Completed mid-year presentations
Next Week’s Deliverable
- Five paragraphs of paper completed
- Meet with Mr. V
- Plans for 3 photographs
- Email updates for Mrs. Chaney
Weekly Report 12/12
Last Weeks Deliverables:
- Approximately half of outline completed, sent to Mrs. Chaney for review
- Sample survey outline finalized, still in the process of determining all components I want to include
- 3 painters verified and preliminary dates set, determining if I would like to include more
Next Weeks Deliverables:
- Outline 75% done in an EXTREMELY DETAILED manner by the end of next week
- Hope to have it 100% reviewed and finalized by the end of break
- Get feedback from Mr. Feenstra on finished survey I will send out
- Create Bibliography for paper
- Decide how many (if any) more painters I want to include
- Decide on emotions with Mrs. Chaney — determine which are most important for project
Important References
Although perception is dependent on a host of physiological (e.g., age, health, hunger) and social (e.g., cultural differences, social roles, self-concept) factors, the perception of “art itself is a cultural universal” (Dutton, 2002). – The Perception and Evaluation of Visual Art
Elements of Art:
- Color – most expressive
- Value
- Line
- Shape
- Form
- Texture
- Space
- Light
- Poses
Weekly Report 12/4
Last Weeks Deliverables:
- Subsections of paper completed
- Definitions finalized for convey vs. generate, preliminary research conducted
- Completed article “Photography and Emotions”
- Began draft of survey
- Contacted painters
Next Weeks Deliverables:
- Run through sample survey with Mr. Feenstra
- Meet with Mrs. Chaney, establish hard deadlines for spring
- Let painters know deadlines for works
- Finish at least half of outline
Weekly Report 11/8
Last Weeks Deliverables:
- Finished “How Does Art Express Emotion” (half below line)
- Completed entire article “On Aesthetics and Emotions in Images”
- First 5 slides of presentation completed
- Meeting with Mrs. Chaney completed
Additional Work, not listed in last week’s deliverables:
Next Week’s Deliverables
- Finish Presentation
- Finalize Subsections for Outline of Paper and begin filling information in
- Read and annotate “Photography and the Emotions”
- Begin investigating difference between convey & generate
Art and Emotion (EOP)
- Emotion in response to art is not only a good thing to have, but also valuable in enabling us to appreciate artworks
- General Features of Emotions:
- Cognitive Thesis
- Belief Requirement
- Phenomenological Thesis
- Valence Thesis
On Aesthetics and Emotions in Images
- Draws inspiration from diverse disciplines such as philosophy, photography, art, and psychology
- Associating pictures with aesthetics and emotions that they arouse in humans
- Ties between computational image analysis and psychology, study of beauty and aesthetics in visual art, including photography, are natural and essential
- Computational aspects are not currently within scope of project but results could be helpful for research
- “Aesthetics”
- “To perceive, to feel”
- The branch of philosophy that deals with the expression of beauty, as in the fine arts
- The study of the psychological responses to beauty and artistic experiences
- A conception of what is artistically valid or beautiful
- An artistically beautiful or pleasing appearance
- “To perceive, to feel”
- Philosophical studies have resulted in the formation of two views on beauty and aesthetics: the first view considers aesthetic values to be objectively existing and universal, while the second position treats beauty as a subjective phenomenon, depending on the attitude of the observer
- For terms of project, I will follow subjective view
- While aesthetics can be colloquially interpreted as a seemingly simple matter as to what is beautiful, few can meaningfully articulate the definition of aesthetics or how to achieve a high level of aesthetic quality in photographs
- High ratings on photos because it “looks goof, attracts/hold attention, interesting composition, good use of color, drama, humor, impact”
- Ideas of aesthetics emerged in photography around the late 19th century with a movement called Pictorialism
- Pictorialist photographers drew inspiration from paintings and etchings to the extent of emulating them directly (***photography as a modern extension of painting)
- By around 1915, the widespread cultural movement of Modernism had begun to affect the photographic circles
- In Modernism, ideas such as formal purity, medium specificity, and originality of art became paramount
- Photography vs. Painting
- Photographs at large represent true physical constructs of nature
- Artists, on the other hand, have always used nature as a base or as a “teacher” to create works that reflected their feelings, emotions, and beliefs.
- One of the key movements of Western art, Impressionism, started in the late 19th century with Claude Monet’s masterpiece, “Impression, Sunrise, 1872.”
- Impression artists focused on ordinary subject matter, painted outdoors, used visible brush strokes, and employed colors to emphasize light and its effect on their subjects
- With the rise on Expressionism, the blending of reality and artists’ emotions became vogue
- Expressionist artists freely distorted reality into a personal emotional expression
- Artistic use of paint and brush can evoke a myriad of emotions among people
- These are tools that artists employ to convey their ideas and feelings visually, semantically, or symbolically
- Thus they form an important part of the study of aesthetics and emotions as a whole
- Aesthetics, Emotions, and Psychology
- There are several main areas and directions of experimental research, related to psychology, which focus on art and aesthetics: experimental aesthetics (the psychology of aesthetics), psychology of art, and neuroaesthetics
- Studies suggest that aesthetic experience is a function of the perceiver’s processing dynamics: the more fluently a perceiver can process an image, the more positive is their aesthetic response
- Human beings rarely associate definitive emotions with pictures
- Great works of art evoke a “mix of emotions” leaving little space for emotional purity, clarity, or consistency
- Need to settle upon a set of plausible emotions that can be experienced by human beings in regard to art
- Factors that affect appeal of image:
- Can be social-cultural, demographic, purely personal, or influenced by important events, vogues, fads, or popular culture
- Another manifestation of emotional response is attraction among human beings especially to members of the opposite sex
- Important aspect of attraction is the perception of a human face as beautiful
- Facial expression can affect degree of attractiveness of a face
- Aesthetic response to a picture may depend on several dimensions such as composition, colorfulness, spatial organization, emphasis, motion, depth, presence of humans
- Photographers follow certain principles that can distinguish professional shots from amateur ones
- Rule of thirds, complementary colors, close ups, etc..
