KEYNOTES

Opposites Attract: The Marriage of Art and Science

Robert Pepperell

Cardiff Metropolitan University, U.K.

Abstract

Art and science have very different histories, approaches, and priorities. In many ways they are opposites. Artists, for example, often cultivate mystery and obscurity in their work where scientists strive for plainness and transparency. Yet there is an ongoing attraction between these two worlds that has become ever more flirtatious in recent years to judge by the growing number of conferences, publications, and events devoted to art-science integration. Are we witnessing the coming marriage of art and science, or will the relationship be one of perpetual courtship? As an artist who has worked closely with scientists and scientific methods over many years, I have found operating between these very different cultures both challenging and rewarding. In this talk I will discuss some of the lessons I have learned from my experience. Using examples of research undertaken with various colleagues on painting and visual perception, I will consider ways in which art and science might be productively integrated. The case will be made that a true marriage of art and science — where artists and scientists work on shared problems as equal partners — is desirable and achievable. The benefits in terms of expanding our knowledge and understanding of some of the deepest questions about human nature could be great. But like all marriages it will require compromise, patience, and trust on both sides, and I will propose some practical steps we might take to promote this union.

Colour, Light and Time in Paintings

Anya Hurlbert

Newcastle University, U.K.

Abstract

Colour in paintings carries meaning on multiple levels, from the concrete (the yellow lemons in van Hulsdonck’s Still Life with Lemons …) to the symbolic or abstract (the celestial blue in Sassoferrato’s The Virgin in Prayer or the red in Richter’s Wand). Colour contrast may demarcate boundaries or create salience (in Turner’s Helvoetsluys …), or express political beliefs (in Mondriaan’s compositions). Yet the painter’s genius, especially Turner’s, is to conjure up, with pigment alone, the multiple modes of colour as both surface and light. In turn, colour as light conveys other non-visual qualities, such as time or weather. Turner’s pair of paintings, The Morning after the Deluge, a cyclone of brilliant colours, converging on yellow and white, and The Evening of the Deluge, blackness encircling a grey-blue core, not only pay explicit homage to Goethe’s colour theory but also express an implicit rule in evoking time. Our previous online experiments using Western European art (Hurlbert et al. VSAC 2018) support this rule: people consistently rate darker, bluer images as corresponding to later in the day, and brighter, yellower images as earlier. In lab experiments (Hurlbert et al. VSS 2018), people also consistently adjust their preferred illumination on artworks to match the depicted illumination within. These experiments raise practical and theoretical questions, answers to which I will consider: how does the environmental viewing light influence the interpretation of colour and light in paintings? How does the visual brain estimate and represent the properties of illumination and its changes over time?

TUTORIALS

Tutorial 1: Art History

Organizers/Moderators: Johan Wagemans and Koenraad Jonckheere

Jan van Eyck: An Optical Revolution

Maximiliaan Martens

Ghent University, Belgium & KVAB, Belgium

Abstract

Since the 15^th century up until the present day, people have wondered why the art of Jan van Eyck appears, so it seems, out of oblivion. No one before has ever been able to represent in painting the visually observed world with such an astonishing sense of naturalistic precision. As of the 16^th century, this riddle gave rise to the legend that he was the inventor of oil painting. However, this explanation was debunked when much earlier medieval treatises were discovered that referred to oil as a painting medium. Only now it becomes clear that the Van Eyck phenomenon must be explained as a combination of a sublime mastery of the limitless possibilities of an improved technique of oil painting, an exceedingly accurate eye-hand coordination in painterly execution, and an in-depth theoretical knowledge of medieval optics. This insight forms the basis for the largest exhibition ever mounted on Jan van Eyck, which will take place at the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, between 1 Feb – 30 Apr 2020. As a co-curator of this exhibition, I will present an introduction to its concept and the works that will be on display, many for the first time in confrontation with one another.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Case for Technologically Assisted Connoisseurship

Christina Currie

Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Belgium

Abstract

When is a Bruegel not a Bruegel? How can you tell, given the large number of copies, some virtual replicas of the originals? We make judgment calls based on our own perception, conditioned by our own set of unique visual memories. Connoisseurs experience a gut feeling when a painting in question is ‘right’ so to speak. There is no denying the power of this instinct, which is based on years of looking and absorbing of visual material. Nonetheless, we have ways to test, validate, challenge and ultimately confirm or reject that initial subjective judgment. These involve science and technology, which lead to more informed, or assisted connoisseurship. The presentation will follow this approach through the fascinating case of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Winter Landscape with Bird Trap and Skaters, which was rediscovered in 1925. Initially greeted with joy, doubt soon set in when it became known that none other than the notorious painter-restorer-forger Jef van der Veken had restored the painting. Could it be a copy? After all, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and his studio produced at least fifty versions of the composition. Other, anonymous copyists from outside the elder son’s workshop also made copies of it. So we can also ask the question: When is a Brueghel not a Brueghel?

Adriaen Brouwer: The Painter’s Painter

Katrien Lichtert

Ludens Projects

Abstract

Adriaen Brouwer was born in Oudenaarde c. 1604, as the son of a tapestry cartoon designer. At a fairly young age, Brouwer travelled to the Netherlands staying, among other places, in Amsterdam and Haarlem. Afterwards he settled in Antwerp where he already died in 1638. In spite of his short and turbulent life, Brouwer left an impressive oeuvre: relatively small in scale but of the highest artistic quality. From an art-historical point of view, Adriaen Brouwer’s work is of the utmost importance: as a key figure he bridges the sixteenth-century Bruegel tradition and the genre and landscape scenes of the seventeenth century. Brouwer’s artistic virtuosity and the different layers of meaning in his work make him one of the most fascinating artists of the 17th century Low Countries.

Tutorial 2: Image Statistics Used in Empirical Aesthetics

Organize/Moderator: Gregor Uwe Hayn-Leichsenring

Historical and Philosophical Background Behind the Search for Objective “Aesthetic” Properties

Gregor Uwe Hayn-Leichsenring

University of Jena, Germany

The Relation of Symmetry, Complexity and Self-Similarity to Subjective Ratings (Preference)

Gregor Uwe Hayn-Leichsenring

University of Jena, Germany

The Relation of Fractal Dimension and Amplitude Spectra to Subjective Ratings (Regularity, Interest, …)

Branka Spehar

University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

The Relation of Angular/Curved Shapes, Entropy of Edge Orientations and Variances of Low-Level Visual Filter Responses to Subjective Ratings (Preference, Harmony, …)

Christoph Redies

University of Jena, Germany

SYMPOSIA

Symposium 1: East Meets West

Organizers/Moderators: Eline Van Geert and Jörg Fingerhut

Cross-Cultural Empirical Aesthetics

Marcos Nadal ¹ , Jiajia Che ¹ , Xiaolei Sun ¹ and Victor Manuel Gallardo-Berrocal ²

¹University of the Balearic Islands, Spain

²Hospital Son Llàtzer, Spain

Abstract

One of the goals of empirical aesthetics is to determine how object, person, and context attributes contribute to aesthetic appreciation. The conclusions of this research program are based on studies conducted with European or North American samples. It is tacitly assumed that people’s aesthetic appreciation is governed by the same principles, independently of country of origin and cultural background, and that, therefore, findings apply to humans all around the world. Cross-cultural empirical aesthetics seeks to determine whether the psychological processes underlying aesthetic preference are indeed universal. We provide a brief review of the field’s origin, development, and current state. Our goal was to evaluate the evidence and separate what is actually known from what is only assumed. We conclude that, on the downside, cross-cultural empirical aesthetics can claim few solid general principles. The main reason for this is the field’s inconsistency and disjointedness. Cross-cultural empirical aesthetics is more a rough patchwork of different research programs than it is an organized and integrated field. On the upside, the evidence, albeit scarce and weak, shows that people from different cultures base their aesthetic preference on a common set of formal features, especially complexity, contour curvature, and symmetry, but also proportion, contour, brightness, and contrast. The reason for this commonality is that aesthetic preference emerges from basic perceptual and valuation processes that extract, and assign value to, informative features of the environment, and that are common to all humans, and even to many other animals.

Aesthetic Preferences for Neatly Organized Compositions in Dutch- and Chinese-Speaking Samples: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

Eline Van Geert ¹ , Rong Ding ² and Johan Wagemans ¹

¹KU Leuven, Belgium

²Peking University, China

Abstract

Do aesthetic preferences for images of neatly organized compositions – images as collected on blogs like Things Organized Neatly^© – generalize across cultures? In this online study we compared preferences of a native Dutch-speaking (N = 356) and a native Chinese-speaking sample (N = 220). Participants indicated their preference for one of two concurrently presented images (100 pairs) and completed the Big Five Inventory as well as the Personal Need for Structure scale. Overall, aesthetic preferences were quite similar across cultures (r = .58, BF₁₀ > 1000), and preferences related to differences in soothingness and order between the images in a pair for both Dutch-speaking and Chinese-speaking participants (for soothingness, r_Dutch = .57 and r_Chinese = .53, BF₁₀ > 1000; for order, r_Dutch = .36 and r_Chinese = .33, BF₁₀ > 1000). Some interesting differences were found as well, however. Chinese-speaking participants showed an additional preference for simplicity (r = .43, BF₁₀ > 1000) and Dutch-speaking participants one for fascination (r = .58, BF₁₀ > 1000). As fascination ratings of the images related positively with measures of order and complexity, whereas soothingness ratings related positively with order and negatively with complexity (Van Geert & Wagemans, under revision), these results hint at a cross-culturally consistent relationship between order and aesthetic appreciation, but a cross-culturally diverse link between complexity and appreciation. In addition, individual differences in preferences for complexity and fascination related positively with Openness to Experience and negatively with age in both the Dutch- and Chinese-speaking samples, indicating a cross-culturally consistent relationship.

Visual Engagement via the Written Word: Arabic Typography, Calligraphy and Calligraffiti

Ruth Loos

Sint Lucas Antwerp School of Arts, Belgium

Abstract

As an artist, art lover, art historian, … engaged citizen, volunteer worker and eager student of Modern Standard Arabic, I’ll address some dimensions, contexts, places, connotations, perceptions of ‘language’. My talk or travelogue is especially based upon my encounters with Arabic as a script or writing system whereby the script itself is addressed in all its visuality. The written, printed, stenciled, painted, drawn word, be it in the two-dimensional context of a book or the three-dimensional urban public space, it is perceived, interpreted, researched, … and designed. Whilst exploring the visual dimensions of scripts, artists and designers engage in many narratives: aesthetic, poetic, critical, societal, activist narratives. Sometimes they address general, sometimes specific or contextual aspects of language; being well aware of the artistic, societal, global or local context of their ‘designed language’. During this presentation we’ll look into the work of contemporary artists and designers from or strongly connected to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. We’ll meet the inspirational Bahia Shehab, Tarek Atrissi, Parastou Forouhar, Liron Lavi Turkenich, Jamila El Sahili, Michael Rakowitz, Huda Smitshuijzen Abifares, eL Seed… They all engage with language and script, often in a multilingual and bi-scriptural way, exploring disparate and shared principles of different writing systems, testing the boundaries of legibility and ‘staging’ script as a powerful image. They investigate through observation, research, creation. Their art and design show the impact, the role script can play in expressing societal engagement; in installing cross-cultural exchange.

Cultural Influence on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Eastern and Western Visual Art

Yan Bao ^1,2 , Taoxi Yang ² and Ernst Pöppel ^1,2

¹Peking University, China

²Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich, Germany

Abstract

Traditional Western visual art as expressed in realistic landscape paintings is typically characterized by a geometric perspective and focuses on salient objects, while the Eastern counterpart usually takes a negative or reversed geometric perspective and is largely context-oriented. To address whether these different representations influence the aesthetic experience of different cultural groups, we conducted both behavioral and neuroimaging studies, measuring Chinese and Western participants’ aesthetic evaluations and neural activities involved in viewing Eastern and Western paintings. Our behavioral study revealed a significant cultural impact; while Western participants evaluated traditional Western paintings as more beautiful than Chinese paintings, Chinese participants showed the opposite, i.e., they evaluated traditional Chinese paintings as more beautiful than Western paintings, thus indicating a cultural difference in aesthetic preference. A further study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) investigated the neural correlates of viewing traditional Eastern and Western landscape paintings in both Chinese and Western participants. The results demonstrated that both Chinese and Western participants showed stronger brain activations to visual art from their own culture. While higher brain activation levels were observed in the primary visual cortex, SMA, PCC and hippocampus for Western participants when viewing original Western as compared to Eastern landscape paintings, the right cuneus, bilateral calcarine cortex, and left lingual gyrus were activated in the comparison of Eastern paintings relative to Western paintings by Chinese participants. These findings provide differential support for a cultural modulation of aesthetic appreciation at both behavioral and neural levels.

Zones of Silence, Zones of Freedom, and Transformative Experience: A Cross-Cultural Consideration of Japanese and Western Reactions to Voids or Aniconism in Visual Art

Matthew Pelowski

University of Vienna, Austria

Abstract

When one thinks of visual art, and aesthetic responses, one typically thinks of what is depicted. However, what happens when visual art is built around elements that are absent or missing? Use of voids or other absences is in fact a major art-making technique, increasingly so with abstract expressionism and Contemporary examples—the empty Zen for Film of Nam Jun Paik, the silent piano in 4’33 of John Cage. Use of absence also exists hand-in-hand with compelling arguments for the resulting experience. As put by Belting (2002), and verified in some of our own empirical studies, these “Zones of silence” might act as powerful spaces for negotiation of our expectations, self-aware reflections, creativity, and eventual transformations of self/worldview. Interestingly, this use of voids is not only found in the West with contemporary artists. It is a major technique in Eastern art, as well as with ‘aniconism’ in Buddhist design and in master-student interactions meant, again, to lead to ‘satori’ or reflective enlightenment. This raises the question of how these ideas or reactions might overlap or differ based on culture or complement our understanding of the underlying psychology. Here, I discuss a series of onsite, survey-based studies conducted in both Japan and in the US/Europe with one ‘void’ artist—Mark Rothko—and both Western and Japanese viewers, showing that (a) both have similar epiphany/enlightening experiences, however, (b) particularly the Eastern/Japanese view of satori or response to absences may be a powerful tool for psychologically defining these reactions to visual art.

Symposium 2: Material Matters

Organizer/Moderator: Hannah De Corte

The ‘Wovenness’ of Painter’s Canvas. Encounters Between Fabric and Paint in Unprimed Canvas Paintings

Hannah De Corte

Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Abstract

The Renaissance brought about a model in painting: the primed and stretched canvas. A smoothly prepared woven canvas was the dominant support for several centuries in western painting. However, raw canvas made sporadic appearances in paintings of artists such as Velázquez, Rembrandt and Tintoretto, who utilized thin priming and coarser fabrics, integrating the weave of the canvas into their pictures. The fabric of the canvas appeared increasingly more at the surface of paintings in the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century with the likes of Georges Seurat and Paul Klee making use of the irregular canvas weave. The merging between paint and canvas culminated with Jackson Pollock’s pouring of paint on bare canvas, starting in 1946, and with the staining techniques that ensued. The examination of uses of unprimed canvas reveal a multitude of possibilities. For this paper, I will discuss how painters have utilized the fabric of the unprimed canvas as a medium, and how this choice of medium profoundly influences the perception of the painting by the viewer. I will also describe how I put these parameters into play in my own painting practice ² to highlight the ‘wovenness’ of painter’s canvas.

Velvet or Satin? How We Distinguish Textiles from Their Material Properties

Francesca Di Cicco, Maarten Wijntjes and Sylvia Pont

Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands

Abstract

People can easily distinguish different textiles and estimate their physical properties from their visual appearance. Here we are interested in the material properties used to differentiate velvet from satin, rendered in 17th century paintings. In an online experiment, participants rated roughness, shininess, weight, softness, hairiness and warmth of 20 images of painted satin and velvet. The stimuli were shown under three viewing conditions: full figure, crop of part of the textile retaining the same visual size as in the full figure, and zoom on the crop. On average, velvet was judged rougher, heavier, softer, warmer, hairier and more matte than satin. The distinction was more evident when the images were shown full figure. With principal component analysis (PCA), satin and velvet were found to form separate clusters in the full figure condition, according to their distinctive material attributes. For painters using loose brushstrokes, like Rembrandt and Van Dyck, we found the biggest rating differences between zoom and full figure conditions. On the other hand, for the fijnschilders, who applied meticulous and invisible brushstrokes, zooming in on the textiles did not cause such a dramatic change of perception. The appearances of velvet and satin varied in the paintings (as they do in real samples, with varying color, fiber and weave). But despite those variations, we showed that people consistently associated certain material properties, like hairiness and warmth, with velvet more than satin. The next step will be to determine which image features are used to visually differentiate velvet from satin.

Light as a (Non)Material Artistic Medium

Houda Hamid

Museum Guide, Belgium

Abstract

Through history light has been an outstanding matter of concern. As the origin of the visible, this physical phenomenon brings symbolic and metaphysical connotations, but also questions about the materiality of the work of art. Scientifically, light is a prime example of the wave-particle duality theory: it is at once a material and unmaterial phenomenon. This hybrid and dual characteristic of light had a major impact on artistic creation. With the progressive dematerialization of the work of art in the 20^th century, fine art could be a phenomenological experiment rather than an object, and the perceptive body of the viewer a key partaker in the meaning of the artwork. Yet, light has a material component, too. Do light installations of the likes of James Turrell Michel Verjux or Olafur Eliasson qualify as material or unmaterial?

Emergence of the Image

Ian Kiaer

Artist ³ , U.K.

Abstract

I will ask questions of the surfaces of recent work I have made, comprising of repurposed plexiglass advertising panels, that impact upon the painted image. These panels have been marked by varying degrees of pollution, informal inscription and weathered distortion which allow for a different order of image to emerge. I will be asking what significance the stain, mark and trace might bring to an experience and reading of the work and in turn, how this might be understood in relation to wider questions of ‘not knowing’ within painting.

Optical Effects and Material Outcomes: The Practical Use of the Camera Obscura in the Time of Vermeer

Jane Jelley

Artist ⁴ , U.K.

Abstract

An experimental exploration of the use of the camera obscura in the seventeenth century considers the material aspects of the work of Johannes Vermeer, and questions the interpretation of optical phenomena in his pictures. Vermeer’s paintings have visual and technical qualities not found elsewhere. We see strong effects of light, variations in focus, blurring, and distortions of scale. Looking beneath the surface there is an abstract quality to his monochrome underpaintings, which are roughly applied, with a striking lack of line and little correction, sometimes using two kinds of black pigment. Vermeer used this dark beginning as a tonal plan, and often allowed it to show through to the top surface. Colour was applied in further layers, in a traditional manner. There is some consensus that Vermeer used a lens in the making of his pictures, but there are challenges in its practical use. Projections can only be seen in a darkened space, and appear upside down, and also back to front. How could a painter transfer information directly to a canvas in these circumstances? A rudimentary form of offset printing, using oiled paper and oil paint, corrected the orientation of the image; and many experiments were made to see which materials would work best for the purpose. Prints on canvas, made from tracings, had material and visual qualities resonant with Vermeer’s own underpaintings, providing an explanation that a studio process, rather than an optical effect, could account for some of the unusual qualities of his pictures.

