a position either excluded from, or subordinate to, the highest of human aspirations. Until recently (and perhaps even now), in the ‘‘ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’’ to which Plato referred in the Republic, philosophy has predominated, in its attempt to free thought from rhetoric and from the unreflective influence of the senses. The inheritance of the Platonic view – despite its complexities, and the oft-pointed out literary quality of Plato’s own writings – has survived in some dominant strains of contemporary philosophy, where aesthetics is a secondary operation of epistemology, metaphysics, or semiotics, or where it is as ripe for deconstruction as any other set of cultural signs. One scholar notes that despite the ubiquity of efforts at defining aesthetic criteria, ‘‘aesthetics today is at a loss for words . . . a loss of understanding and a dearth of strategies for understanding artistic practice. . . . Aesthetics has lost its sense of how to read a text, how to interpret a painting, how to experience a poem.’’1 From one perspective, Anglo-American aesthetics has suffered most from the absence of a fundamental theory of aesthetic practice and experience, despite the carefulness of its arguments about criteria for beauty, its debates, particularly in the light of contemporary art, for ontological criteria for the art-object, or its understanding of art institutions and their role in our appreciation of art. In all of these cases, art remains a privileged object for observation, but is subordinate to a philosophy itself wholly undetermined by the aesthetic; and it lacks a sensitivity to the more profound connections between art and life. One notable exception remains Dewey’s classic work, Art as Experience, where aesthetic experience is regarded as a culmination or consummation of experience as such; aesthetic experience, he writes, ‘‘is experience in its integrity,’’ it is ‘‘pure experience . . . freed from the forces that impede and confuse its development as experience; freed, that is, from factors that subordinate an experience as it is directly had to something beyond itself.’’ Art and poetry unify the elements of experience – doing and undergoing, perceiving and making, matter and method – thus correcting the haphazardness or one-sidedness of other kinds of human endeavors. For this reason, Dewey claims, it is

Bennett Reimer completed and defended his dissertation, Common Dimensions of Aesthetic and Religious Experience,' in 1963 and was awarded the Doctor of Education degree in Music Education from the University of Illinois. This work proved to be not only courageous, for there was nothing in the music education literature of the time to prepare the profession for a discussion of the issues Reimer addressed, but also prophetic in the way it grounded, propelled, and even predicted Reimer's scholarly agenda in the decades that followed its publication. The rooting of his dissertation in the writings of John Dewey, Susanne Langer, Leonard Meyer, Paul Tillich, and Karl Jung was enormously influential on much of his subsequent writing in music education philosophy. One need not have read all of Reimer's published works to see the imprint of this dissertation throughout his later writings. In fact, given the powerful influence of his famous book on the philosophy of music education2 and the fact that it too was grounded similarly in the writings of most of these same thinkers, it seems fair to suggest that Reimer's dissertation has shaped, at least indirectly, the philosophical conversations of the music education profession for the last thirty years. Reimer was not the first to examine the apparent intersections between religious and aesthetic experience, of course. For centuries, theologians, philosophers, aestheticians, and ministers have pondered the overlaps that seem to exist between these two profound ways of knowing. In fact, it is difficult to imagine most expressions of religious experience, religious ritual, and personal religious reflection absent the pervasive infusion of rich aesthetic and artistic content.

This essay explores the universal nature of aesthetic, creative, and mystical experience, tracing some essential interrelations among the three. Enlarging upon the work of anthropologist Jacques Maquet, I speculate that “sensory fixedness” is both necessary and sufficient to achieve aesthetic experience, and that the unification of mind engendered by sensory fixedness is the essential source of aesthetic power. Therefore, the role of the aesthetic object (construed broadly) is either as an arbitrary sensory focusing mechanism, or as the physical embodiment of a gestalt facilitating fixedness; the first category is merely attractive, while the second contains all that is truly great in art (visual and auditory). I suggest further that as both creative inspiration and mystical experience result from fixedness, both are related to aesthetic experience. However, while aesthetic experience is rooted in sensation, mystical and creative experience, though often prepared by sensory fixedness, may transcend the sensory domain altogether toward more abstract forms of mental fixedness.