- Pictures with simplistic composition and a well-focused center of interest are more pleasing than pictures with many different objects
- Relationship between shape characteristics and emotions ***
- DP Challenge
- Emotional and aesthetic impact of art and visual imagery is also linked to the emotional state of the viewer, who, according to the emotional congruence theory, perceives his or her environment in a manner congruent with his/her current emotional state
- Artists and experienced viewers tend to prefer artworks that are challenging and emotionally provocative
- Contrasted to the majority of people who prefer art that makes them happy and feel relaxed
Art is an Expression
- Art is an expression made visible by a form
- Just the statement that art is an expression is complex and raises questions: What does art express? Why does art express? How does art express?
- Feelings, beliefs, characteristics — although not easily distilled
- Humans continually searching for meaning, making meaning out of lived or observed experiences
- Central to all of art’s purposes are emotions. Expressions involve emotions and the act of expression is wherein the power of art lies
- Some experiences are unnamed through language, and therefore remain unknown until they are named through a different communication method: the expression that exists in art
- Ex: an expression that is especially emotionally complicated is grief
- Both presence and absence
- Language is inadequate: “even language ruptures and implodes under the weight of pain”
- Visual art translates the artist’s expression to the viewer, but is also a translation of the viewer’s viewing of the art. There are layers of translation that exist, changing with each viewer, perhaps in each setting, upon each viewing
- What surrounds the artwork changes the nuances of the communication — the translated expression
- “Art is valuable in part because acquaintance with it does something for the acquainted”
- We search for modes of communication that give voice to our mute emotions, and this is found in art
- Art can resonate with viewer, especially art that acknowledges a difficult experience
- The potential always exists for emotional resonance to occur within the viewer of the art as does the possibility of a transfer of meaning, understanding, or emotion
- Art can intervene and educate viewers in a different capacity than policy or public service announements
- Art can shift perceptions and understandings by challenging thoughts, ideas, and experience through the vehicle of complex emotional expression
- Art, utilizing the most guttural communication attempts — speaking the “language of the soul” — is able to articulate human nature and give form to our feelings
- A work of art, or anything that affects us as art does, is said to ‘do something to us,’ though not in the usual sense which aestheticians rightly deny — giving us emotions and moods, What it does to us is formulate our conceptions of feeling and our conceptions of visual, factual, and audible reality together. It gives us forms of imagination and forms of feeling, inseparably; that is to sat, it clarifies and organizes intuition
The Perception and Evaluation of Visual Art
- The experience of art, and consequently the perception and evaluation of art, seems particularly challenging to comprehend within a scientific framework
- Progress is being made toward a psychological understanding of art perception and aesthetic appreciation
- It is doubtful whether scholars will ever agree on a firm definition for what constitutes as art (establish my own for project)
- In the current context it seems appropriate to define art from the viewers’ perspective: that art is that which is categorized by the viewers as such
- Survey
- People asked to distinguish art images from non-art images and describe why they considered some to be art and others not
- Respondents consistently asserted that art images are expressive (“emotion,” “expression”), that the manner of creation is a central feature of an artwork (“talent,” “creativity and skill,” “I couldn’t do it”), while making a statement without this manner (“symbol…not creativity and skill”) is not enough to constitute art.
- Artworks may be identified as works perceived as embodying human expression
- Cognition
- Emotions, which per force belong to the individual experiencing them, should influence the cognition of attributes belonging to an artwork
- Affect
- It is well established that visual art is an aesthetic stimulus that evokes an emotional response
- What role does an individual’s emotional response to an artwork have in its evaluation?
- Typical that positive feelings lead to positive evaluation and negative feelings give rise to a negative evaluation
When exposed to a stimulus, two processes may occur
- First, individual praises globally as a whole without doing a detailed assessment of individual features
- Followed by a detailed evaluation
- Model of aesthetic emotions according to which viewers deem an artwork beautiful when they find it easy to process
Investigation: what are the various components that we theorize influence art evaluation, how do they relate to one another, and how do they inform art evaluation as a summary judgement
- Elicited strong, negative emotion, high arousal
Weekly Report 10/30
Last Weeks Deliverables
- Compiled list of articles
- Completed reading and annotating second half of article
- Was not yet able to obtain a copy of book, Art and Emotion
- Instead, I began reading and annotating article called How Does Art Express Emotion
- Meeting with Mrs. Chaney had no detailed notes this week, just formulating a list of materials to read and cover
Next Weeks Deliverables
- Read and annotate second half of article, How Does Art Express Emotion
- Read and annotate first half of On Aesthetics and Emotion in Images
- First 5 slides of presentation
- Meet with Mrs. Chaney (research and presentation)
Advanced Senior Research 