ART & SCIENCE SESSIONS

Art & Science Session 1: Motion, Space & Time

Organizers/Moderators: Johan Wagemans, Joos Vandewalle and Rasa Gulbinaite

DUO by Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács ⁵ “Forest on location”

TRIO by Frederik De Wilde, Giacomo Bignardi and Joos Vandewalle

1. – Introduction by Joos Vandewalle (emeritus professor in engineering, president of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and Art, and amateur sculpturer)
2. – Frederik De Wilde ⁶ : “All Possible Futures – Quantum Flux#1” (art video)
3. – Giacomo Bignardi ⁷ : “Degrees of freedom” (art video)
4. – Commentary & discussion, moderated by Joos Vandewalle

QUARTET by Rasa Gulbinaite, Youjia Lu, Carol MacGillivray and Ann Owen

1. – Rasa Gulbinaite ⁸ (introduction: 200 years of flicker research)
2. – Youjia Lu ⁹ (stroboscopic art work)
3. – Carol MacGillivray (short lecture on kinetic art work)
4. – Ann Owen (short lecture on stop-motion film)
5. – Commentary & discussion, moderated by Rasa Gulbinaite

200-Years of Flicker Research

Rasa Gulbinaite

Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon, France

Abstract

For exactly 200 years, scientists and artists were fascinated by how stroboscopic light (“flicker”) affects the brain and cognition. The unwritten history of flicker begins with Jan Purkinje, who in his PhD dissertation explored geometric hallucinations induced by the flickering light (1819). Later, Adrian and Matthews (1934) demonstrated, using electroencephalography (EEG), that the amplitude of the most prominent brain rhythm (alpha; 7-13 Hz) increased when periodic light flashes were “in sync” with subject-specific alpha-band peak frequency. This study revealed the interaction between visual stimulation and endogenous brain rhythms, and raised the possibility that light could noninvasively modulate brain rhythms. The development of electronic stroboscopes allowed more control over the stimulation frequencies, resulting in an outburst of flicker research and its effects on cognition. Flickering-light stimulation in the scientific community was picked up by the artists in the 1960’s and 1970’s who sought mind-altering experiences. The artist Brion Gyson and mathematician Ian Sommerville designed their own stroboscope – named the Dreamachine – that could induce vivid hallucinations without drugs and was seen as a way to explore the perceptual and creative capabilities of the human mind. Although the names have changed and the interest has waxed and waned, flicker-induced visual experiences and flicker effects on cognition have captivated scientists and artists for 200 years. Here, I will invite to celebrate this anniversary by tracing back the unwritten history of flicker that threads through neuroscience, arts, mathematics, and medicine.

Art on the Z-Axis: Gestalt Investigation in an Ecological Environment

Carol MacGillivray

Royal College of Art, London, U.K.

Alluding to artworks made by the author in the partnership, Trope ¹⁰ and as artist, Coral Woods ¹¹

Abstract

When arguing for taking a stance of affordance when interrogating perception James J. Gibson remarked that ‘A line drawn on paper is not a stimulus’. This paper re-examines Gestalt laws using examples of 2D illusions translated to sculptural artworks, showing that the introduction of depth, focus, and parallax in an ecological environment reduces many illusions to being literal 2D ‘tricks of the eye’. Specifically drawing on examples of Multi-stability and Familiarity, the paper argues that it is necessary for new parameters to be interrogated when artworks are encountered in an ecological environment i.e. In real time in the real world. The paper draws on examples of Trope’s work in animating in an ecological context referencing a new version of Multi-stability that exists between perceptions of Phi and Beta movement in Gestalt Circle (2013), and the percepts of Familiarity and Smooth Pursuit in the monumental artwork, Codex (2014). These are examples of artworks that use movement in real time through animating without a screen using the D-Scope technique; a technique investigated in the author’s PhD thesis of 2012: Choreographing Time: Developing a System of Screen-less Animation.

The Subversion of Innocence: A Neuroaesthetic Perspective on Nostalgia & the Uncanny in Stop-Motion Animation

Ann Bridget Owen

Falmouth University, Cornwall, U.K.

Abstract

Within stop-motion animation there are two commonly recurring themes: animated films such as Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and Mary and Max (2009) evoke a nostalgic sense of times gone by, whilst films such as Frankenweinie (2012) and The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) utilise stop-motion’s ability to convey the uncanny, creating comic but sinister narratives. Stop motion animation outside of the mainstream tells a similar story. For example, the animated shorts of Barry Purves and Peter Lord evoke a wistful and sometimes sad sense of nostalgia: Screen Play (1992), Next (1989), War Story (1989) & Sales Pitch (1983), whilst Robert Morgan’s The Separation (2003) and the Quay Bothers’ Street of Crocodiles (1986) convey a tangible and uncanny sense of bodily threat with puppets that are clearly made from non-human material. This phenomenon has not gone unnoticed or unstudied by animators and theorists: Robin Farrell and Paul Wells write on stop-motion’s propensity for communicating the uncanny, whilst Svankmajer speaks of the quality of ‘memory’ that is inherent in real objects. This paper will examine stop-motion’s affinity with nostalgic and uncanny content in the light of recent advances in neuroscience and neuropsychology. It will show that it is the visibility of both the animated objects and the stop-motion technique that enables the animator to communicate bodily empathy and nostalgic emotion in a unique and very primal way.

Art & Science Session 2: Color, Space & Time

Organizer/Moderator: Stefanie De Winter

Cameraless Photography: Light, Time, Painting, Sculpture and Performance

Tanya Long

Artist ¹² based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands

Tanya Long is a visual artist working primarily with camera-less photography, specifically color analogue photographic paper. Her abstract, reductivist works are deeply inspired by both Modernism and Minimalism. Long will discuss the technology she (mis)uses, her making process, the role of color in her work and the relationship between the work and the viewer.

Mondrian’s Ideas in Space Explored as a Physical and VR Reconstruction: ‘Zukunftsräume’ in Dresden

Johannes Zanker ¹ , Doğa Gülhan ¹ , Szonya Durant ¹ , Jasmina Stevanov ¹ and Tim Holmes ²

¹Royal Holloway University of London, U.K.

²Independent Neuroscientist, Researcher & Educator, U.K.

Abstract

We had a unique opportunity to explore these questions experimentally at the art exhibition ‘Spaces of the Future’ at the Albertinum in Dresden, home of Mondrian’s original design and Villa Bienert for which it was designed. This exhibition featured a full-scale physical room installation based on Mondrian’s original drawings, which allowed visitors to step inside and move freely through the space. We paired it with a 3D VR environment that truthfully implements Mondrian’s design. For both conditions eye movements were recorded whilst visitors were exploring artworks, using mobile eye-tracking glasses, and an eye-tracking enabled VR headset, respectively. Preliminary analysis of the recorded fixation data from 31 visitors in both conditions shows clear patterns of gaze preferences for particular compositional elements and pieces of furniture. Mean duration for exploring the artwork is longer in VR (173 sec) than in the physical installation (122 sec). Qualitative results from exit-questionnaires indicate that participants found the installation enjoyable (77%), were not bored in the VR environment (67%), and were split equally for preferring one or the other (40%:40%). They were united in their view that museums will not lose their significance (93%), perhaps not surprising for a sample of highly educated museum visitors with a mean age of 49 years (SD = 18).

FEEL COLOR - Color as Event

Regine Schumann

Artist ¹³ based in Cologne, Germany

Abstract

Regine Schumann is an artist based in Cologne. In her work, she focuses on light effects caused by fluorescent materials. Some of the materials she uses are colored polylight-cords and different colored acrylic panels, which she composes in complex color spaces in accordance with Goethe’s theory of colors. The artist layers and combines sheets of florescent acrylic glass to form three-dimensional volumes. When they are illuminated with black light the boundary between the material and the immaterial begins to blur. For the exhibition FEEL COLOR Regine Schumann creates a new kind of spatial experience with light. Unusual is how her site-specific installation employs alterations of different kinds of light — daylight, artificial light, and black light — in rhythms that flow, overlap, or flash like a stroboscope. The vibrating light situation constantly changes the entire space — color veritably begins to vibrate, and its luminosity and vitality are experienced in heightened intensity.

Tracking Frank Stella

Stefanie De Winter, Christophe Bossens and Johan Wagemans

KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

In order to investigate the impact of fluorescent colors in Frank Stella’s paintings from the 60s and the art criticism that pertains to them, an innovative eye-tracking experiment was setup in collaboration with the Van Abbe museum. To explore the role of fluorescent colors in relation to shape and materiality, a number of paintings were displayed: two Stella paintings from the Van Abbe collection (Effingham I & Tuxedo Park Junction), in addition, a full sized printed copy of Effingham I, without fluorescent colors, was shown next to the original. A hand-painted copy of Hiraqla Variation II was specially made for the occasion, which was also provided with a life-size print. During several weeks, viewing profiles of about a hundred participants were collected. The subjects went into the exposition, one by one, following a predetermined route. Their viewing experiences were recorded through mobile eye-trackers. With the eye movement study, we mainly wanted to examine which version - the original work of art or the print - received the first and most attention. We examined which zones were seen first, which ones were observed the most (and for how long) and whether fluorescent colors played a decisive role in these respects. These analyses will result in a better understanding of the complex visual structures of (these) artworks. In addition, they will contribute to the development of an ‘empirically- informed’ art history, which will (re)determine the position and the role of fluorescent colors in Frank Stella’s oeuvre and the related art criticism.

Color and Movement

Gijs Van Vaerenbergh

Art and architecture practice ¹⁴ based in Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

Gijs Van Vaerenbergh is an artistic collaboration, established by Pieterjan Gijs and Arnout Van Vaerenbergh (both 1983). The work of the duo inevitably seeks to be framed within the fields of architecture or the visual arts, and yet neither seem fully satisfactory. Pieterjan Gijs and Arnout Van Vaerenbergh met during their architecture training, and have since worked within a more or less classical architectural environment. Immediately after their studies, however, they developed a parallel practice in which they applied their technical and theoretical know-how towards an experimental research that varies from works in the public space and architectural structures to sculptures and smaller works. Within this grey area, the duo has gradually developed a practice that thematizes the friction between function (architecture) and autonomy (the image), and that raises the question as to where the daily experience of space becomes aesthetic. For this symposium, Pieterjan Gijs will talk about the role of color, space and time in their work.

Color, Space and Time in the Art Work of Pieter Vermeersch: A Multi-Method Exhibition Study in M

Eva Wittocx ¹ and Johan Wagemans ²

¹M-Museum Leuven, Belgium

²KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

In combining painting with architecture, Pieter Vermeersch ¹⁵ (°1973, Kortrijk, Belgium) creates spatial interventions with powerful impact on the viewer (e.g., huge walls with bright colors, with smooth saturation gradients). The spatial experience one obtains from exploring his work blurs the distinctions between 2D and 3D, material and immaterial, and time and space. On the occasion of a large overview exhibition in M, with new work created on location, we conducted a study in which we monitored how viewers navigate through the exhibition and explore the different works. After a short questionnaire to collect demographic information (incl. art education and interest), participants (N = 108) freely explored the 4 large exhibition spaces, wearing mobile eye-tracking glasses and a position sensor, followed by a short survey about their understanding and appreciation of the exhibition. In general, participants spent between 10 and 35 minutes visiting the exhibition. Most participants indicate that they enjoyed the experience of participating in an eye tracking study while visiting a museum. In our analysis of the position- and eye-tracking data, we focus on (1) the navigation through the exhibition and the exploration within and between the different spaces), (2) the selection of specific components (walls, surfaces, paintings) and the variable viewing distance to acquire a global overview as well as local details, and (3) the fine-grained distribution of fixations and saccades on the objects on/against the walls. In addition to reporting the general findings, we will explore how different viewing styles relate to the appreciation of the exhibition.

ART & SCIENCE DIALOGUES

Art & Science Dialogue 1

The Backstage

Lisa De Boeck ¹ , Marilène Coolens ¹ and Stéphane Symons ²

¹meymom, Belgium

²KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

memymom ¹⁶ is a collaboration between two artists, a mother (Marilène Coolens, 1953) and her daughter (Lisa De Boeck, 1985). Two self-taught photographers who work and live in Brussels, Belgium. ’The cross-generational project began with what the pair describes as a ‘The Umbilical Vein’. They are referring to analogue image archive made from 1990 till 2003 of Marilène encouraging Lisa to express herself and to invent her own improvised theatre sketches. These semi-staged dreamscape portraits developed into a mature conversation that deals not only with metamorphosis, personal identity, potential and a maternal relationship, but has evolved into a plea for sensual analysis and tragic romanticism. It reveals both the foundations of the close mother-daughter bond and the professional career of this artistic duo, who have worked together under the moniker memymom since 2004. The rough analogue images of a past era also form a source of inspiration for the artists’ current work which produces an emotional aesthetics that stops just short of the erotic; inventing mystery, exercising intimacy and creating a post-modern hyperlinked narrative where anything might unfold. The mother-daughter relationship means they can often work in a highly intuitive manner that allows the results to emerge naturally, even almost automatically.

Hypotheses and Discoveries in Paintings by Maaike Schoorel

Maarten Wijntjes ¹ , Rob van Lier ² , Ward Groutars ² and Maaike Schoorel ³

¹TU Delft, the Netherlands

²Radboud University, the Netherlands

³Artist, the Netherlands

Abstract

At first glance, the apparently abstract, monochrome paintings by Maaike Schoorel ¹⁷ do not reveal their content. Yet, after some moments the viewer starts to discern objects and scenes on the low contrast and sparsely painted canvas. Therefore, it seems these works ‘slow down’ perception, as is often described by art critics. To understand how perception-in-slow-motion contributes to the appreciation of Schoorel’s work we conducted an experiment where art gallery visitors were asked to think-out-loud for 3 minutes while viewing a painting, for a total of 7 paintings per visitor (N = 28). Prior and following these contemplative sessions, we let visitors rate the interest, emotion and beauty of each work. To analyse the verbalised thoughts, we transcribed and annotated the audio recordings using a wide variety of labels. For example, we marked when observers talked about the abstract (e.g. colour or shape), figurative and narrative content. Within the 21 labels, we also used ‘hypothesis’ and ‘discovery’ to mark moments where observers expressed a question (hypothesis) and resolution (discovery). We particularly analysed 4 works, 2 for which the appreciation increased while viewing, and 2 for which appreciation declined. Interestingly, an equal amount of hypotheses were formulated for these works, but discoveries were primarily made for the works that also evoked raised appreciation. Furthermore, temporal analysis revealed that hypothesis formation primarily occurs at start and middle, while discoveries are either made at start or end, while generally absent midway. The results can possibly be generalized to what art viewing makes engaging: hypotheses and discoveries.

Art & Science Dialogue 2

A Brief Introduction to Image Thinking

Patrick Ceyssens ^1,2 and Tom Lambeens ²

¹UHasselt, Belgium (+ artist ¹⁸ )

²PXL Hasselt, Belgium

Abstract

We don’t look at images, we look through them: this shift in meaning will be the starting point of our essay in which we will scrutinize the mediation of images in perception. Although it is generally accepted that certain parameters will have influence on our perceptual experiences, this point of view however emphasizes that visual observation can be analyzed as such – in the sense that it is instrumental and value-free. Artistic Images, among others, are tended to be the outcome of this process. Images fulfill a more active role in the approach we will put forward. Art forms like painting, photography and cinema interfere in our experience of the surrounding environment: they shape our view. While the embedding images, artistic and non-artistic, intervene our perception, a more attentive look is able to arbitrate within the world itself. We developed three different concepts to engage in these dynamics of mutual influence. The first concept will be ‘pictoriality’, it is the category which has the closest ties with the development of space in an image. We will delineate this case by the plastic idioms of Giacometti and Morandi. The second category we will present is the ‘symbolic’. As the ‘pictural’ is imbedded within the realm of interpretation, the ‘symbolic’ is also eviscerated of authorial intent. Central in this category stands the clarification of the motifs and topics that were used to unfold the ‘pictural’ (cf. W. Hoffmann, 1966). ‘Materiality’, the last category, is the tipping point between presentation and representation; as a consequence of that it affects the ‘pictural’ and the ‘symbolic’ as well. We will exemplify this concept, and its relation towards technology as dominant aspect of materiality since modernity, by artists who stood at the origins of cinema (Monet, Renoir, Vigo and Bergman). In addition, we will give an overview of the manner in which these categories interact with each other.

The Egg-Peeling Project ¹⁹ of Liedewij van Eijk

Rob van Lier ¹ , Sara Fabbri ² , Eline van Petersen ¹ , Arno Koning ¹ and Liedewij van Eijk ³

¹Radboud University, the Netherlands

²University of Groningen, the Netherlands

³LVE Producties, the Netherlands

Abstract

We were extremely fascinated by the art installation of Liedewij van Eijk, who asked 360 participants for a most simple act: Peeling an egg. All peeling actions were recorded and numerous peeling details were carefully documented by the artist. Each recording starts with a simple set-up and a specific sequence of events: first, an empty space is seen with one boiled egg on one side of the scene; next, two hands move in that start to peel the egg - and when done, the peeled egg is placed on the other side, after which the two hands leave the scene. All peeling acts are clustered by the artist, based on particular characteristics. For example: the participant may typically start peeling after a single tap of the egg on the table, or after two taps, or after three taps etc. Another example: the participant may peel mainly with the index finger or with the thumb; with or without using the nails, and so on. In this way, this simple well-known act could be decomposed into a cascade of micro-components. Eventually, for each single peeling act more than 100 data entrances were collect​ed. We analysed the data and found various posthoc findings, e.g. showing the efficiency of particular peeling strategies. In addition, we investigated the aesthetic appearance of the egg-peeling movies. Online recruited participants rated these videos on a Likert scale for various aesthetic categories. Preliminary results showed that different aspects of the action elicited different aesthetical experiences in the observers.

TALKS

Talk Session 1: Symmetry, Balance and Imbalance; Seeing, Feeling and Believing

Moderators: Ronald Hübner and Marcos Nadal

Mindset Affects Differently Preference for Symmetry and Preference for Curvature in an Implicit Task

Enric Munar, Erick G. Chuquichambi and Jaume Rosselló

University of Balearic Islands, Spain

Abstract

Substantial evidence demonstrates that symmetry and contour take part in shaping initial aesthetic appreciation. We proposed to study the interaction between preference for symmetry and preference for curvature as a contribution to understand the initial aesthetic appreciation based on these two features. We designed an implicit task based on affective compatibility between stimuli and responses, a revised Stimulus-Response Compatibility. We used four kind of stimuli: symmetrical/curved, symmetrical/sharp-angled, asymmetrical/curved, and asymmetrical/sharp-angled. Participants had to match as fast as they could a stimulus with a schematic facial expression of happiness or sadness (positive and negative affective valence). As people use different mental states o mindsets, we activated a mindset on symmetry or contour by making participants focused on one of the two features with the aim to measure implicitly preference for symmetry or preference for curvature. Later, participants carried out an explicit task about liking with the same stimuli. Results showed accumulative effect of the two preferences in both tasks, implicit and explicit. The effect size was higher in preference for symmetry than preference for curvature. Symmetrical and asymmetrical patterns contributed similarly to preference for symmetry, but only curved patterns contributed significantly to preference for curvature. We did not find correlation between the implicit and explicit measures, but the tendency from the four stimuli was the same in both measures. We conclude that combination of implicit and explicit measures and mindset is a useful tool to study interaction between stimulus properties.