Aesthetic package design: A behavioral, neural, and psychological investigation

The article examines the scientific problem of designing the aesthetic experience formation in 4th-grade students during art lessons. The concepts of experience, aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experience of a fourth grader are clarified. The main focus is on students’ mini-project activities. The article highlights the design-based formation of aesthetic experience as the foundation for artistic and creative activity, the basis of which is artistic creativity. It is determined that aesthetic experience is the result of previous artistic and creative activity during art lessons in grades 1 to 3. Adapted and original creative mini-projects are outlined. The appropriate tools are identified, as well as their use in teachers’ practical work. Practical recommendations and cases are provided. Future research prospects are defined in enriching the line of mini-projects that can be integrated into art projects according to the content of the integrated course “Art” and the thematic planning for grade 4. Aesthetic experience is not only knowledge about art but primarily an internal process of spiritual perception of beauty that shapes the student's personal stance. In turn, the aesthetic experience of fourth graders is a combination of artistic knowledge (in line with the content of the "Art" course) and skills that ensure emotional perception and intellectual understanding of artistic images and phenomena. These are formed within the motivational-creative, emotional-sensory, and axiological-orientational spheres of student activity. It is important to consider that by the 4th grade, the emotional sphere of students becomes more stable. However, the need for play, vivid impressions, and artistic experimentation remains a leading one. It is essential to support students' cognitive interest in art through interactivity, the opportunity to choose, self-evaluate creative results, and experiment. Therefore, the project-based formation of aesthetic experience must take into account both the age-specific characteristics of fourth graders and the components of aesthetic experience (drive, need, incentive, interest, feelings, emotions, experiences, evaluations, tastes, ideals, views) as well as the factors influencing its formation (availability of an emotionally safe environment; interactive interaction; motivational significance; individualization). As an example, we developed a series of mini-projects (Impression Art Diary, Music in Motion, The Color of Music – Painting the Sound, What Emotion Lives in Music?, Two Sides of the Artistic Palette: Good and Evil in Colors and Sounds, My Art – My Choice) to help shape the aesthetic experience of fourth-grade students. The prospects for further research lie in designing the aesthetic experience formation of primary school students through the use of short- and long-term art projects.

Do you like Arcimboldo's? Esthetic appreciation modulates brain activity in solving perceptual ambiguity

Emerging technological innovations offer the potential for experiential engagement through virtual scenarios, yet the viability of this approach for educational purposes remains significantly underexplored. This study aims to assess the feasibility of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies in providing users with aesthetic experiences when visiting digital exhibitions. A total of 190 students participated in this investigation. The control group visited traditional exhibits at the Palace Museum in Beijing. This group underwent a survey to evaluate their acquired aesthetic experience. In contrast, the experimental group, comprising 96 students, engaged with VR/AR scenarios at the Palace Museum in Beijing. Accordingly, students in the experimental group were also surveyed to evaluate both their aesthetic experiences and, additionally, their user experiences. The survey results unveiled significant distinctions in aesthetic experiences between students in the control and experimental groups. Moreover, there were notable correlations between individual variables related to user and aesthetic experiences within the experimental group. Furthermore, the study revealed disparities in both user and aesthetic experiences among male and female students. The findings have implications for aesthetic education teachers and officials in the context of developing sound strategies for providing aesthetic experiences to their students. This information is also of interest to employees of museums, exhibitions, and other cultural facilities, who are interested in holding or hold digital exhibitions.

The proportion of students studying in higher education institutions who are experiencing mental health needs is increasing and becoming a serious concern. Using participatory arts projects may be key to enabling students to maintain well‐being despite the pressures inherent in their student role. Therefore, this study aimed to ascertain whether such a course could be feasibly developed within a university setting, and to examine how esthetic experience influences university students' well‐being. To understand the differences in students' esthetic experience and well‐being before and after engaging in participatory art, this study implemented an intervention and collected quantitative and qualitative data. A total of 39 students volunteered to participate in the study. The results revealed that esthetic experience predicted student well‐being, as the more students had an esthetic experience by concentrating on a particular artwork, the more effective it was in terms of enhancing their well‐being. In addition, there was a significant difference between the pre‐ and postintervention, where students' esthetic experience and well‐being improved after completing the art activities. These findings have implications for our understanding of university students' well‐being, as well as the importance of considering participatory art, on its own, as a target for intervention.