Small Deviations from Symmetry in Abstract Patterns: Often Interesting, but Sometimes also Liked?

Andreas Gartus and Helmut Leder

University of Vienna, Austria

Abstract

It has been shown that even slight (random) deviation from symmetry in abstract black-and-white patterns leads to significantly less aesthetic liking (Gartus & Leder, 2013). However, it is unclear if this is the case for all types of deviations from symmetry. In a ‘method of production’ study, 50 abstract patterns showing small random deviations from symmetry were used as initial stimuli. Participants were either instructed to improve (n = 26) or to impair (n = 20) the aesthetic appeal of the patterns by changing up to three elements. However, restoring symmetry was prohibited. Patterns generated by the improvement group were on average more symmetric and balanced, but less complex than the patterns generated by the impairment group. In a follow-up validation study, selected patterns generated in the previous study were rated by 32 participants for liking and interest. On average, impaired patterns were less liked than initial patterns, while improved patterns were liked more—almost as much as the, still most liked, fully symmetric patterns. However, symmetric patterns were also rated less interesting than the three other groups of patterns. We conclude that while abstract patterns showing random deviations from symmetry are on average less liked than symmetric patterns, this is not necessarily the case for all deviations from symmetry. Deliberate, carefully designed deviations from symmetry can achieve a level of aesthetic liking (almost) as high as that of symmetric patterns. In addition, such patterns are also likely to be more interesting than fully symmetric ones.

Thirty-Six Views of X: Variations on a Theme Reveal Individual Artist’s Approaches to Composition

Nicola Bruno

University of Parma, Italy

Abstract

A visual artist is working on a picture. The theme of the picture involves an obvious, well-defined key element. Where will the artist position this key element? I call this compositional choice key element framing. Is framing of the key element random, or does it follow rules? I propose that a fruitful domain for studying key element framing is found in suitable serial works having a strong thematic homogeneity. What characterizes such series is that they might be regarded as variations on a theme by the same artist, allowing meaningful assessments of random variations while keeping other factors approximately constant. In this work, I report two studies on series originally inspired by 19th century Japanese prints (Hokusai’s Thirty views of Mount Fuji) and later revisited, in similar form, both in later Japanese works and at the beginnings of the 20th and then 21st centuries in Europe. I call this database of images Thirty views of X. Results do not support framing according to “power points” of “power lines” defined by known principles of composition, suggesting that key element framing shows an overall bias for moderate asymmetry, that this bias is modulated by individual and cultural differences, and that there may be an additional effect of print aspect ratio.

Perceived Instability in Pictures Is Aesthetically Appreciated When Movement Is Implied

Martin Fillinger and Ronald Hübner

University of Konstanz, Germany

Abstract

Perceived instability is an important feature of pictures with respect to their aesthetic appreciation. Pictures whose composition is perceived as gravitational unstable are usually liked less than those with stable arrangements. However, there are exceptions. In a recent study, we found that unstable Japanese calligraphies were preferred to stable ones. From this result, we derived the hypothesis that instability is liked when it implies movement, which, presumably, induces positive emotions. In the present study, we tested this hypothesis with pictures painted by the artist K.O. Götz. One hundred of his pictures were first rated in a preliminary study with respect to stability and movement. A sample of these pictures were then selected so that they systematically varied from high to low movement as well as from low to high stability. In the main study these pictures were rated with respect to liking, emotionality, movement, and stability. Our results show that instability had a positive effect on emotion and liking. The effect of movement on liking was also positive, as expected. After discounting the latter effect, instability and liking were again negatively correlated. Taken together, our findings indicate that perceived gravitational instability reduces the aesthetical appreciation of a picture unless it implies movement.

The Relation Between Adults’ Aesthetic Preferences and Infants’ Visual Preferences: A Domain-Specific Study

Helene Mottier, Olivier Pascalis and David Meary

CNRS UMR 5105, Université Pierre Mendès France, France

Abstract

Infants and adults look longer at faces that have been rated attractive by adults than at faces rated less attractive. However, the effect of aesthetic judgments on visual behavior in the first years of life is still unclear and no study has systematically examined it. Here, we tested whether the relation between adults’ explicit aesthetic preference and the implicit visual preference of infants and adults varies with the category of visual stimuli used. We tested if visual preference for motions, paintings representing portraits and landscapes, is predicted by adults’ aesthetic preference. Adults rated motions, portraits or landscapes in a forced-choice paradigm. We then presented the stimuli in a classical visual preference task to infants and adults while recording eye-movements. Results show that the rating predicts looking time for motions. Infants and adults looked longer at motions according to ratings, β1 = 1.81, t(1613) = 16.27, p < .001. Rating, however, did not predict infants’ looking time for portraits (β1 = -0.11, t(1017) = -1.14, ns) nor landscapes (β1 = -0.22, t(1184) = -1.43, ns). Despite strong aesthetic rating agreement in adults for all categories of stimuli, visual preference for highly rated stimuli is only observed for motions. The correlation between adult explicit rating and implicit looking in adults and infants is domain specific, then not systematic. The results are discussed in light of current models of visual aesthetics.

Musical and Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity

Ana Clemente ¹ , Marcus T. Pearce ² and Marcos Nadal ¹

¹University of the Balearic Islands, Spain

²Queen Mary University of London, U.K.

Abstract

We conceive aesthetic sensitivity as the extent to which a given feature affects someone’s liking or preference, and measure it as the individual slope in linear mixed effects models. Such a notion emphasizes the importance of individual differences to understand aesthetic experiences. In a series of previous experiments, we examined aesthetic sensitivity to balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity in the musical and visual domains separately. Now we explore the individual sensitivities to these four attributes across domains within participants. In doing so, we aim to clarify to which degree aesthetic sensitivity obeys to peripheral or central psychological processes. If visual and musical sensitivities correlated, one may conclude that modality-general central processes mostly define aesthetic judgments. Otherwise peripheral processes would directly involve the reward centers and might be therefore responsible for aesthetic judgments at least in one of the sensory modalities. To elucidate these issues, 48 non-musicians rated their liking for 96 musical motifs and 66 visual patterns and responded to several questionnaires. These allowed us to further investigate the relations of aesthetic sensitivities with experience and knowledge of music and art, desire for aesthetics, and openness to experience. The results replicate our outcomes in previous experiments regarding visual and musical aesthetic sensitivities and confirm a binary pattern related to information processing that seems to underlie liking judgments of both images and music, shedding light on the domain specificity and generality of aesthetic processes.

‘Feeling in Seeing’ is Believing: Visceral Reactivity as a Precursor to Authenticity Judgments of Photojournalistic Images

Manos Tsakiris

The Warburg Institute, London, U.K.

Abstract

Images in their many different forms, from paintings and icons to photography and beyond, have always been powerful cultural agents. Their performative power has been extensively discussed across disciplines, from art history and the history of emotions to media studies, in political sciences, and more recently psychological sciences. Images, and especially photographs, operate differently from words, as they appear to be truthful witnesses of reality. Social media, alternative facts, debates about post-truth and fake news make our negotiation between what is real or fake challenging. Beyond our cognitive judgments, we respond and relate to visual culture in visceral, embodied ways. We ran a series of experiments to understand how our visceral responses, as the basis of subjective feelings, influences our relation and response to aversive photojournalistic images. First, participants saw a series of aversive photojournalistic images, while we measured their neurophysiological and subjective arousal. Next, participants were informed that they would see the same images again and judge whether the images were real (i.e. photos capturing an event as it happened depicting genuine emotions) or fake. Thereby we assessed if levels of neurophysiological and affective arousal would predict realness judgements. Higher neurophysiological and affective arousal for an image predicted the probability with which participants would judge that image as ‘real’. These findings highlight the crucial role that physiology plays in engaging us with imagery, beyond cognitive processing. ‘Feeling in seeing’ seems to be a salient signal that at least partly determines our beliefs in a culture powered by images.

Global Aesthetics and Top-Down Influences on the Perception of Visual Art

Bence Nanay ^1,2

¹University of Antwerp, Belgium

²Cambridge University, U.K.

Abstract

Those who apply empirical and neuroscientific approaches in art history often take our engagement with visual to be a cultural universal – something that is the same across cultures and historical periods. After all, neuroscience and perceptual psychology studies culturally universal features of our mind and perceptual system. And this assumption is clearly something most art historians find difficult to swallow. And rightly so. I argue that the application of empirical and neuroscientific approaches in art history does not have to be universalist – in fact we have very good – empirical – reasons to think it shouldn’t be. Perception, as a number of empirical findings show, is cognitively penetrable. The way we perceive depends on our beliefs and expectations. But then we should not expect uniformity in our engagement with visual works of art across cultures and historical periods. And this dependence is (often) mediated by mental imagery – a surprisingly underrated concept within art history.

Talk Session 2: Visual Space and Visual Field; Viewing and Experiencing

Moderators: Nicole Ruta and Jörg Fingerhut

The Quality of Perspective in Canaletto’s Paintings of Piazza San Marco in Venice

Casper Erkelens

Utrecht University, the Netherlands

Abstract

There are two types of perspective relevant to human vision, photographic and visual perspective. Photographic perspective results from projection of the three-dimensional world on two-dimensional surfaces such as canvases and retinae. Photographic perspective is widely applied in drawings and paintings to create an illusion of depth. Visual perspective is a property of the space that we, human beings, perceive through vision. Photographic perspective is two-dimensional, visual perspective three-dimensional. Paintings of perspective scenes are interesting objects of study because both types of perspectives play a role in the creation of depth. A previous study showed that Canaletto and other vedutisti applied perspective related to visual space. Paintings of Piazza San Marco in Venice are analysed in the current study. These paintings are of particular interest because of the Piazza’s extraordinary geometry and the fact that Canaletto and his followers produced dozens of paintings from almost identical viewing positions. Buildings and patterns are directed to three horizontally separated vanishing points. Perspective is extremely veridical in a number of paintings. It is hard to imagine how such accuracy could have been obtained without the help of a camera. In other paintings the quality of perspective is poorer and perspective is completely wrong in number of paintings, suggesting that those paintings are not of Canaletto. People have been painted twice to four times too large on all the paintings. The large sizes suggest that people were added later, aiming to portray San Marco as a more intimate plaza than it is.

People Are Better Estimating Distances in Natural Perspective than in Linear Perspective

Nicole Ruta, Alistair Burleigh and Robert Pepperell

Cardiff Metropolitan University, U.K.

Abstract

Linear perspective is a pictorial technique developed by artists during the Italian Renaissance and is still the standard method for rendering 3D space geometry on 2D images. However, our previous work suggests that images created using linear perspective do not accurately represent visual space, particularly under normal viewing conditions and for wide fields of view where it can appear to distort object size and shape (Burleigh, Pepperell & Ruta, 2018). We hypothesised that people would be better at estimating distances in ‘natural perspective’, which is based on the way artists have traditionally depicted visual space. To test this, we created a new form of 3D renderer that generates natural perspective images by computationally modelling artistic depictions of visual space. A set of 72 still images were generated for an online study. Each image showed the same target object in six different locations, in two different backgrounds, and in three different fields of view (100°, 120° and 140°) using both linear and natural perspective renders. Participants (N = 52) were asked to estimate how many units away the target object appeared to be in the image. Results showed that participants were 4.9 times more likely to estimate the target’s correct distance and 5.12 times more likely to give an accurate distance estimation (±1 correct) if they were looking at natural perspective renders compared to the linear perspective ones. We will discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of visual space and how natural perspective captures key characteristics of visual phenomenology.

Understanding Perspective in the Absence of Vision: Tactile Exploration and the Visual Angle of Objects

Jennifer Stevens and Peter Vishton

College of William & Mary, U.S.A.

Abstract

Esref Armagan is a blind painter. One of the reasons his ability is so compelling is his use of perspective: his paintings often include objects in the distance appropriately smaller than those closer in. Our present investigations reveal a non-visual mechanism in place that allows for appropriate placement of relatively larger items in the foreground: tactile exploration. In a series of studies, participants were asked to draw, size match, and make visual discriminations of objects of varying size. When objects were explored in distal space they were identified as being significantly smaller than when they were explored proximally. This is the first research identifying tactile exploration can inform the perceiver that the visual angle of objects decreases with distance. Moreover, our findings reveal that tactile exploration may provide information in general about perspective in the 3-D world that, until now, was considered only deliverable through vision. Implications for the representation of the depth, both in mind and in the 2-D plane as found in drawing and painting, will be considered.

Architectural and Visual Complexity. A Series of Studies of Aesthetic and Behavioral Ratings

Jörg Fingerhut ¹ , Matthias Ballestrem ² and Claus-Christian Carbon ³

¹Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

²HafenCity University Hamburg, Germany

³University of Bamberg, Germany

Abstract

Public spaces become increasingly important as modulators for the public exchange of heterogeneous and multi-cultural populations. How visual aesthetics contributes to such interactions is still poorly understood. In a series of studies, we presented German participants with artistically plausible manipulation of interior public spaces. In a pretest (n = 41) we manipulated the amount of volumes enclosed in existing Berlin public interiors without finding a significant difference in the ratings of complexity. In the main study (n = 111) we manipulated visual representations of 5 types of public interior space for architectural complexity by altering (a) the amount of different architectural elements, (b) visual, and (c) locomotive permeability. Our participants rated the aesthetics (beauty, interesting architecture), behavioral affordances (exploration, meeting), and complexity of the spaces presented. We found a main effect of manipulation: our complex stimuli were also rated more complex and led to higher ratings for one of the aesthetic measures (interestingness), as well as for both behavioral measures (such as the room affording meetings and exploration). Interestingly perceived complexity did not correlate significantly within subjects with perceived beauty, nor did we find a main effect of our manipulation for beauty. In a follow-up study (n = 120) we manipulated only visual surface properties (e.g. lines, the rhythm of patterns) of the same spaces and kept other architectural elements constant allowing us to report differences between our kinds of manipulations. In general, our studies aim to advance the understanding of visual vs. architectural complexity as well as the underexplored field of visual aesthetics of architecture.

How Does Restricting Vision of a Scene with Masking or Filtering Affect Drawing from Observation?

John Christie ¹ , Mathew Reichertz ² , Bryan Maycock ² and Raymond Klein ¹

¹Dalhousie University, Canada

²Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Canada

Abstract

Mona Lisa is notable for her ephemeral “smile”. Research has suggested that the expression is ambiguous, seen either as a smile or a neutral expression, because the less acute peripheral visual system sees it differently than does the high resolution fovea. Taking inspiration from this effect, and the common guidance to students that they draw using peripheral vision or try squinting to reduce fine details, we sought to see how people draw carefully constructed scenes from observation while we controlled what they saw. Using a high speed eye monitor we obscured foveal vision of the scene in one condition and peripheral vision in another. The drawings were subsequently rated for accuracy of various components. A second experiment manipulated the source material so that some images had fine high frequency detail but lacked low frequency information and others were the opposite, mirroring some of the properties of central and peripheral vision.

A Cross-Methodological Approach to Study the Vision of Paintings: The Combination of Eye Tracking and Ethnographic Research

Pablo Fontoura ¹ , Jean-Marie Schaeffer ¹ and Michel Menu ²

¹EHESS, France

²C2RMF, France

Abstract

Eye tracking is used in the analysis of paintings, especially to investigate the salience of iconographic elements and of particular features, such as colors and textures, mostly in the context of cognitive scrutiny. But such scientific approach is not enough to understand why people pay attention to specific zones, as historical, cultural, social, and environmental factors can influence what people look at. Eye tracking data alone cannot give an account of the aesthetic experience associated with such artworks. In order to achieve an overall comprehension of the role of vision in the experience of paintings, I have developed a method of analysis in natural environments (i.e., in museums) that mixes eye tracking data with visitors’ background surveys and qualitative interviews. Statistical analysis and text mining techniques are then put in place to reveal what exactly people see, say and experience when looking at paintings. As an example of this method, I will present the case study of a masterpiece of the North Renaissance: The Isenheim altarpiece, by Mathis Grünewald (1512–1516), based on the experiments I have done at Unterlinden Museum, in Colmar/France with 68 observers from different backgrounds. Other than unveiling the way visitors see Grünewald’s triptych and what exactly draw people’s attention to it, I will reflect on the influence of bottom-up visual processes and top-down culturally informed attention in the visualization, interpretation, and aesthetic experience of paintings.

Visual Art in the Digital Age: About the Art Experience in VR vs. Ordinary Displayed Museum Contexts

Dragan Jankovic ¹ , Vitomir Jevremovic ² and Claus-Christian Carbon ³

¹University of Belgrade, Serbia

²VR All Art, Switzerland

³University of Bamberg, Germany

Abstract

Art experience is mainly about experiencing art in original art-related contexts, mostly art museum and galleries. This so-called “Path #1” (real-world context), according to Carbon’s (2019) terminology of measurement strategies of art experience, is problematic as we lose a lot of experimental control when testing in the field (e.g., lack of power of randomization to prevent order effects, the artworks interact with the physical environment as well as the social context. Recent digital technologies from the field of virtual reality (VR) have opened up innovative ways to test art experience in realistically simulated contexts while keeping experimental control. Here we tested the experience volunteers (N = 40) had with twelve paintings from a wide range of Western art epochs in a simulated 3D Virtual museum context compared to experience of the same paintings presented on an ordinary computer screen. Half of the participants first had to assess their aesthetic experience plus multidimensional qualities of the paintings in VR and then in an ordinary computer screen setting, the other half assessed the paintings in the opposite order of contexts. The results showed that aesthetic experience of paintings was more intense in VR than in the computer screen setting, artworks were experienced as being more impressive, and respondents expressed a greater desire to know more about the paintings. There were no differences in the experienced quality and artistic value of the artworks. Next important steps will be to directly compare VR with real world settings to test the VR for ecological validity.

Talk Session 3: Aesthetics, Art and Brain

Moderators: Lora Likova and Ed Vessel

Designing an EEG Paradigm for Naturalistic Engagement with Aesthetic Stimuli

Dominik Welke and Edward A. Vessel

Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Germany

Abstract

“Real-world” visual aesthetic experiences typically involve open-ended exploration of highly variable artistic objects. Yet uncontrolled gaze and stimulus variability are typically avoided in electroencephalographical (EEG) experiments due to the potential generation of artifacts and noise. We aimed to quantify EEG Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) during an aesthetic rating task of both static images and moving (video) stimuli in which participants were allowed to gaze freely. Observers viewed “artistic” video clips depicting nature scenes or dance performances plus randomly drawn still frames from these clips, and were instructed to rate each stimulus for both subjective aesthetic appeal and degree of personal interest. 64-Channel wet EEG was recorded in a lab environment. To quantify SNR, a task-unrelated auditory stimulus eliciting a frequency-tagged EEG response (Auditory Steady-State Response, ASSR) accompanied each trial. An initial comparison of four different ASSR stimuli (n = 5) demonstrated that an ASSR-based SNR assessment can indeed be applied in our aesthetic rating paradigm, and that amplitude-modulated Pink Noise or Speech Noise lead to the most robust response across participants. Individual ratings of aesthetic appeal and personal interest spanned the entire scale, suggesting that the auditory stimuli did not prevent observers from aesthetically engaging with the visual stimuli.

“Being Moved” by Moving Images: fMRI of Aesthetic Experiences with Landscape Videos

Ayse Ilkay Isik and Edward Vessel

Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Germany

Abstract

Aesthetic experience with artworks engages visual, reward and default-mode (DMN) networks. Yet, we know very little about the dynamics of these networks during aesthetic appreciation. Here, we investigated behavioral and neural responses to temporally extended, aesthetically engaging stimuli (videos), using fMRI in combination with continuous behavioral ratings. Participants (n = 26) were scanned as they viewed 40 video clips of landscapes (30 s) and indicated their moment-to-moment liking, as well as a final summary rating at the end of each clip. Category-selective visual regions in ventral occipitotemporal cortex [e.g. Parahippocampal Place Area (PPA), Occipital Place Area (OPA), Fusiform Face Area (FFA)] were identified using a functional localizer scan, and core regions of the DMN were identified using a “rest” scan, in each individual. A parametric regression analysis of the fMRI data using overall ratings as regressors revealed sensitivity to aesthetic appreciation in several scene selective regions (PPA, Retrosplenial cortex and OPA) as well as ventral striatum and inferior frontal sulcus. These results suggest that aesthetically pleasing landscape videos modulate a wider network of higher-level visual regions than their static counterparts, and may rely less on top-down information for their aesthetic appeal.

Brain Representations of Acting Together: Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials to Watching Synchronous and Asynchronous Apparent Human Movement

Emiel Cracco ¹ , Haeeun Lee ² and Guido Orgs ²

¹Ghent University, Belgium, Goldsmiths

²University of London, U.K.

Abstract

While there is an extensive literature on the visual and motor processes involved in processing the actions of others, very little is known about the brain processes involved in processing multiple persons acting together. To address this issue, we developed a novel fast periodic apparent motion paradigm (Orgs et al., 2013) designed to study the neural mechanism of perceiving group movement. First, in an initial experiment, we presented four dancers performing fluent or non-fluent movements either in synchrony or out of synchrony. In a second experiment, we then manipulated configural body processing by showing the dancers either upright or inverted. While participants watched these apparent motion sequences, we used EEG to measure steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) at the base frequency of visual stimulation, at the frequency of body posture repetition, and at the rhythm of movement. We show that SSVEPs coupled to fluent rhythmical movements were modulated by whether or not the dancers moved in synchrony across both temporo-occipital and fronto-central areas. In contrast, SSVEPs coupled to body postures primarily varied with the fluency of the apparent movement sequence. This suggests that the brain binds together multiple individual observed actions into a higher-order percept encompassing the relationship between those actions, and that this binding process involves not only visual but also motor processing.

Progressive Change in Formal Qualities of Art Produced over the Course of Frontotemporal Dementia

Lisa Furman ¹ and Stephen Joy ²

¹Lesley University, U.S.A.

²Albertus Magnus College, U.S.A.

Abstract

Changes in the work produced by artists afflicted with neurological disorders shed light on the visuospatial and creative operations involved in art. Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) is among the most interesting disorders from this perspective. FTD’s presentation typically involves loss of verbal fluency and inhibitory executive controls with relative sparing (until later stages) of memory and comprehension. Cases have been reported of patients initiating artistic avocations after developing FTD, and it has been suggested that FTD may temporarily facilitate creativity. Fewer cases are known of accomplished artists who develop FTD; these lead to a more nuanced interpretation. This study used quantitative rating scales applied by judges trained in both art and psychology to examine the progressive changes in the formal qualities of artworks produced by a professional artist over the course of FTD. High-quality images of her works were made available and six rating scales were developed to capture important formal qualities of the artwork. Analysis of variance revealed statistically significant effects of time period on every scale, but the magnitude and timing of the effects varied. In general, our findings do not support the hypothesis that FTD enhances creativity and we discuss the interpretation of our findings considering previous work which may have misinterpreted disinhibition or loss of control as creative. The research suggests that the relationship between executive control and creativity is complex: these prefrontal circuits are necessary to planning and execution but may interfere with the generation of novel ideas.

Your Brain on Memory Drawing

Lora Likova

Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, U.S.A.

Abstract

Introduction: The most ancient manifestation of visual art – cave art – gains its power from the externalization of memories through drawing. Today, memory-guided drawing is widely neglected even in the art school curriculum. My hypothesis was that by orchestrating multiple abilities through the full perception-cognition-action ‘loop’, this fundamental form of art praxis has in turn a powerful potential to enhance these abilities, and my Cognitive-Kinesthetic training based on memory drawing has been developed to optimize and study this process across levels of vision function. Methods: Groups of normally sighted and totally blind participants underwent five 2-hr/day sessions of the Cognitive-Kinesthetic training. Memory-guided drawing was compared with a memory-free scribble. Transfer of learning to the enhancement of untrained core cognition tasks was assessed through standardized test batteries, run before and after training, together with whole-brain 3T fMRI. Granger Causality analysis was used to assess brain connectivity and its changes under the drawing training regimen. Results and Conclusions: As hypothesized, the short period of training in memory-guided drawing transferred to the enhancement of a broad range of cognitive abilities in both the sighted and the totally blind (from spatial analysis, working memory, retention, concept learning, and problem solving, to emotional empathy, etc.) and led to dramatic neuroplastic changes at both the functional and causal brain connectivity levels. The results provide strong experimental evidence of the power of art learning to enhance brain function, and support the importance of harnessing the great potential of art in education and beyond.

The Race to the Locus of Creativity: A Systematic Review

Liz Coulter-Smith

University of Northampton, U.K.

Abstract

In Gestalt and Art, Arnheim asserted that Gestalt theory was likely a reaction to an atomistic approach (Arnheim, 1943). Gestalt was a scientific expression, known as naturphilosophie and its popularity at the turn of the twentieth century arose from a renewed romanticism in Germany that favoured an emotional and unified relationship with nature, its creative power, and the view that the ‘gestalt’ or the whole was more than the sum of its parts. Gestalt ushered in a more holistic interrelatedness between the arts and sciences. Later, the Gestalt principles of perception and image-based rules such as proximity, similarity, continuity, symmetry, closure, and connectedness were applied to a number of fields in the arts and sciences including psychology, neurology and cybernetics. Gestalt concepts have continued to profoundly impact visual and perceptual technologies since the early development of photography, film and psychology. Considering the plethora of emerging visuoperceptual technologies such as virtual, augmented and mixed reality systems it may be useful to reconsider the basis of interrelatedness across disciplines. This talk summarises the findings of a systematic review carried out on current neuroimaging studies between 2009 and 2019, which have focussed on locating creativity in the brain. Many of the studies reviewed seek to build creative algorithms also known as creative machines (Colton et al., 2015). This review concludes with a discussion of the paradoxical socioethical and economic implications arising from a selection of these studies.

A Quantitative Approach to the Taxonomy of Artistic Styles

Johannes Schrumpf, Viviane Clay and Yannick Tessenow

University of Osnabrück, Germany

Abstract

Classifying artists and their work as part of a distinct art style has been the work ofscholars in the field of art history. Due to its subjective nature, the individual classifications of such scholars often contradict each other or are subject of debates. Our project investigated the differences in aesthetic qualities of seven different art styles through quantitative means. This was achieved by utilizing state-of-the-art deep learning paradigms to generate new artworks resembling the style of an artist or an entire art epoch. We conducted psychological experiments to measure the viewing behavior of subjects when regarding these new artworks. Two different experiments were conducted: In an eye-tracking study, subjects viewed artworks generated by our networks. Subject eye movements were recorded and then correlated. In a pop-out study, subjects had to identify an outlier style from three works of the same style. Reaction time and accuracy were measured and analyzed. Resulting from these experiments, we show that there are differences in viewing behavior between art styles indicating measurable aesthetic differences between styles. From these differences, we construct a hierarchical clustering showing relations between formerly distinct art styles. The hierarchical clustering constructed from our data shows a striking similarity to a clustering based on existing literature. Our study reveals a novel perspective on the classification of artworks into their respective art epochs through quantitative means. Advancements in deep-learning technology motivate using the methodology employed here for future studies in the domain of empirical aesthetics.

A Framework Directed at Answering the Question: What Is Art?

Dhanraj Vishwanath

University of St. Andrews, U.K.

Abstract

The complexity of the domain of artistic activity, particularly in the contemporary context, makes it challenging to provide a succinct definition of what constitutes the artistic endeavor, artifact and experience. Several influential theoretical proposals put forward in the last two decades have successfully addressed factors that drive artistic engagement, appreciation and preference; focusing primarily on an understanding of the perceptual and cognitive processes occurring in the art viewer. But why does an artist engage in art and what does she/he aim to achieve from a psychological standpoint? I present a framework which argues that the creation of art and aesthetic engagement can be best understood from the standpoint of the distinction between “declarative” and “non-declarative” information operating within four distinct levels of perceptual and cognitive processing. The proposed distinction between declarative and non-declarative information in the perceptual and cognitive domain is independent of the debate on aesthetics. I aim to motivate the framework by contextualizing it within the disparate strands of the neuroaesthetics debate and the history of the development of (Western) art and artistic practice.

Talk Session 4: Image and Material Properties; Beauty and Non-Beauty

Moderators: Claudia Muth and Fatima Felisberti

Image Perception: Can Old Thoughts Incite New Scientific Challenges?

Koenraad Jonckheere

Ghent University, Belgium

Abstract

In this paper, I will address some of the most ancient theories of the image and explain how some of the concepts and arguments, as developed in these medieval and early modern image theories, can still instigate viable research questions for the visual sciences of art. Indeed, in medieval and early modern times, images and image perception were a intensely debated topic. Especially in byzantine times (8th and 9th century) and in the sixteenth century varying and complex theories of the image were developed in which ancient philosophy, rhetoric, dialectic, theology were merged. While these theories were typically intended to either justify or condemn the religious use of images, they also testify of a thorough and inspiring understanding of image perception coining such principles as decorum, simulacrum, prototypum, et cetera. In doing so, these ancient scholars intuitively touched upon phenomena which are still intriguing, such as the psychologically complex relation between the image and the object, the perception of the image of a person in relation to the actual person or the impact of moment and context on perception. Can these old thoughts incite new scientific challenges? I will zoom in on one concept, namely the ‘insettinghe’, to argue that some of these ancient notions are still relevant.

A Tool to Investigate Colour Harmony

Jonas Van den Spiegel, Kevin A.G. Smet and Peter Hanselaer

KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

Colour harmony is an important issue for interior designers, fashion trend setters, developers of cosmetics, artists, … Colour harmony can be defined as the extent to which two or more colours, seen in neighbouring areas, produce a pleasing effect. Several scientific and less-scientific arguments have been used to develop theories about colour harmony. Some important issues in colour harmony research are: (a) Which question do we ask? Harmonic or disharmonic? Like or dislike? (b) How does context influence the outcome? Results could be completely different if the context is for example about fashion rather than room interior. (c) How objective and generic are the answers? It is not clear that an absolute and widely accepted colour harmony scale really exists. To answer these questions, large numbers of visual assessments must be performed. To meet this demand, a tool has been developed that helps us to perform experiments on a larger scale. Using this tool, several contexts can be questioned. The tool consists of 50 schematic representations of a “family” (parents and children) in which the colour of the shirt and of the trousers is selected from the Berkeley colour sample set. The assessment of the colour combinations is done by convenience sampling using a polling system via a personal smartphone. A pilot experiment was conducted with a class of high school students. The consistency of the answers, especially with the aim of avoiding biases, was investigated. The results of some preliminary tests obtained with this tool will be presented.

Characteristic Image Statistics Observed in Paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn and his Workshop

Isamu Motoyoshi

The University of Tokyo, Japan

Abstract

We have previously shown remarkable and systematic differences in the style between classical paintings in Europe and East-Asia in terms of simple image statistics (Motoyoshi, 2012, 2018, etc.). In the present study, we looked at variations in the style within Europe by analyzing image statistics for ~3200 paintings by 60 masters in the history of European paintings from 15 to 19 centuries. We computed the aggregated Portilla-Simoncelli texture statistics for each image and took the average across works for each author. Comparing these mean image statistics between the authors, we found a characteristic trend in paintings by Rembrandt, and his colleagues. His works have extremely low SD (but high contrast), extremely high skewness and kurtosis, and extremely high energy correlations across distant orientations and spatial frequencies. These properties are highly deviated from those of natural scenes, and hardly observed in works by the other masters such as Rubens and Caravaggio (or Caravaggisti). The subsequent PCA applied for the mean statistics revealed that Rembrandt and Gerald Dou are located in one extreme along the PC1 axis and Michelangelo and FraAngelico in the opposite end. Considering visual cortical representations as expected from these image statistics (i.e., low amplitude, sparse, and mutually suppressed neural signals), one may characterize Rembrandt’s paintings as extraordinary ‘silent’ pictures.

Attractiveness and Beauty Ratings in Art Portraits Relate to Different Image Properties

Gregor Uwe Hayn-Leichsenring ¹ and Anjan Chatterjee ²

¹University of Jena, Germany

²University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

Abstract

In the field of psychophysics, objective image properties (OIPs) are investigated for their relation to subjective ratings. OIPs can be divided into two groups: Local image properties (LIPs) referring to specific aspects of depicted objects and global image properties (GIPs) that refer to the image as a whole rather than its components. Both groups of properties have previously been associated with hedonic values. Art portraits possess two different – but highly correlated – hedonic values: the attractiveness of the model painted and the beauty of the painting itself. Attractiveness (in face photographs) has been related to LIPs and - to a smaller degree - to GIPs, while beauty has been shown to relate to GIPs in various categories. Based on these findings, we hypothesize that in art portrait paintings, LIPs relate to the attractiveness of the model while GIPs relate to the beauty of the painting. In an online study, 200 Participants rated 192 portrait paintings of different art styles of portraits (baroque, impressionism, expressionism). We confirmed our hypothesis showing that main predictors for model attractiveness was eye size (a LIP) while the main predictor for painting beauty was self-similarity (a GIP). A detailed analysis showed that baroque paintings drove the effect of beauty.

When Scenes Look Like Materials: Lessons from the “Figure-Hole” Motif in the Paintings of René Magritte

J. Brendan Ritchie and Benjamin van Buren

KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

It has been proposed that perception of certain classes of natural stimuli — including scenes and materials — may be explained by processes that do not explicitly segment regions into figure and ground. Such analyses in effect treat stimuli as textures, and visual discrimination and categorization as image processing problems over image statistics such as ‘spatial envelope’ and global ‘luminance skewness’. A reoccurring motif in the paintings of the Belgian surrealist René Magritte (1898–1967) suggests such approaches will have difficulty explaining cases in which the very same natural image stimulus can induce dual percepts. In these paintings, a scene is depicted that contains a silhouette (e.g. of a man in a bowler hat), and this silhouette itself contains another depicted scene (e.g. The Happy Donor, 1966). The silhouette is bistable, appearing as (i) a hole providing a window onto another scene; and (ii) a figure whose (positive) space is covered or filled with the scene texture. We call this the “figure-hole motif”. Several principles of perceptual organization are involved in the perceptual bistability of the motif, which we illustrate using examples of Magritte’s work, as well as reproductions and extensions of the motif using different scene textures. Crucially, because the stimulus does not change when our percept changes, the motif’s appearance at a particular moment cannot be explained by its local image statistics, but rather stems from visual segmentation processes which seem to determine, or interact with, its subsequent processing as a scene or material.

Appealing Non-Beauty

Claudia Muth ¹ , Jochen Briesen ² and Claus-Christian Carbon ¹

¹University of Bamberg, Germany

²University of Konstanz, Germany

Abstract

Does beauty imply appeal and does appeal imply beauty? And are these implications weaker in case of art? Whereas art can appeal due to beauty, it provides more resources for appeal such as artistic value, innovativeness, rewarding insights and extension of our emotional and experiential repertoire: Art-related pleasures of the mind are multifold and can even coexist with negative valence. We examined if expressions fusing (non)beauty and (dis)appeal reflect this specificity. Forty readers with varying levels of art-experience evaluated how contradictory sentences appeared like “X is beautiful but I don’t like how it looks” or “I like how X looks but it is not beautiful”. X was replaced by art-related (e.g., “this drawing”) or non-art-related concepts (e.g., “this bicycle”). The first sentence was estimated more contradictory than the latter: Beauty often implies appeal whereas we can more easily state appeal despite non-beauty. Generally, art-related sentences appeared less contradictory, especially for art-experienced people. Meanwhile, an additional sample of art-experienced graphic-design students did not differentiate significantly between art-related and -unrelated sentences. We will discuss specifics of the graphic-design background, conceptualizations of beauty and potential biases towards an aesthetic mindset. Reading about appealing non-beauty is not equivalent to experiencing it. But it might reflect that such a thought is conceivable and that readers considered the variability of art-related pleasures. This underlines the importance of negative valence and mixed emotions (Menninghaus et al., 2017), dichotomy between content and material (Pepperell, 2015) as well as ambivalence (Muth & Carbon, 2016) for art-experiences.

The Perception of Ugliness in Urban Environments Through Photographs of Nature and Man-Made Artefacts

Fatima M. Felisberti ¹ and George Mather ²

¹Kingston University London, U.K.

²University of London, U.K.

Abstract

Ugliness is a vague concept, and in folk psychology, it is usually linked to the absence of beauty and with negative affect. Little is known about the perception of ugliness in urban environments, which this multidimensional study addressed using photographs and mixed methods. In Experiment 1 participants wrote about ugliness in man-made and nature scenes in urban environments and took photographs of those scenes. Experiment 2 measured the aesthetic ratings for the photographic images using an online survey; half of the participants (“experts”) had contributed images to the survey and half not (“naïve”). Experiment 3 examined whether the visual properties of the photographic images could account for the aesthetic ratings they received. The findings revealed that notions of destruction and danger were frequently associated with ugliness in nature, while rubbish, disgust and unethical or unhealthy behaviours were associated with ugliness in man-made scenes. Overall, aesthetic preferences were higher in the naïve condition and for images of urban nature. The statistic properties of the images (spectral slope, fractal dimension and Shannon entropy) explained only a small proportion of the variability in aesthetic ratings. The study showed, for the first time, that the concept of ugliness in images of urban environments merges a wide range of cultural factors, as well as perceptual and statistical properties of the images.