The paper is based on the assumption that modern art centralises aesthetic experience in a specific way, why it as well be may regarded – in contrast to the rather forced interpretation of art already opposed by Susan Sontag (Sontag 2001, 10) – as an appropriate mode for encountering art. However, the theoretical discourse on aesthetic experience is characterised by opposite poles, which will be examined in the first part of this paper. On the one hand, there is the utopian conception around 1800, in which the reflection on aesthetic experience originally is rooted, in Friedrich Schiller’sOn the Aesthetic Education of Man(cf. Noetzel 2006, 198) or Friedrich Schlegel’s imaginations of a life in art inLucinde(cf. Dziudzia 2015, 38sqq.). On the other hand, the reflections in the German discourse at the beginning of the 20th century are marked in a conspicuously negative way, which can still be seen until the 1980s.In the theoretical first part of the essay, a few cursory positions on the ›problem of the aesthetic human being‹ will be considered initially, which reject aesthetic views in everyday life and evaluate such tendencies as forms of social decay. Concerned about morality on the surface, these positions indeed aim at criticising individual lifestyles in a modern world, which, in particular, are opposed to conservative and collectivist ideas of society and morality. These discourse positions, which are ultimately ideologically grounded, then lead to the deliberate reflections on aesthetic experience, as they unfold most notably from the 1970s onwards, where they form the implicit background.As will be shown, the explicitly negative evaluation expressed in the earlier positions then shapes the assessments of aesthetic experience of Hans-Robert Jauß (cf. Jauß 2007), Peter Bürger (cf. Bürger 1977) and Rüdiger Bubner (cf. Bubner 1989) as a fundamental, rather implicit scepticism. For the most part, their positions seem to make it impossible to think of the aesthetic experience as enrichment or to evaluate it positively, as is common in the US-American discourse, for instance.The latter stance, which is, in essence, initiated by John Dewey and his consciously non-strict separation between art and everyday life as well as his decidedly anti-elitist understanding of art and aesthetics, is more in keeping with the utopian concepts of around 1800. However, his writings only find late distribution in Germany (cf. Dewey 1980). In contrast to Dewey’s position – and Susan Sontag’s explicit rejection of the interpretation as a violent act and the omittance of the sensual experience of the artwork (Sontag 2001) – the critical condemnation of aesthetic experience, which ultimately remains unfounded in the German discourse (because of its implicit ideological origin), now appears challenged.In fact, attentive observation in an aesthetic stance becomes part of the aesthetic programme in modern art across the board (cf. Dziudzia 2015b). Bürger reflects on this and offers – especially in the examination of Marcel ProustIn Search of Lost Time – a productive proposal to grasp the ›aestheticizing perception‹ (as he calls it) as a literary technique. In his conception, Bürger refers to media as a specific ›projection area‹ of aesthetic experience, especially in literature around 1900. The ›imaginary fadings‹ (cf. Schmitz-Emans 2001) in modern literature are, following Bürger, to be further thought of as ›exponentiated‹ aesthetic experiences, which find their form not only around 1900 but also in more recent literature.Therefore, in the second part of the paper and the exemplary reading of a contemporary German novel, Martin MosebachsDer Mond und das Mädchen(The Moon and the Maiden), published in 2007, it is to be shown how aesthetic experience finds complex forms. In the specific shaping of imaginary fadings in the interplay of figure and narrator level, especially in recourse to the medium film to be observed therein, the ambivalence of the theoretical concept of aesthetic experience insinuates as will be argued.

P. M. Zeltner was a John Dewey aesthetician who greatly enhanced his understanding of Dewey's aesthetic experience. He argues that Dewey's aesthetics represent naturalistic metaphysics, and in Dewey, organic humans and music result in the existence of ‘of nature’, ‘in nature’, and ‘by nature’. From this point of view, music is defined as containing the mysterious things of nature, that is, the metaphysical things of nature. Aesthetic experience is a key concept of Dewey aesthetics and a medium for restoring continuity between daily life and art. Dewey introduces everyday aesthetic experiences as ‘an experience’. Zeltner argues that this an experience is an aesthetic experience “as a convergent completion,” and that all experiences in everyday life become an aesthetic experience as well as an experience when they have aesthetic structures and properties. Zeltner suggests dividing ‘an experience’ into a primary phase of aesthetic experience and an intentionally cultivated phase of aesthetic experience for understanding Dewey’s aesthetic experience. However, these two phases have a continuity that can never be separated.

Direct questioning about the ‘felt sense’ of organizational actions or artefacts is an accepted way to explore organizational members’ aesthetic experience. However, this requires organizational members to be able to talk about their aesthetic experience, to translate that felt sense into language. I suggest this is often difficult due to aesthetic muteness, which is a significant problem, not just for research but for organizational practice in general. I use empirical data to illustrate how this aesthetic muteness is manifested in the research process as organizational members’ difficulty in approaching their experience from an aesthetic perspective, reframing from ‘feeling’ to ‘thinking’, inability to recall aesthetic experience and denial of aesthetic experience. I then speculate that aesthetic muteness might be caused by threats to harmony, efficiency and images of power and effectiveness and that the consequences of aesthetic muteness are aesthetic amnesia, a narrowed conception of organizational aesthetics and aesthetic stress.

Empirical aesthetics has found its way into mainstream cognitive science. Until now, most research has focused either on identifying the internal processes that underlie a perceiver's aesthetic experience or on identifying the stimulus features that lead to a specific type of aesthetic experience. To progress, empirical aesthetics must integrate these approaches into a unified paradigm that encourages researchers to think in terms of temporal dynamics and interactions between: (i) the stimulus and the perceiver; (ii) different systems within the perceiver; and (iii) different layers of the stimulus. At this critical moment, empirical aesthetics must also clearly identify and define its key concepts, sketch out its agenda, and specify its approach to grow into a coherent and distinct discipline.

Contextual information influences aesthetic experience and psychophysiological responses to art, yet these influences have seldom been analyzed with real artworks in a real museum. Consequently, this study set out to assess the aesthetic experience and psychophysiological responses of participants in an art museum viewing 6 artworks of Flemish expressionism. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the experimental conditions, either receiving elaborative information or descriptive information on the artworks. Aesthetic experiences were assessed via a questionnaire and through psychophysiological markers. A systematic influence of contextual information on aesthetic experience could not be shown. However, artworks had effects on aesthetic experience and heart rate, heart rate variability, skin conductance, and skin conductance variability. The results indicate that the characteristics of the artwork itself have a stronger impact than provided contextual information, at least when they are perceived as originals in a museum.