INTEGRATED ART & SCIENCE POSTERS

How Can Sculptures Induce Visual Dynamical Processes for the Spectators?

Joos Vandewalle

KU Leuven/KVAB, Belgium

Abstract

The author is an amateur sculptor and professionally a mathematical engineer, who has made over a period of 16 years about 20 sculptures in soft natural stone with nice colors and crystals. The results are abstract sculptures like those in the two pictures with typically smooth surfaces that are based on natural convex and concave shapes and mathematical equations. These shapes are the typical shapes that are carved by mountain rivers in stones. The manual sculpturing process with chisel, grater and sandpaper is inspired by this action of the water. The mathematical representation of the surfaces are typically hyperboloids, paraboloids or surfaces with soft derivatives. When two surfaces meet each other, smooth boundary curves are created. Moreover, openings link the front and back sides. All these elements together are expected to trigger different visual perception of the spectator, depending on his relative position. The visual system is particularly sensitive to the smoothness of the curves and surfaces. So, for every position the spectator sees a different 2D outline of the sculpture and also a different 2D inner opening. This should seduce the spectator to move around the sculpture in order to see what is on the backside. While moving around the sculpture, the spectator has a visual perception of a varying inner and outer outline of curves, shapes, openings and colors. Depending on the curiosity and the head movement of the spectator, a 3D visual impression is created of the sculpture. The sculptures can be exhibited at the conference.

Paintings of Masks in Surrealistic Environments

Benjamin Baret

Labokube, Belgium

Abstract

In Latin, the translation of “mask” is “persona”. Interestingly, in French, “personne” has two meanings: it can designate either the presence or the absence of somebody. Similarly, a mask is an inanimate object (i.e., absent), but is supposed to bring a certain presence to the person wearing it. Its presence usually remains hidden until someone wears it. This duality (absence vs. presence) may lead to ambiguous sensations that we feel when looking at a mask. Would the same kind of sensations or emotions emerge when looking at painted representations of masks? Following graphical researches on the sensations triggered by the observation of a picture depicting a mask, I have intended to develop a way to paint that aims at triggering this duality of sensations. I paint realistic compositions made of pre-existing masks that are merged together using invented items and masks. This composite mask is surrounded by a desert landscape with a colorful sky. As a result, the painting represents a realistic mask floating in a surrealistic environment. It usually leads to a sensation of presence, as if the masks were real. How to define this strange sensation we feel when looking at a mask or at a picture of it? Why and in which conditions can we get this sensation of a presence? I would like to invite the audience to discuss these questions during an exhibition of my paintings.

Artwork by Hennou Ben Houssine

Hennou Ben Houssine ¹ and Valérie Goffaux ²

¹Artist ²⁰ , Belgium

²Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium

Abstract

After studying painting at the Art Academy of Namur (Belgium) with Luc Perot, Bernard Boigelot and Jean-Pierre Gonthier, I studied the history of art and sculpture. The canvas is the ground where I deploy a mixture of techniques combining colors and materials. This is how I convey the impressions gleaned in everyday life and the pulses of the city. Through this process, the surface of the canvas transforms into an urban map tainted by echo sounds. Over the last years, my daughter who is a vision scientist and I have been discussing the emerging cross-talks between vision sciences and art. VSAC is a unique opportunity to show my work to this scientific community.

A Series of Artworks Demonstrating Colour Phenomena

Leone Burridge

Artist ²¹ , Australia

Abstract

I would like to present 2 short series of art works demonstrating colour phenomena. (1) Monocular rivalry: A series of drawings made on an iPhone 5 and then printed onto fine art paper, and paintings on canvas. These works demonstrate fluctuating perceptions of opponent colours, a phenomenon described as monocular rivalry. Wade et al gave an account of the history of the discovery and rediscovery of this phenomenon in i-Perception Nov-Dec 2017. (2) Illusory colours: Paintings executed using only black and white pigments, but which produce the perception of subtle spectral colours. An early description of this phenomenon was given by Luckiesh in The American Journal of Psychology, 1933.

Order around the Colour Circle

Jan Koenderink ¹ and Andrea van Doorn ²

¹KU Leuven, Belgium

²Utrecht University, the Netherlands

Abstract

We consider colour circles based upon progressive subdivision of the elementary red-yellow-green-cyan-blue-magenta periodic six-step scale, made up from the basic red, green and blue “parts of white” (as originally suggested by Schopenhauer on the basis of Goethe’s colour theories). In analogy to the Farnsworth hundred-hue task, we let observers sort scrambled colour circles with respect to hue. Almost all observers manage to sort a twenty-four colour circle perfectly, but almost nobody is able to perfectly sort even more fine-grained ones. The errors accumulated in a clear pattern, rather than being distributed uniformly. We computed the dominant wavelengths of the spectral hues, which allowed us to compare the sorting results to classical spectral discrimination data. We find good correspondence. This data is relevant to the arts, suggesting that a twelve step colour circle might perhaps be most universally useful, whereas a forty-eight step scale is heavy “overkill”. Thus the doubling of the number of hues (in 1950) from 20 to 40 was no progress from the artistic perspective and Wilhelm Ostwald’s ordinal 100-step hue scale was also far over the top. These findings agree well to our work on human colour reproduction abilities.

Foray into Colour Harmony

Andrea van Doorn ¹ , Doris Braun ² and Jan Koenderink ³

¹Utrecht University, the Netherlands

²Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany

³KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

We consider the topic of colour harmony from the perspective of affective dimensions. Colours are presented as self-similar random Gaussian noise patterns (no edges) or in random mosaics of Voronoi cells (many edges). Colour combinations are presented as mixtures of the chromatic colours, black and white. Such stimuli look rather more “natural” than mere swatches made up of a small number of full strength uniform rectangles as is more like the usual practice. In fact, especially the textural patterns appear aesthetically pleasing and might well fit into general art work. During a trial the patterns are refreshed every second, so the judgement is based on a statistical sample of images of a common “style”. We studied a group of more than thirty participants (students and staff) of a mid-European university. Ages ranged from 23 to 76, both genders about equally presented. We find that the concordance between participants is quite good, so apparently the notion of a “colour harmony” as at least a cultural trait makes some sense. As a kind of sanity check we look at the subset of dichromatic either all-warm or all-cool combinations, for which one might expect to see the warm-cool dichotomy reflected in the results. Indeed, a clustering algorithm robustly yields the expected dichotomy for the textured images. We find that the spatial structure is important, which has implications for the interpretation of the literature. We report results on the affective dimensions soothing-irritating, weak-strong, dull-vivid, subdued-intrusive, calm-lively, blunt-piercing and gloomy-cheerful.

Experts’ Judgements of Texture Expression Depend on Drawing Technique and Material

Susan te Pas ¹ , Andrea van Doorn ¹ , Marianne Venderbosch ² and Jan Koenderink ³

¹Utrecht University, the Netherlands

²Venderbosch Gallery, the Netherlands

³KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

In drawings, the artist is able to use the interesting interaction between the material that is drawn on, the drawing technique used and the object that is depicted to get the desired result. We would like to investigate what effects these interactions have on various aspects of objects. In order to do that we asked 23 art experts, 8 collectors and 15 artists, to view and judge drawings of everyday objects on several aspects. These objects were chosen in three categories: Soft, Smooth or Articulate and in each of those categories we had either both a more and a less detailed object. The objects (Cotton, Feather, Egg, Sharks Tooth, Amethyst, Binoculars) were all drawn 10 times by the same artist, Marianne Venderbosch. ²² They were drawn on white paper using black ink, pencil, crayon or charcoal, on black paper using white ink or white crayons and on grey paper using black ink, white ink, black and white ink or black and white crayons. Our experts judged various qualities of the drawings. When they judged more physical properties such as contrast of the drawings, judgements were very consistent between experts and between objects, and were in line with the physical contrast of the drawings as expected. When they judged which background or drawing technique yielded the best texture expression of the object material the experts were less consistent. There were, however, large differences between soft, smooth and articulated objects.

A Computational Analysis of Moiré-Induced Illusory Deformation

Takahiro Kawabe and Masataka Sawayama

NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan

Abstract

Moiré pattern refers to a pattern that can be seen when two or more periodic structures are superimposed. The moiré pattern has been used in many types of optical arts to provide the perception of illusory structures. In this study, we report a new moiré-related phenomenon in which a real object is apparently deformed by the background drifting grating. In the phenomenon, a real object apparently deforms when it is placed in front of an LCD display presenting a tilted drifting grating. The apparent deformation of the object seems to come from the moiré pattern that is generated between the edge of the object and the background grating. We tried to understand what visual mechanism underlay the moiré-induced illusory deformation of the object. In a psychophysical experiment, we confirmed that orientation and spatial frequency of background grating were strong determinants of deformation perception in our illusion. Assuming that the critical component of the deformation was image motion signals of moiré patterns, we simulated the responses of velocity-selective units (MT pattern motion cells) to the stimuli we used. When the deformation perception was strong, the simulated responses had spatially alternated peaks at leftward and right motion. Further computational analysis showed that the deformation perception occurred when the spatial pattern of the simulated responses had specific bands of spatial frequency. The deformation perception in our moiré effect is well explained with assuming a high-level mechanism that monitors the spatial pattern of velocity-selective units in MT areas.

Abstract Images with and without Artistic Composition: A Tool to Investigate Aesthetic Perception

Christoph Redies

University of Jena, Germany

Abstract

What is the nature of artistic composition in visual artworks and how is it processed by the human visual system? To study this question, I created a series of 20 abstract drawings, each composed of various pictorial elements. In the original version of the drawings, I arranged the elements in a way that pleased me aesthetically (original drawings with artistic composition). I also produced image versions by randomly shuffling the pictorial elements, thereby destroying artistic composition (shuffled images without artistic composition). Ten pairs of these images will be shown at the meeting, together with a poster that summarizes three recent scientific studies using these images. The first study (Redies et al., 2015) demonstrates that the original images possess a higher degree of self-similarity, and are perceived as more ordered and harmonious than the shuffled versions. In the second study (Menzel et al., 2018), we show by electrophysiological recordings that the human brain can detect composition-related differences between the original and shuffled images in an automatic fashion. The third study (Schwabe et al., 2018) demonstrates that exposure times as short as 50 ms suffice for human observers to reach stable and consistent aesthetic ratings on the images. Together, these studies suggest that artistic composition can be processed fast and automatically by the human visual system. A cognitive contribution to the aesthetic judgment is not required. (References: Redies et al. (2015) Art & Perception 3:93–116; Menzel et al. (2018) Biological Psychology 136:76–86; Schwabe et al. (2018) i-Perception 9(3):1–25.)

How I Paint - Deep Neural Network Responses during the Creation of Abstracts Artworks

Christoph Redies

University of Jena, Germany

Abstract

Little is known about the perceptual strategies that visual artists use to create their artworks. In the present study, I recorded series of state versions of five colored abstract drawings that I painted myself. I then used algorithms derived from deep neural network to analyze the state series by objective means. Deep neural networks can be trained to learn complex visual tasks, such as object recognition. At low levels, the networks react to oriented luminance and color edges and spatial frequencies in images, much like neurons in the human visual system. We have shown previously that the low-level responses of particular deep neural networks (CNNs) show a high richness and variability in large subsets of traditional artworks (Brachmann et al., 2017). In the present study, we show that the richness of network responses steadily increased during the creation of each drawing. Variability increased initially, but then dropped to intermediate values when the drawings approached their completion. When richness and variability were plotted in two-dimensional diagrams, the plots for the five drawings varied greatly at early states of their creation, but then followed a narrow common path at later states, before terminating at or close to the cluster of traditional artworks in the plots. Our results show that it is possible to use objective physical measures to analyze creative decisions taken by artists. In future studies, it will be of interest to compare creative strategies used by different artists. (Reference: Brachmann, A., Barth, E., Redies, C. (2017) Frontiers in Psychology 8:830).

Lichtenberg Figures Assessed for their Aesthetic Potential

Nicolas Strappini ²³

University of Portsmouth, U.K.

Abstract

My PhD research involves the documentation of diffusion-limited aggregation patterns and other ‘self-authoring’ systems. I assess these arrangements to appraise their artistic potential. In relation to geoscience, I study DLA patterns similar to those found in the manganese oxide that are found on the surface of sedimentary rocks. I visualize and document electrical breakdown patterns that display fractal properties. Electrical branching patterns are also observed in the surfaces of golf courses that have been struck by lightning. Fulgurites are made of fused sand and are found in a variety of geosystems. These electrical formations obey the Laplace equation. I experiment with different materials to visualize the dendritic form in materials like lucite using lycopodium powders, carbon powder or iron filings. Using wooden and metallic constructions I have been charging up plastic surfaces with static, then dusting powders on the surface, thus visualising the invisible Lichtenberg figures left in the plastic. My photopolymer etchings are a direct visual representation of electricity. The usage of mechanical contrivances echoes Jean Tinguely and Francis Picabia’s Neo-Dadaism. I have been studying the work of the German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. The Lichtenberg figures can be described by Maxwell’s equations. The powder dusting method I used to make artworks is also used in forensic science. Not dissimilar to my process, forensic scientists use a device that generates static charge, and the charge draws the dust from the print on to the black plastic.

Quest for the Aesthetic Photograph: A Multi-Method Approach to Studying our Reactions to Artistic Photography

Nathalie Vissers ¹ and Johan Wagemans ²

¹Researcher and artist, Belgium ²⁴

²KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

Photography is a child of our time and place. Being around for a bit less than two centuries, it has now reached omnipresence in our current society. Even though the technology is relatively new, visual communication is old and our visual system trying to interpret our environment is of course much older still. By combining visual elements in a certain way, careful framing, waiting for the right moment and editing, photographers hold in their hands a very powerful system to convey meaning, stir feelings, tell stories and inspire reactions in others. Yet, despite the omnipresence of our interactions with photography, our scientific understanding of the perceptual and aesthetic effects of photographs is surprisingly limited (Jacobsen & Beudt, 2017 in Frontiers in Psychology; McManus & Stöver, 2014 in The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Aesthetics and the Arts). In a large-scale exploratory study with a set of high-level artistic photographs, we combined several quantitative and qualitative methods to obtain a better understanding of these perceptual and aesthetic effects. Using a grouping paradigm, rating tasks, an alternative forced choice procedure and open-ended questions, we aimed to unravel the role of image features, processing fluency, composition and context information in viewers’ perception and aesthetic reactions to these artistic photographs. With this poster, we want to present the first results, in order to receive feedback to further guide our analyses of this rich dataset as well as brainstorm about ideas for valuable follow-up experiments based on the findings.

Visual Diagrams and Spatial Narrations

Roxane Enescu

Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Abstract

Is the presence in reality and the awareness of the viewers part of the territory on which the architectural spaced could increase their performances through a synergy with film creation? Several areas of questioning and experimentation will be discussed, such as haptic and imaginary dimensions of architecture seen from the viewers-users points of view. This presentation puts space, visual arts and cinema face-to-face in a dual approach. Firstly, it deals with a rather holistic phenomenological approach that focuses on the theoretical and philosophical definitions of several concepts and transitional notions between cinema and real spaces. Secondly, it is about a rather experimental approach, which first opens up to the segmentation of observed experiences to finally build an integrative installation associating film and spatial thinking. The installation established a spatial diagram that interconnects and stimulates the creation of collective synergies and imageries or mental constructions as well as augments presence and awareness of viewers. It provides narrative structures and building elements of dynamic views. The installation transforms the user from a passive observer to an actor with an active and creative role. A series of devices is used to test the possibilities of setting up fictional or real visual architectures. The devices were built from the structural analysis of a sequence from one of Chantal Akerman’s New York films, Hotel Monterey.

Between Immersion and Empathy

Ute Leonards ¹ , Stephen Whitehead ² , Angela C. Rowe ¹ , Jasmina Stevanov ¹ , Aya Kobayashi ² and Nick Scott-Samuel ¹

¹University of Bristol, U.K.

²Countershade CIC, U.K.

Abstract

The frog school of camouflage (FSOC) is a pedagogical strategy directed towards primary schoolchildren (<12 years old) which uses defensive coloration as a learning device to increase empathy with nature. We present a video which outlines the key stages of this approach, along with a discussion of its underlying philosophy between an artist, a social psychologist and two vision scientists. The children are guided through the process of abstracting the features found in their local forest environment, and encouraged to record and then reproduce those features on plaster cast life size frog models. These models are placed in the forest environment and the children search for them, thereby directly experiencing the effectiveness of background matching as a defensive coloration strategy. We will test whether the FSOC actually works: specifically, do measures of empathy, both general and specific to nature environments, change after the intervention? If so, which are the critical components, e.g. learning to see visual patterns usually masked by our tendency to focus on objects, visual cognition, high-level cognitive processes, or the artistic creation process itself? Once the effectiveness of the approach has been established, we will create a toolbox for use in schools both within Britain and beyond, with the aim of increasing empathy for the natural world in young people. We see this as a crucial step toward changing attitudes and behaviour towards sustainability and climate change.

POSTERS

Poster Session 1

Technical Art History: Opening up Heritage Interpretation

Maria Hansar and Hilkka Hiiop

Estonian Academy of Art, Estonia

Abstract

Heritage interpretation as a culturally inscribed process includes understanding visual imagery within its cultural context. In our presentation we are arguing that digital media as research tool has the potential to profoundly alter the landscape of heritage interpretation. New forms of dialogic relationships with the place and object of heritage are personalizing the experience and the engagement of the public and can be a creative challenge for artists, allowing new interpretations of the heritage. We will present an ongoing research project of the department of Cultural Heritage and Conservation of the Estonian Academy of Arts. The interdisciplinary project is focusing on the oeuvre of Christian Ackermann. Since 2016 technical investigations have been carried out and in addition to technical art history, a field of study combining methods from arts and sciences, using ICT for acquiring, processing, contextualizing and visualising data, this project has an outcome for a wider public and is a source for new artistic creations. The aim of the artistic cooperation in a joint project with the students of interior architecture, graphic design and conservation, was to design the 10 meter high scaffolding for the altar retable of Tallinn Cathedral, which would take into account the artwork, its history and spatial context, as well as its liturgical use. The scaffolding enabled close-up views of the retable completed in Ackermann’s workshop, not only to professional specialists, but also to the general public. During one year around 3,000 people from very different interest groups visited the tours on the scaffolding.

Back to the Roots: Towards a New ‘Aesthetic from Below’

Stefan A. Ortlieb and Claus-Christian Carbon

University of Bamberg, Germany

Abstract

When Gustav Theodor Fechner (1876) launched the research agenda of “empirical aesthetics,” he envisioned an experimental down-to-earth complement (“aesthetic from below”) to highbrowed philosophical speculation with its predilection for the arts and its disregard for everyday phenomena (“aesthetic from above”). Although Fechner’s experimental approach to aesthetic problems has been highly influential, a strong proclivity to high art in theory and practice of empirical aesthetics persists as studies on popular taste are still outnumbered by research on art perception. As a result, the elitist ideal of Modern art has shaped our understanding of human aesthetic sensibility to the point that today’s paramount models of aesthetic appreciation—including fluency-based ones—share the premises and blind spots of eighteenth-century highbrow aesthetics; by privileging style over content and detached cognitive assessment over unconditional emotional involvement, they deliberately exclude what is essential not only for popular aesthetics (e.g., kitsch) and Postmodern art (e.g., Pop art), but also for premodern artistic production (e.g., religious art): a meaningful subject matter with a strong affective charge. Last but not least, with recent studies suggesting that content-based associations are the best estimates for aesthetic liking and that content is processed prior to style even on a micro-genetic level, we conclude that it is about time to discard “disinterestedness” and to establish a new ‘aesthetic from below’ that allows us to deal with the popular, the premodern, and the postmodern comprehensively.

Perceptual and Cognitive Processing in Aesthetic Experience

Tomoyuki Naito, Masahiro Wakabayashi, Masatoshi Kitaguchi and Hiromichi Sato

Osaka University, Japan

Abstract

Theoretical studies suggest that there are three different mechanisms underlying human aesthetic experiences: perceptual processing, which has small variability among individuals (shared properties) and strong correlation with image statistics (e.g. color statistics); cognitive processing, which is idiosyncratic and has weak correlation with image statistics; and emotional processing, which determines the affective part of the experience. Furthermore, several experimental studies have reported that a human aesthetic experience can be largely explained by only a few latent factors. However, it is still unclear whether the idiosyncrasy and sensitivity to image statistics of the latent factors from empirical studies are consistent with the multi-stage processing hypothesis from theoretical studies. In the present study, using exploratory factor analysis, we derived three latent factors of an aesthetic experience from participants observing landscape paintings and photographs, and examined the difference in idiosyncrasy of the factors and the relationship between the factors and color statistics. We found that there were significant correlations among the color statistics and Factor 1, which had a small variance of factor scores (low idiosyncrasy), and no or weak correlation among the color statistics and Factor 2, which had a large variance of scores (high idiosyncrasy). Our results suggest that the multi-stage processing hypothesis and latent factor model on aesthetic experience are partially consistent.

Vienna Art Picture System (VAPS)

Anna Fekete ¹ , Eva Specker ¹ , Matthew Pelowski ¹ , David Brieber ¹ , Marcos Nadal ² and Helmut Leder ¹

¹University of Vienna, Austria

²University of the Balearic Islands, Spain

Abstract

A particular challenge in the field of empirical visual aesthetics is the stimuli itself: artworks share diverse properties and dimensions in terms of style, complexity, affect, and depicted content which all influence aesthetic experiences. Therefore, a systematic consideration of these methodological aspects is crucial when investigating aesthetics empirically and developing reliable set of stimuli is essential. Vienna Art Picture System (VAPS) provides a comprehensive database of visual artistic stimuli, consisting 1000 fine art paintings from European painters since 1450 with a focus on the 20th century and contains artworks from five main categories: scenes, portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and abstract paintings. The database is standardized on five variables: liking, emotional valence, emotional arousal, visual complexity and familiarity and rated by 60 men and 60 women. Depending on the research-related characteristics, VAPS offer an objective, normative (mean, standard deviation) set of fine art pictures that can be used as a tool for researchers on the field of empirical visual aesthetics, and experimental psychology.

Computational Aesthetics: On Recognising and Drawing Kittens in Chinese Paintings

Qianqian Gu and Ross D. King

University of Manchester, U.K.

Abstract

Deep Learning (DL) image analysis has made recent rapid advances, but still confronts problems that indicate that DL differs significantly from human image analysis – the requirement for large training sets, being fooled by adversarial attacks, etc.. It is hypothesized that the reason for this is compiled background knowledge about the world encoded in the human visual system architecture was learnt through millions of years of Darwinian evolution. Traditional Chinese Painting (TCP) is one of the great art heritages of the World (206 BC - now). Its unique style, which dates back over 2000 years, is instantly recognizable to humans. Here, to explore the differences between human and DL object recognition, we investigate DL object recognition, style classification and style transfer areas. We introduced a new DL object detection method A-RPN (Assembled Region Proposal Network), which concatenates low-level visual information, and high-level semantic knowledge to reduce coarseness in region-based object detection. A-RPN significantly outperforms state-of-art DL methods YOLO2 and Faster R-CNN on natural images (P < 0.02). We applied YOLO2, Faster R-CNN, and A-RPN to TCPs with a 13%, 16% and 17% drop in accuracy compared to natural images. We investigate what features of TCPs make DL perform relatively poorly and their relationships with TCP design concepts.

The Naturalness of Artistic Mark-Making Predicts Aesthetic Value

Rebecca Chamberlain, Guido Orgs, Daniel Berio, Frederic Fol Leymarie and Kirren Chana

Goldsmiths, University of London, U.K.

Abstract

Research is beginning to show that embodiment plays an important role in engagement with the arts, by helping the viewer to recover the artist’s movements and intentions from the artwork. In line with this idea, motor systems seem to contribute to the observation of dynamic abstract artworks (e.g. Umiltá et al., 2012) and aesthetic appreciation for a painting is enhanced when artistic movements appear less robotic (Chamberlain et al., 2018). Motor simulation accounts of visual aesthetics make an interesting assumption about the origin of artistic traces: Artworks originating from human artists’ movement should be more attractive than artworks from non-human artists. However, to date no study has evaluated how natural movement parameters such as the timing and velocity of drawing movements contribute to perceived plausibility and aesthetic appreciation of the artistic trace. In a series of 4 studies, we present participants (n = 40 per study) in the laboratory with synthetic graffiti tags, which are computationally generated with biologically plausible and non-plausible movements. We then measure the perceived plausibility of these trajectory formation methods in both their static and dynamic forms and evaluate the impact this has on aesthetic evaluation of the artistic trace. Results indicate that observers are sensitive to the plausibility of the artificially generated graffiti tags, and that this perceived ‘naturalness’ shapes aesthetic appreciation. These studies are the first in a line of research evaluating the aesthetic value of graffiti art and its potential for explicating the mechanisms of embodied aesthetic experience.

Art as Creative Inspiration

Edward Vessel ¹ , Dominik Welke ¹ and Isaac Purton ²

¹Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Germany

²New York University, U.S.A.

Abstract

What inspires you? Moments of creative inspiration (externally evoked motivation for creative activity) are critical pivot points that mark the transition from creative ideation to actualization of an idea. We hypothesize that the state of being aesthetically moved, a critical moment during aesthetic reception, is similar to the state of being creatively inspired. If this is the case, then being aesthetically moved may serve as an effective prime for creative inspiration. We designed an experimental paradigm in which participants wrote short pieces of creative text in response to visual prompts that varied in their subjective aesthetic appeal. Following each writing phase, participants rated how inspired they felt when beginning their writing. In Experiment 1 (25 participants), prompts consisted of paintings that each participant previously rated as highly liked (aesthetic prompts) or triads of unrelated words (non-aesthetic prompts). Mixed linear modelling revealed higher self-reported inspiration for aesthetic vs non-aesthetic prompts (p < 0.001). In Experiment 2 (34 participants), prompts consisted of paintings that each participant previously rated as highly liked or as disliked, plus novel paintings. Self-reported inspiration was higher for liked paintings than for disliked paintings (p < 0.001), with novel paintings producing intermediate ratings of inspiration. Yet even for novel paintings, inspiration ratings were positively associated with post-hoc aesthetic ratings. Thus aesthetic appeal, but not stimulus familiarity, influenced felt inspiration, suggesting that being aesthetically moved can act as a trigger for creative inspiration. Aesthetic engagement may be a potent tool for increasing individuals’ likelihood to engage in creative production.

Investigating the Components of the Aesthetic Processing Among Artists and Non-Artists with a Composition Creating Task

Bernadett Arndt

University of Pécs, Hungary

Abstract

According to the existing research results on the field of visual perception, there are certain objective features, which contribute to the aesthetic judgement of visual stimuli. These are: balance, symmetry, integrity, stability and complexity. Together they are called the principles of figural goodness. Besides, meaning-attribution and artistic perception can influence the aesthetic judgement as well, based on our previous studies. To test these effects, participants of two groups (artists, n = 65 and control, n = 49) have made two simple compositions, a beautiful/good and an ugly/wrong. After that, they were asked to give titles to the pictures. By comparing the “good” and “bad” compositions, we drew conclusions about the role of figural goodness. By comparing the two groups, we investigated the role of artistic perspective. Finally, by comparing the titles, we tried to understand the role of the content. Our results confirm the importance of the objective features in the process of aesthetic appreciation. Especially symmetry seems to be dominant. Artistic perspective adjusts to some traits of figural goodness, but it also overwrites some of them. Average beholders find pictures which are depicting something more beautiful. They create their “good” compositions according to this, while their “bad” compositions are rather abstract. There is no such difference between the content type among the pictures of the experimental group: both the good and the bad pictures are mostly abstract - which means, that their aesthetic judgement is not based on the type of the content, but rather on the meaning and the effect of it.

The Influence of Art Expertise, Knowledge, and Interest on the Appreciation of “Black and Red Squares” by Kazimir Malevich

Arefe Sarami ¹ , Johan Wagemans ² and Reza Afhami ¹

¹Tarbiat Modares University, Iran

²KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

In this study, we investigated how art experience affected the appreciation of a series of “Black and Red Squares” by Kazimir Malevich. We used a set of 124 stimuli consisted of the original Malevich’s work (4 times) and 120 alternatives derived by changing the skewness of the black square’s side edge, the orientation and color of the small square (red or black), and the distance between the large and small squares. Sixty-two participants rated these 124 stimuli on 4 different 5-point Likert scales to indicate how harmonious, balanced, pleasing, and interesting they found them. Moderate Pearson correlations were obtained between all of the scales, but they were particularly strong between interesting and pleasing, and between harmonious and balanced. Participants were also asked about their expertise, general and abstract art knowledge, and interest in art, which were all correlated (Pearson’s r ~ 0.65). Two-sample paired t-tests were used to investigate how each of the four ratings differed between the groups of participants with and without art expertise, knowledge, and interest. Art expertise, knowledge, and interest showed highly significant (p < 0.001), significant (p < 0.05) and marginally significant (p = 0.05) effects on the pleasingness and interestingness scores. No significant effect was observed on the harmony and balance scores. Despite perception of the structural characteristics, art experience can significantly influence the visual aesthetic perception. Particularly, art expertise, and not necessarily knowledge or interest, can significantly affect the appreciation of artworks.

Putative Alternation of Orientation and Spatial Frequency Tuning of Visual Neurons in Experts of Art

Tatsuya Mori, Yoshiyuki Shiraishi, Hiromichi Sato and Tomoyuki Naito

Osaka University, Japan

Abstract

Genre of painting means the type or category of a painting. Experts of art can identify and classify the genre of paintings never seen before in a high accuracy. However, it was unclear what kind of visual information is a clue to the classification. In this study, we used deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) to examine the neuronal alternation between before and after learning genres of paintings learning. The DCNN has been a de facto standard model for image recognition. Recent studies reported that performance optimized DCNN can be used to build quantitative predictive models of neural processing in the ventral visual stream. Using DCNN model, we investigated the qualitative and quantitative alternations of neuronal properties between the models before and after learning genres of paintings. Orientation (OR) and spatial frequency (SF) tunings of DCNN units were measured using sinusoidal grating stimuli. The magnitude of selectivity was measured using tuning bandwidth after Gaussian fitting. After learning painting genre, OR tuning became shaper in the middle layers and became broader in the higher layers. The SF tuning became sharper in the middle layers. Our results showed that systematic OR and SF tuning alternation occurred mainly in the middle layers in the DCNN, which probably were corresponding to the intermediate cortical areas in the visual information processing. Our results suggest that in the brain of experts of art, similar alternation of properties of visual neurons may occur comparing to novice.

Terminology and Classification of Selfies

Carolin Tratz, Tobias Matthias Schneider and Claus-Christian Carbon

University of Bamberg, Germany

Abstract

Taking selfies has become a common habit in our daily life. According to estimates by social media platforms (e.g., Instagram), the number of uploaded self-portraits per week increased dramatically during the last decade (~17M/week in 2016). Consequently, this phenomenon got more in focus of scientific investigations. Interestingly, there are obvious differences in how selfies are taken (e.g., classical self-ies vs. we-fies or using a mirror vs. no mirror). However, up to now there is no consistent terminology or scientific investigation on such typical characteristics, similarities and diversity in selfies. The current research approached the problem of terminology empirically, by studying people’s word usage to describe common selfies. 130 individual participants had to assess the quality and nature of 30 selected pictures – in sum, all participants assessed 1000 selfies. This assessment war realized through free associations which had to be expressed as written statements. We conducted a content analysis revealing that most selfies can be described by distinct characteristics such as compositional aspects, mood, place, and season of creation. We were particularly interested in the relationship between personality attributions and aesthetic aspects like attractiveness or harmonic impression. This research aims to develop a classification of selfies for the visual modality. Such a common terminology should facilitate the development of cross-disciplinary models of selfies and create a basis for the construction of standardized investigations.

Decoding Facial Expressions in Paintings: The Effect of Distance

Daniele Zavagno ¹ , Maria Vittoria Carboni ¹ , Rossana Actis-Grosso ¹ and Olga Daneyko ²

¹University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

²Sheffield Hallam University, U.K.

Abstract

By means of an association game conducted on the web we asked people to match terms denoting 24 affective states, divided into three categories (emotions, feelings, and moods), to 21 facial expressions taken from XV–XVII century European art. The task was to choose for each face one term from each category that best described the expression portrayed. We then combined each face with the term/s that were the most chosen: under each picture we placed a question (e.g. “Does this face express SATISFACTION?”) and a 5-point Likert scale (1 “not at all”; 2 “very little”; 3 a bit; 4 “quite”; 5 “very much”). We asked 30 people to inspect the faces and answer the questions using the Likert scale. Stimuli were presented at two different distances: half of the participants saw first the images from a distance of 50 cm and repeated the experiment a week later observing the images from a distance of 550 cm; for the other half the order was inverted. Our hypothesis was that distance would modify the interpretation or the intensity of the facial expression portrayed. We found this to be true for a limited number of images: 9 faces combined with feelings, 6 with moods, and only 4 with emotions. Five works by Leonardo Da Vinci were also employed as stimuli, among which “La Gioconda” and “La Bella Principessa”. The interpretation of the facial expressions in these two portraits were not affected by distance.

The Attention Capture by Artificial Faces: Fictional Movie Character, Ugly and Beautiful Faces

Eriko Matsumoto and Tomoyuki Naito

Kobe University, Japan

Abstract

Human faces can capture and hold attention. Especially, threat-related face or high-attractive faces are thought to be captured more attention because these would be important for survival. However, little is known whether the artificial faces could capture attention if they present completely task-irrelevant. The present study uses fictional movie character or artificial made faces for task-irrelevant distractors to test how they could capture attention compare to the real human faces. We measure the aesthetic values of each distractor face to test the correlation with the degree of the distraction effect. The study employed RSVP task with presenting distractor faces periphery. The artificial faces (beauty and ugly) were made by using classification image paradigm (Naito et al., 2017) to control the level of ugliness and attractiveness (beautifulness). The horror movie character stimuli were selected; 10 Zombie faces were used. The real human faces were used for control. Forty students were participated for all condition. In each task trial, 20 letters with variable colors presented rapid serially at the center of the monitor in 100 ms SOA. Participants asked to detect target color letter ignoring the peripheral distractor stimulus. The results showed that there were significant difference among face categories; the artificial faces could capture attention. The correlation between the aesthetic judgement and correct response rates were not significant, but the correlation with the judgement of arousal was significant. These results suggest that involuntary attention capture for artificial faces could arise before the aesthetic perception process.

Attractive Bodies Are All Alike; Every Unattractive Body Is Unattractive in at Least Three Ways!

Slobodan Marković and Tara Bulut

University of Belgrade, Serbia

Abstract

In the present study we investigated the differences in experience of both attractiveness and unattractiveness of human bodies. Participants (48 males, 57 females) were asked to create the most attractive and the most unattractive male and female figures using a program for computer animation. They performed this task by adjusting the size of six body parts: shoulders, chests/breasts, waist, hips, buttocks and legs. Unfortunately, differences between attractive and unattractive sizes of body parts couldn’t be tested directly, because the distributions of two data sets were substantially different: normal distributions for all attractive and none for unattractive body parts were obtained. Distributions for unattractive body parts were either U-shaped or skewed towards one of the other extreme size. Cluster analysis revealed three clusters of unattractive male bodies: (1) Bulky body (increased masculinity: broad shoulders, chests, waist and hips), (2) Pear-shaped body (decreased masculinity: narrow shoulders and chests, wide hips, large buttocks and short legs), and (3) Tiny body (narrow shoulders and chests, small buttocks and short legs). Three clusters of unattractive female bodies were specified as well: (1) Androgen body (decreased femininity: broad shoulders, small breasts, narrow hips, small buttocks), (2) Pear-shaped body (increased femininity: narrow shoulders, large breasts, wide hips, large buttocks and short legs), and (3) Tiny body (narrow shoulders, small breasts, small buttocks and short legs). These findings have shown that, unlike attractiveness, unattractiveness has more than one shape. Generally, these shapes go in the direction of either an increase or a decrease of masculinity/femininity.

Does Everyday Beauty Match Philosophers’ Definitions?

Aenne Brielmann ¹ , Angelica Nuzzo ² and Denis Pelli ¹

¹New York University, U.S.A.

²The Graduate Center City University of New York, U.S.A.

Abstract

Many philosophers, including Plato, Kant, and Hegel, gave normative definitions of beauty. For instance, Kant claimed that beauty entails a disinterested pleasure that feels universal. But do these definitions match how people experience beauty today? To answer this question, we asked 100 participants to rate their experience of 15 images (pre-rated: 5 beautiful stock- and 5 beautiful art-images, 5 neutral stock-images) on 12 dimensions including pleasure, beauty, and disinterestedness. One trial consisted of rating one image on one dimension. The order of all trials was randomized. We find that beauty experiences are associated with strong pleasure, the claim that everyone should find the image beautiful, feeling more alive, more wanting to continue looking at the image, more connections with the image, greater longing, and greater disinterestedness. Surprise, the need-for-understanding of the image, free mind-wandering, and the extent to which the image tells a story are unrelated to reported beauty. A similar pattern holds true when people (N = 99) rate a beauty memory instead of an image. This pattern is largely independent of image type. However, the pattern of association between ratings does differ between participants. The largest cluster (N = 41) shows strong correlations between beauty and all other ratings. Conversely, correlations between beauty and other ratings are absent in a small group (N = 14) of mostly male, Caucasian, and more conservative observers. In conclusion, beauty experiences on average fit some (pleasure, disinterestedness, universality) but not all (free mind-wandering) criteria of philosophers’ definitions. Yet, response patterns reveal three distinct observer groups.

Who’s Afraid of Kitsch? Anxiety-Related Coping Styles Modulate the Appreciation of Decorative Everyday Objects

Uwe Christian Fischer, Jelisaweta Vlasova, Claus-Christian Carbon and Stefan A. Ortlieb

University of Bamberg, Germany

Abstract

The Functional Model of Kitsch and Art by Ortlieb and Carbon (2019) predicts that whatever affects one’s sense of security and self-efficacy will also modulate one’s appreciation of familiar, perfectly unambiguous stimuli with a positive emotional charge. We thus expect people with different anxiety-related coping styles to show different reactions to kitsch: Individuals with little confidence in their own abilities, who are particularly intolerant of uncertainty and highly vigilant about threatening information (sensitizers) should find kitsch more attractive, than people who systematically overestimate their abilities and habitually avoid or deny threatening information to evade strong affect (repressors). Ninety-five participants (46 male) answered a standardized coping-style inventory (ABI; Krohne & Egloff, 1999) prior to rating 208 images of decorative everyday objects from the Bamberg Repository of Contemporary Kitsch (BaRoCK) in terms of liking and kitschiness. Based on cut-off values from the ABI-manual, the sample was subdivided into repressors (n = 35), sensitizers (n = 27), as well as ineffective copers with high scores for vigilance and cognitive defense (n = 27), and non-defensive individuals scoring low on both dimensions (n = 6). A comparison of these four subsamples revealed commonalities as well as complementary response patterns regarding kitsch and liking judgements: Both sensitizers and non-defensive copers rated kitsch objects as more likable and less kitschy than typical repressors and ineffective copers. The more negative responses of high-scorers for cognitive defense (i.e., repressors and ineffective copers) possibly reflect a general reluctance to admit feelings, including the untroubled affection provided by kitsch.

An Itch for Kitsch: Do Needs for Security and Arousal Modulate the Appreciation of Decorative Everyday Objects?

Jelisaweta Vlasova, Uwe Christian Fischer, Claus-Christian Carbon and Stefan A. Ortlieb

University of Bamberg, Germany

Abstract

“Don’t we all have an itch for kitsch?” (p. 234), philosopher Călinescu (1987) once asked. Drawing on the Zurich Model of Social Motivation (Bischof, 1985, 1993), Ortlieb and Carbon (2019) have made a case that appreciation of kitsch is a function of basic needs for security and arousal: Individuals with a high need for security should rate familiar, identifiable stimuli with a positive emotional charge as more likable and less kitschy than people with a high need for arousal. Ninety-six participants completed the Motive Profile Following the Zurich Model (MPZM; Schönbrodt, Unkelbach, & Spinath, 2009) before rating 208 images of decorative everyday objects from the Bamberg Repository of Contemporary Kitsch (BaRoCK) in terms of liking and kitschiness. For data analysis the sample (N = 96) was split into homogenous groups of low, medium, and high scorers for security, respectively arousal. A group-wise comparison confirmed the initial hypotheses: Across all participants, liking was positively/negatively linked to needs for security/arousal. On average, male participants displayed a higher need for arousal, while a high need for security was more frequently found among female participants. Separate analyses showed that the overall pattern held true for the female subsample (n = 50), but not for the male subsample (n = 46). However, for both gender groups a high need for arousal was associated with particularly low liking ratings. In sum, there seem to be gender-related differences in kitsch perception, with female participants showing more differentiated responses in accordance with social motivation.

Putting the Heart into Aesthetic Experiences

Mackenzie Trupp and Joydeep Bhattacharya

Goldsmiths, University of London, U.K.

Abstract

Over the last decade, there has been an explosion of research interest in understanding the neural correlates of aesthetic experience and judgment. Previous research has exclusively focused on the brain, while ignoring the critical brain-body interactions. Yet, the brain receives constant feedback from the body, across multiple physiological axes, and over different time-scales. This interoception system, which processes sensations from within the body, provides a moment-by-moment mapping of the body’s internal landscape across conscious and unconscious levels, which critically influence our perception and evaluation of the external world. In this study, therefore, we investigate the role of interoceptive processing, especially the communication between heart and brain, during processing and aesthetic judgments of visual arts. Specifically, we record high density EEG and ECG signals to estimate the role of heartbeat-evoked potential in the brain and the phasic cardiac cycle of the heart on the intensity of the aesthetic experience. We also discuss how interoceptive sensitivity can mediate aesthetic appreciation at an individual level. We argue here that visceral processing provides a novel insight into the understanding of aesthetic experience.

Putting Genetic in Aesthetics: Etiological Sources of Variation of Aesthetic Chills

Giacomo Bignardi and Rebecca Chamberlain

Goldsmiths, University of London, U.K.

Abstract

Aesthetic chills, or frisson, broadly defined as the experience of piloerection or shivers down the spine, are established measurable peak emotional-hedonic response to aesthetic phenomena and have been shown to be extremely idiosyncratic. Moreover, individual differences in chills have been related to functional and structural individual brain differences. However, as far as we know no study to date has explored the genetic etiological sources of variation of such a trait. Thus, to partition genetic and environmental sources of variation, we conduct a biometric model fitting on twin data. Both genetic and environmental factors have been found to account for individual variances in aesthetic chills. Finally, results are discussed in light of the known biological underpinnings of aesthetic chills.

Studying the Relationship Between Flow and Aesthetic Experiences Among Museum Visitors

Manuela Maria Marin, Johanna Hinterholzer, Pia Dumberger, Katharina Fürstenberg, Benedikt Gantioler, Vanessa Ganze, Saskia Jacob, Sarah Jakob, David Jost, Michaela Matzinger, Christina Schäfer, Lucy Uiberreiter, Felix Leitner and Moritz Hebel-Haug

University of Innsbruck, Austria

Abstract

Most previous research on flow in an aesthetic context has mostly considered the creation of works of art or music performance. Both flow and aesthetic experiences induce states of being highly focused and fully absorbed in the activity pursued. Recently, aesthetic experiences have been linked to flow experiences (Wanzer et al., 2018); however, the relationship between these concepts has not been empirically tested yet. We thus aim to fill this gap by hypothesizing that viewing paintings in a museum context and the resulting aesthetic experience are positively associated with experiencing flow. We also expect that openness to experience and art interest are positively related to flow and aesthetic experiences. This museum study is being conducted as part of an innovative Master’s project seminar in cooperation with the State Museum of Tyrol, Austria. Subjects will be approximately 150 visitors of an ongoing exhibition featuring Otto Dix and Albin Egger-Lienz, two artists who captured scenes of the period between the World Wars. Data on flow states, aesthetic experiences (AESTHEMOS, Schindler et al., 2017), art interest (VAIAK, Specker et al., 2018) and openness will be collected immediately after the museum visit. Factor analysis will be used to determine the dimensional structure of the AESTHEMOS (which depends on the activity studied), and flow will be predicted using these dimensions as predictors in a hierarchical regression analysis. This field study will deepen our understanding of art reception in a museum context, and contribute to the existing literature on how to model art experiences.

Spatial Incidence of Materials in Visual Pre-Modern Art

Mitchell van Zuijlen, Sylvia Pont and Maarten Wijntjes

Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands

Abstract

The recent increase in digitization of paintings could be beneficial to both art history and perception research, for example elucidating how material properties are depicted in paintings. However, currently, it is often unclear what materials are actually depicted within each painting since detailed meta-data is missing. Analysis of such data could lead to novel insights into artistic composition, for example, how does the composition change over time or between painterly styles? Furthermore, it could elucidate the role of context on material perception. In this study we use crowdsourcing to collect meta-data on what and where materials are depicted in paintings. First, we downloaded roughly 21.000 paintings, primarily containing 15th through 19th century western art. Next, we collected approximately 1.6 million human responses, to identify which of these paintings displayed which of 15 material classes such as metal, wood and fabrics. We found that landscape orientation paintings (i.e. width > height) depict 25% more materials than portrait orientation paintings, t21064 = 43.51, p < .0001. We also found that the materials incidence is dependent on the materials in their context. For example, food is four times as likely to be depicted in a painting if glass is also present. In the next step, we used crowdsourcing to indicate the spatial location of these materials within the paintings. Data collection is still ongoing, but initial results show that some materials are more likely to be found in specific locations. The data will be published as part of a larger annotated art database.

Scale Ambiguities in Material Recognition

Jacob R. Cheeseman, Filipp Schmidt and Roland W. Fleming

Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany

Abstract

As a rule, observers can reliably identify the material properties of surfaces. Here, we investigated exceptions to this rule using a set of 87 photographs of materials (e.g., water, sand, stone, metal, wood) that appear to belong to different material classes depending on their apparent distance from the viewer. In three experiments, participants viewed each image and provided a categorical judgement of the depicted material, and a quantitative estimate of the distance between the camera and surface. Experiment 1 manipulated interpretations of these images by instructing two groups of participants to imagine a small or large distance between the camera and surface, while a third control group received no such instruction. In Experiments 2 and 3 interpretations were manipulated by providing visual cues for scale (e.g., objects of familiar size), which were presented alongside the target image or digitally inserted into the image. Results indicate that these manipulations can cause identical images to appear to belong to different material classes (e.g., water vs. marble), and that susceptibility to context information (i.e., material ambiguity) correlates with higher variability in distance estimates. Under challenging conditions, therefore, the recognition of some materials is vulnerable to simple manipulations of apparent scale.

Art Preferences and Tolerance for Ambiguity Are Affected by Deepened Visual Art Engagement

Carmel Levitan ¹ , Emily Winfield ² and Aleksandra Sherman ¹

¹Occidental College, U.S.A.

²Rutgers University, U.S.A.

Abstract

We conducted multiple studies to explore how engagement with visual art and activation of sociocultural associations relates to individuals’ aesthetic preferences. In the first study, we hypothesized that people would generate more associations in response to abstract but not representational paintings that were aesthetically preferred. Participants (N = 78) rated preferences and tagged 40 abstract paintings with salient associations. Separately, participants tagged 68 representational paintings (N = 20) with salient associations and rated their preferences (N = 109). Consistent with our hypothesis, abstract paintings with more tags (i.e. salient associations) on average were appreciated significantly more than abstract paintings with fewer tags, but this relationship did not hold for representational art. Next, we asked whether encouraging viewers to more deeply engage with visual art would shift preferences, and whether deepened engagement would have cognitive benefits related to complexity resolution such as increased tolerance for ambiguity. Following Belke et al. (2015), participants (N = 138) rated their preferences for 10 abstract and 10 representational artworks. Participants then either engaged with each work by answering a set of targeted questions, or spent one minute viewing each work before providing preference ratings again. Finally, participants completed Budner’s Tolerance of Ambiguity questionnaire. Abstract art preferences were significantly higher upon re-evaluation irrespective of engagement type; representational art preferences, however, increased only when participants engaged more deeply. Interestingly, engaging with representational paintings also seemed to increase intolerance of ambiguity, relative to other conditions. These results underscore the nature of art appreciation as an active social practice.

There Is a Crack in Everything. Is That How the Appreciation Comes in?

Marius Hans Raab and Claus-Christian Carbon

University of Bamberg, Germany

Abstract

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” These lines from Leonard Cohen’s ‘Anthem’ remind us that insight, the glimpse of ideal concepts, can be evoked by imperfection. Art has, over the centuries, incorporated ‘cracks’ to open our eyes for invisible ideas: deliberate imperfections in Gothic cathedrals, the concept of Baroque as ‘flawed pearl’, modern and postmodern ‘chance art’, and the Japanese ‘Kintsugi’ style. Some aesthetic theories emphasize the importance of ambiguity and semantic instability for aesthetic pleasure and interest. However, other theories associate a higher processing fluency with increased liking. We took pictures of 19 very different artworks (statues and sculptures, antiquity to contemporary, as well as paintings and portraits from different centuries; each original being either visibly imperfect or without flaw), generated a counterpart for each original (flawless resp. imperfect) and asked 71 participants to give a preference for either the complete or incomplete version, regarding different aesthetic dimensions. For religious motifs, flawless works were associated with higher liking and familiarity. For statues, imperfect manifestations were clearly preferred and considered more aesthetical. For 15 out of 19 artworks, the imperfect version sparked more interest. We discuss the relevance of imperfections and instabilities for future research of aesthetic appreciation. Questions are: Is the object iconic? Is the embodied idea supposed to be immaculate (religious depictions)? Are faces/ bodies portrayed? And finally: Do setting (gallery vs. lab). mindsets (art vs. everyday objects) and personality (ambiguity intolerance) foster the inclination to engage with cracks in our expectations?

Poster Session 2

What Can Viewing Behaviour Tell Us About Preference for Curvature?

Erick Gustavo Chuquichambi Apaza ¹ , Guido Corradi ² , Jaume Rosselló-Mir ¹ and Enric Munar Roca ¹

¹University of the Balearic Islands, Spain

²University Camilo José Cela, Spain

Abstract

Empirical aesthetics shows that we prefer visual curvature and symmetry compared to angularity and asymmetry. In this study, we aimed to test preference for curvature and symmetry related to viewing behaviour by focusing on contour basic property. We used four types of meaningless patterns: symmetrical-curved, symmetrical-sharp, asymmetrical-curved, and asymmetrical-sharp. In the first experiment, we tested preference for symmetry and curvature using these stimuli in a liking task. It consisted of a seven-point Likert scale. Participants’ ratings showed preference for symmetrical-curved stimuli, consistent with literature in empirical aesthetics. Comparing symmetry and curvature, ratings on symmetrical stimuli were significantly higher than ratings for curved stimuli. The second experiment was based on a free-viewing paradigm in which we presented two stimuli that only differed in contour: curved or sharp-angled. We registered ocular movements for 2 seconds while the patterns were on the screen. We analysed the first fixation, the time to first fixation, and the total time of fixations about every pair of stimuli. First fixation and time to first fixation did not differ significantly between curved and sharp-angled versions. However, participants spent more time looking at curved stimulus. Specifically, on asymmetrical pairs, we found a higher proportion of first fixations and total time of fixations to curved stimuli, but not on symmetrical ones. We conclude that our participants preferred curved and symmetrical stimuli and, regarding viewing behaviour, we discuss the influence of symmetry on preference for curvature.

Looking as a Window onto Expertise: Local and Global Visual Processing in Representational Drawing Using Eye-Movement Patterns of Artists

Suhyun Park, Rebecca Chamberlain and Louis Williams

Goldsmiths, University of London, U.K.

Abstract

A growing body of research has been attempting to examine the unique perceptual processing of visual artists, such as flexible visual attention, across diverse disciplines. Using eye movements while artists and non-artists make representational drawings, the current study aim to examine whether flexibility of visual processing systematically predicts artist group as well as the quality of representational drawing in a sample of professional artists and non-artistic participants (n = 40). Using K-means clustering, it is possible to segregate eye movements directed toward the target stimulus as either local (short saccades, long fixation durations) or global (long saccades, short fixation durations). It was possible to differentiate the two participant groups on the basis of the proportion of global and local saccadic eye movements made when looking at the target stimulus. Systematic variation in global and local eye movements, evaluated using Markov chain modelling, was also explored. Using this novel eye movement analysis technique, in the future it may be possible to differentiate domains of artistic expertise on the basis of specific patterns of eye movements.

Eye Movements as a Key to Understanding Individual Differences in Art Viewing

Sarah Delcourt, Christophe Bossens and Johan Wagemans

KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

The general aim of the current study was to identify possible individual differences between art viewers in a more ecological context and a larger sample than in previous research. Therefore, we recorded and analysed the eye movements of 2040 participants viewing two paintings in the museum M in Leuven: “Maria met kind en anjer” (a renaissance oil on oak by an unknown artist, ca. 1500-1525) and “De strijksters” (a social realist oil on canvas by Karl Meunier, 1884). The specific aim was to explore possible individual differences as a function of age, gender, and art expertise, in the number and mean duration of fixations, number and mean length of saccades, and number of fixations and total gaze duration within predefined areas of interest. For both paintings, more fixations and more but shorter saccades were found with increasing age. Additionally, with increasing age, participants showed shorter gaze durations on faces, but more fixations and longer gaze durations on other body parts. In general, women showed more fixations and longer gaze durations on faces and body parts than men. Few significant differences were found between art experts and novices, as defined by education and profession, which was unexpected based on previous literature. However, exploratory analyses did show differences as a function of art interest, gallery visits and number of art books. In conclusion, this study shows the value of a large data set obtained in an ecological museum context, compared to small-scale laboratory experiments.

Tracking Frank Stella: Measuring the Impact of Fluorescent Colors in Hiraqla Variation II Through a Controlled Eye Tracking Study

Silke Renders, Stefanie De Winter and Johan Wagemans

KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

To investigate visual effects of fluorescent colors and their impact on the art criticism of the sixties, this more controlled eye-tracking experiment, as part of a study in the Van Abbe museum, examined the viewing-behavior on the colors of Frank Stella’s Hiraqla Variation II (Protractor series). We wanted to examine visual saliency of fluorescent colors versus conventional colors. We wanted to find out whether fluorescent colors automatically attract visual attention and whether we could detect longer fixations for fluorescent colors than for their conventional variants. We used hand-printed stimuli that were based on the original artwork. The colors of the eight sub-section of the painting were isolated and ordered as color-wheels. Two versions were compared: original fluorescent colors with their conventional variants (as in reproductions). Each participant’s viewing-patterns were examined using the EyeLink 1000. They were all asked to free wander over the stimulus for twenty seconds and for each stimulus one specific color searching-task was tested. Fluorescent colors seem to attract visual attention before conventional color. Subjects fixated more often and longer on fluorescent colors that were mixed with a white paint and less often and shorter on the other two fluorescent colors-types (the group of pure fluorescent colors and the group of mixtures of fluorescent, conventional and white) than on the conventional colors. Fluorescent colors can, because of their intensity, cause strong color contrasts, which causes the surrounding conventional colors to grey-out. The contrast-effect can cause an increase in fixations, because the viewer needs more focus to ‘see’ them.

Do Artists of Photography and Non-Photographers Look at the Same Spots of Art Photographs and Do they Have the Same Opinion about Art Photographs?

Kazim Hilmi Or

Medical Eye Care, Ophthalmologists, Germany

Abstract

Aim: To find the difference at the way of viewing and making decisions of artists of photography and the members of the society at the viewing of art photographs. Methods: This is a double blind experimental study. Photography artists, photography students and their age and education matched control groups (each group consisting of at least 30 subjects) have undergone tracking of eye movements with an eye tracker which records the eye movements in millisecond level (movements are projected on the photographs later) when viewing 10 art photographs in a jury member role in a photography contest scenario. The differences are compared with Student t Test. The subjective decision of each subject about each of the art photos (“accepted” or “rejected”) has been recorded also. The differences are compared with chi square test. Results: Comparison of the eye movement tracking parameter measurements in all four groups on all 10 art photographs revealed no statistically significant differences between the groups. With the exception of one photo, the decision of acceptance also showed no statistically significant differences between the groups. Conclusions: The photography artists (doyens) and students and their age and education matched controls look at the same areas of art photos as shown with eye tracker results measured in millisecond range. Their decision about the art photos are also the same. This is the first scientific study about eye movements during viewing art photos by the photo artists and non-artists.

Studying Aesthetic Responses to Artistic Landscape Photographs

Moritz Hebel-Haug and Manuela Maria Marin

University of Innsbruck, Austria

Abstract

Although present in many art galleries around the world, artistic landscape photographs have rarely been of interest in the field of empirical aesthetics. This study thus aims to develop a novel stimulus set and to examine the perception of aesthetic landscape photographs. For this purpose, the first author, an art photographer himself, pre-selected 125 artistic landscape photographs varying in arousal and pleasantness (Russell, 1980) from his collection. Subjects were two groups of psychology students (n1 = 22, 36% males and n2 = 23, 39% males) who did not differ in sociodemographic variables, mood prior to the experiment, or art and photography interest. Both samples viewed the photographs for 6 seconds each and provided ratings on 9-point rating scales on either the dimensions of felt arousal, valence (pleasantness), beauty and familiarity (first sample) or on perceived complexity, harmony, enclosure or familiarity (second sample). Based on high inter-rater reliability, our results show that overall the landscape photographs were rated as relatively pleasant and moderately arousing, with a small to medium linear negative relationship between these two dimensions. We found large positive correlations between complexity and arousal. Furthermore, rated pleasantness, beauty and harmony were all highly positively correlated with each other. Interestingly, there were large negative correlations between enclosure and pleasantness, beauty and harmony, respectively, and positive correlations between enclosure and complexity and arousal, respectively. We conclude that artistic landscape photography is a promising stimulus category to be studied in the future, connecting environmental and art psychology.

Aesthetic Responses to Photographs and Paintings of Nature Are Influenced by the Viewer’s Sense of Relatedness to the Natural World

Neil Harrison and Dan Clark

Liverpool Hope University, U.K.

Abstract

According to the Biophilia hypothesis, humans have an innate affiliation with the natural world. This idea has stimulated a body of research investigating the role of nature related variables in aesthetics. One variable that has so far been relatively overlooked is connectedness to nature - a cognitive and affective sense of connection to the natural world. Here we tested whether this construct is associated with aesthetic evaluations of photographs and paintings of nature. In study 1, participants (N = 82) viewed 14 photographs depicting natural scenes and evaluated them on six aesthetic dimensions. Participants completed the Connectedness to Nature (CN) and Openness to Experience scales. CN positively predicted pleasure ratings and an “aesthetic experience” composite, while controlling for Openness. In study 2, participants (N = 40) viewed representational paintings (12 landscape, 12 interior/still-life), and indicated their aesthetic evaluations (liking, beauty), and familiarity. Participants completed the CN, Openness, and aesthetic expertise scales. Participants were divided into two groups based on a median split of the CN score. Overall, landscape paintings were liked more than non-landscape paintings. Participants in the ‘high CN’ group liked and found the landscape paintings more beautiful than those in the ‘low CN’ group, controlling for familiarity, Openness, and aesthetic expertise. There were no differences between groups in liking or beauty for non-landscape paintings. The studies show that aesthetic evaluations of images of nature (photographic and artistic) are related to the viewer’s sense of affiliation with the natural world. Theoretical explanations for this relationship are discussed.

Can Instagram Likes Be Used as a Proxy for the Aesthetic Appeal of Photographs? Validating an Aesthetic Liking Score from Instagram Data

Katja Thömmes and Ronald Hübner

University of Konstanz, Germany

Abstract

Be it on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, ‘Like’ buttons are all over social media, generating huge amounts of data. In this project, we develop methods for data collection on Instagram with the purpose of validating such data as a proxy for the aesthetic appeal of posted photographs. Based on a set of 15,073 photos from the fields of architecture, dance, and landscape (gathered from 9 different Instagram accounts), we developed and validated an Instagram Aesthetic Liking score (IAL). We conducted a series of online experiments to test how closely the IAL scores are related to more commonly used psychological measures, such as rating scales of aesthetic liking. We also compared IAL scores to Instagram’s widely used key performance indicator: the engagement rate (ER). Our results show that IAL scores are a reliable measure (ICC = .75) and are substantially predictive for experimental liking data (R² = .12 to .15), whereas ERs show poor reliability (ICC = .38) and no predictive power on experimental liking (R² = .01 to .06). The proposed IAL score provides a simple method for assessing the aesthetic appeal of diverse content on Instagram, and lays the ground for investigating large datasets to isolate image properties that might explain ‘why’ some photographs are aesthetically more appealing than others.

The Photographed World Devoid of Colour: Effects on Level of Construal and Distancing

Sophie De Beukelaer, Manos Tsakiris and Isla Jones

Warburg Institute, London, U.K.

Abstract

We draw on photojournalistic images to make sense of the world we live in: distant socio-political events are made visible and understandable to us through images. We engage with their visual and material forms, their conditions of making and diffusion. By their properties, photographs are actively framing events and able to orient our perception, to affect our cognition and behaviour. Studies of our lab have shown that the visual framing of a social group, e.g. large vs. small groups of refugees, influences the way we perceive them as humans and may engage in the signing of petitions or choosing of a political leader. In Photography theory, black-and-white as opposed to colourful images are thought of mediating the viewers’ engagement with reality, inviting them to distance themselves from it. We capitalised on such insights, to test whether black-and-white or coloured photographs used in the documentation of the Syrian Refugee Crisis would result in measurable changes in the ways we relate to the images. We found, that photographs of large groups of refugees were significantly more likely to be judged as distant to oneself as well as to be looked at with less attention to details. The colourfulness didn’t have an effect on the perceived distance or level of construal to the event. These findings suggest, that the visual framing of refugees considerably impacts how much we construe of and feel distant to one of the most photographed events in recent history, eventually mediating the ways we may act upon the seen.

Color, Extensive and Intensive

Rui Grazina and Fernando Silva

University of Lisbon, Portugal

Abstract

We may define the human perception as twofold: as extensive and as intensive. It is also our assumption that the human body will always mediate perception. The extensive body – or a metric understanding of the body – is the one that can be measured, divisible in parts and mapped. We consider the intensive body as parallel to the metric body - it is the body that we define in the domain of sensation - the body of emotion. From these premises, we consider that we may examine color on the intersection of an extensive and an intensive understanding. Color is scientifically defined on the one hand through its extensive character and on the other it might be subject to an intensive understanding. From Isaac Newton, that defines color as a physical phenomenon, to J. W. Goethe, acknowledging color on an emotional register, color may be approached in various ways with different consequences. In the present study, the main aim is to understand how intensive color approaches might generate extensive knowledge. Specifically, as Goethe or Johannes Itten’s approach to color - an approach framed by an intensive analysis – how this type of approach can generate an extensive insight. In this paper we explore this interpretation, and we try to argument and underline the several ways the intensive interpretation of color might in fact be transposed into extensive qualities.

The Ranges of Object Colors in Animation

Hyejin Han

Incheon National University, Republic of Korea

Abstract

Animation is one of the composite art with images, sound, motion, and technique. Because producing animations requires huge manpower, the database of color for animation can be helpful to reduce the labor. The purpose of this study is to find out the range of object colors in the animation for the color order system for animation. In the experiment, the range of object colors in animation was observed. Twenty-six semi-professional Korean animator created a scene of daytime containing nine objects in same experimental condition. The objects included the sky, soil, grass, apple, leaf, tree, banana, skin, hair. The color range of each object was fitted in an ellipse with 95% of reliability. As a result, the ranges of leaves and grasses were wider than the other. The colors of leaves and grasses with high saturation showed that the strong effect of greenish color from nature, based on the research of Korean color naming (Han, 2018). The color variation of sky from lower saturation to higher one in animation was differ from photograph. Ranges of apples and bananas have the effect of memory color (Hansen et al, 2006) with high saturation. The range of skin colors was the smallest among object colors. The colors appeared brighter than photograph, and were similar to memory skin color of tanned Caucasian (Bartleson, 1960). Hair colors in animation received little effect of race, due to containing colors from dark to middle lightness. Therefore, the object colors in animation had different trends from the photographs.

Sensual Yellows and Moving Lines: A Network Model of Aesthetic Effects

Eva Specker ¹ , Eiko Fried ² , Raphael Rosenberg ¹ and Helmut Leder ¹

¹University of Vienna, Austria

²Leiden University, the Netherlands

Abstract

In this paper we propose the aesthetic effect network (AEN) a novel way to conceptualize aesthetic experience, namely as an associative process where having one association leads to the next association. Through a network of associations, this generates an overall aesthetic experience. In art theory, associations between concepts of this kind are referred to as aesthetic effects. Conceptualizing aesthetic experience (at least in part) as an associative process provides an explicit account of a specific cognitive process involved in aesthetic experience. We discuss previous work, outline the aesthetic effect network (AEN), and discuss the results of an empirical study (Study 1, N = 255) that explored what can be gained from this approach. In addition, we report on a follow-up study (Study 2, N = 133) that provides evidence for the AEN over other alternatives. In summary, we propose a new perspective on the processes underlying aesthetic experience of artworks that extends beyond research on aesthetic effects, that can be applied to aesthetic experience in general, and provides a basis for future studies. It promises to facilitate our understanding of why aesthetic experience is both somehow different and also somehow the same for all of us.

Drawing Attention: Analysis of Comic Strip Panels Reveals Capacity Limits on Event Representations

Benjamin van Buren, J. Brendan Ritchie and Johan Wagemans

KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

Psychologists have made great strides toward explaining the ‘event structure’ of experience in terms of core cognitive processes such as attention. For example, when subjects step through the frames of a movie in a self-paced slideshow, they dwell longer on certain frames, and these moments of greater attentional engagement turn out to be the same moments that these subjects later identify as the movie’s ‘event boundaries’. Here we turned to the visual arts for further clues as to how cognition constrains event representations. Specifically, we considered the work of comic book artists, who specialize in depicting (continuous) stories using sequences of (discrete) still images. We collected dwell time data on movie clips, asked artists to draw comics depicting these movie clips, and then assessed how the artists’ parsing of the movie clips (as judged by a third subject group) related to the dwell times. In agreement with past work on event perception, comic panels represented segments of movies that were bounded by moments with especially high dwell times. In addition, when panels represented a short stretch of time, this was generally an “interesting” series of frames, with high dwell times, and when panels represented a long stretch of time, this was generally an “uninteresting” series of frames, with especially low dwell times. These results indicate that there is a cap on the total information that can be accommodated within a single event, and they demonstrate the broader usefulness of research in the arts for advancing our understanding of visual cognition.

The Role of Implied Motion in Aesthetic Appreciation of Visual Art

Ionela Bara, Kohinoor Monish Darda and Richard Ramsey

Bangor University, U.K.

Abstract

For centuries, the representation of movement in static images has been a challenge for all imagemakers. Artists have used different form cues, such as stroboscopic effects or action lines to successfully evoke motion in static images. To date, however, the neural substrates of aesthetic appreciation of artworks that contain implied motion cues remain largely unexplored. In a behavioural experiment (N = 45) we found that paintings containing implied dynamics significantly predicted higher aesthetic appreciation ratings. To extend and complement this behavioural research, an fMRI experiment (N = 27) is currently examining whether the aesthetic appreciation of artworks with implied motion engages a distributed but connected set of brain regions, such as extrastriate body area (EBA), medial temporal cortex (MT+) and reward circuit. During scanning, naïve participants viewed paintings, they were asked to make aesthetic judgments and to rate the perceived level of dynamism. A functional region-of-interest (fROI) analysis will be employed to identify EBA, MT+, and the reward circuit, and their response profile in the aesthetic appreciation and implied motion. A functional connectivity analysis will be conducted to examine functional coupling between the EBA, MT+ and the reward network during the aesthetic appreciation of artworks that contain implied motion. Given that aesthetic appreciation of artworks that contain implied motion cues is a research line that has not been systematically explored, the present research work will strengthen our understanding of the underlying neural correlates involved in aesthetic appreciation of artworks that convey dynamics.

Neural Entrainment to Rhythmical Apparent Movement Predicts Liking and Complexity Judgements

Haeeun Lee ¹ , Emiel Cracco ² and Guido Orgs ¹

¹Goldsmiths, University of London, U.K.

²Ghent University, Belgium

Abstract

Dance is a social art form often performed and experienced in groups (Vicary et al., 2017; Von Zimmermann et al., 2018). Yet, neuroaesthetics typically study watching dance using videos displaying the movement of a single performer. Here we introduce a novel fast periodic apparent motion paradigm (Orgs, Hagura & Haggard, 2013) to study the neuroaesthetics of group dancing. Using sequences of whole-body dance postures, we manipulated: (a) good continuation between adjacent body postures, and (b) synchrony among four performers who were displayed simultaneously on the screen. While participants passively watched these choreographed apparent motion sequences, we recorded steady state visually evoked potentials (SSVEPs). In a follow-up behavioural experiment we collected liking, perceived synchrony and perceived complexity judgments. We show that the aesthetic experience of apparent group dance does not just depend on the movement dynamics of individual performers on unison movement of all performers. Complexity judgements were primarily related to the movement fluency of the apparent dance sequence. Greater movement fluency was also associated with larger SSVEP amplitudes. In contrast, aesthetic judgements depended more strongly on movement synchrony. Synchronous fluent movements also induced the largest SSVEPs amplitudes. Our findings provide strong evidence for a direct relationship between the strength of neural entrainment to a rhythmical movement sequence and its aesthetic appreciation.

Walking on Illusions – When Quantitative and Qualitative Methods Paint Different Pictures of the Link Between Perception and Action

Greig Dickson ¹ , Daria Burtan ¹ , Yu Lim ² , Shelley James ³ , David Phillips, Jasmina Stevanov ¹ , Priscilla Heard ² and Ute Leonards ¹

¹University of Bristol, U.K.

²University of the West of England, U.K.

³Royal College of Arts, U.K.

Abstract

Little is known about how perceived depth and pattern movement of floor patterns found in modern building design affect walking experience. In this study (n = 145), participants at VSAC & ECVP2018 and at a public engagement activity in a Bristol community centre were asked to walk across four different floor patterns, each comprising of a different visual illusion. Illusions included two high-contrast wavy patterns perceived as alternating 3D “furrows and ridges”, the “Primrose Field” optical illusion, and the “Café Wall” illusion. Having walked over the floors, participants completed a survey where they rated the floors for perceived strength of illusion and for walking discomfort on 7-point Likert Scales, respectively. Additionally, participants provided qualitative feedback about how the patterns made them feel with any words that came to mind. Words fell into three categories: visual perception, and negative and positive impact on body sensations, respectively. Despite large inter-individual differences, the four floors evoked significant rating differences, both in perceived illusion strength and walking discomfort. A strong correlation was found between illusion strength and walking discomfort for each of the patterned floors, which was further substantiated by the results of the qualitative data. While perception dominated qualitative feedback for the wavy patterns, the primrose pattern evoked the largest inter-individual differences from very positive to highly negative descriptions of impact on people’s body sensations. Results are discussed with regard to the cognitive processes that may underpin these findings, and the possible impact that these visual patterns may have on walking stability and fall risk.

Aesthetic Judgments of Physical and Digital Three-Dimensional Art in Virtual Reality and Online Settings

Doga Gulhan, Szonya Durant and Johannes Zanker

Royal Holloway, University of London, U.K.

Abstract

Empirical aesthetics aims to investigate conceptual claims derived from art theory using experimental evidence. Recent developments in virtual and augmented reality offer novel ways to generate immersive three-dimensional environments for aesthetics research. Our first study explored physical and digital artworks as objects and spaces in virtual reality (VR), followed by an evaluation based on subjective measures of aesthetic experience, using an interactive questionnaire. Explorative experiments using a VR headset with embedded eye-tracker showed a range of viewing strategies and variation of viewing durations between participants and artworks, as visualised by 3D heat maps of fixations. Ratings of artworks on various dimensions such as liking, novelty, and perceived viewing duration, were compared as continuous variables in a correlational design. Initial results suggested various degrees of positive correlations between liking and other variables: for instance, strong with artfulness, moderate with novelty, and weak with emotional content. Based on this, we adapted the experiment to a second online study, a screen-based and shorter version, aiming for a wider sample. Preliminary data mainly showed converging evidence on the correlational relationships between aesthetic judgments.

Aesthetic Experience of Artworks in VR Gallery: The Role of Affective Dimensions

Maja Madjarev ¹ , Teodora Pavlovic ¹ , Claus-Christian Carbon ² and Dragan Jankovic ¹

¹University of Belgrade, Serbia

²University of Bamberg, Germany

Abstract

Recent developments of digital technologies in the field of virtual reality, especially virtual galleries and museums, gave us the opportunity to study art experience in strongly controlled but still very naturalistic context. However, most of the current models of aesthetic experience have not yet been tested in VR context. According to VACe model, aesthetic experience of artworks can be substantially explained by valence, arousal and cognitive evaluation, which can be considered the basic dimensions of affective experience (Jankovic, 2017). In the present study we tested whether VACe model can be successfully applied in predicting aesthetic experience of artworks presented in VR. Participants assessed aesthetic experience of artworks operationalized by liking, and three-dimensional construct of affective experience operationalized by pleasantness, impressiveness and familiarity - all answered via 10-point Likert scales. The results showed that linear combination of three dimensions of affective experience can explain 84.6% of variance in aesthetic experience of artworks presented in VR. This is similar, but somewhat lower performance of the model compared to the situations when the artworks were presented on the computer screen (on average 93% of variance explained). Aesthetic experience was mostly determined by valence and arousal while the role of familiarity seem to be significantly lower in VR context. Results of this study suggest that VACe model of aesthetic experience of artworks can be successfully applied in VR, however, it is necessary to elaborate further specificity of the aesthetic experience in the VR contexts.

Combining Virtual Reality and Traditional Story Telling in “The Mystery of the Raddlesham Mumps”: A Case Study

Paul Hibbard ¹ , Abigail Webb ¹ , Mathew Linley ² and Loes van Dam ¹

¹University of Essex, U.K.

²Freelancer, U.K.

Abstract

“The Mystery of the Raddlesham Mumps” is a poem by Murray Lachlan Young, aimed at children and adults aged 7+, which has been adapted as an audio album, a theatre play and a prequel Virtual Reality (VR) / tablet app. This unique combination provided us with the opportunity to explore the user experience for each media element in its own right as well as the interaction between the media elements for the level of immersion in the story. Here we particularly focused on the experience of the VR/tablet app and the theatre play. The theatre audience had the opportunity to play the game in the foyer before the performance started. After the performance participants filled in questionnaires in which they could indicate their level of immersion in the theatre performance and provide ratings for the play and the app. The results (N = 228) show that people of all ages interacted with and liked the app. Ratings for the theatre performance were also high and did not depend on prior engagement with the app. However, the play was liked more by adults than children, and the reverse was true for the app. This suggests a potential generation shift in multimedia story telling.

Minimal Art Museums Are Restorative Environments

Hannah Schipperges, Marion Braun, Zeliha Sahintürk, Sonja Ehret, Miriam Ruess and Roland Thomaschke

University of Freiburg, Germany

Abstract

Previous research has shown that museums, like natural environments, can have restorative effects on visitors directed attention. In the presented study we aimed at investigating whether a small minimal art museum can also be restorative and whether the perception of restorative potential is affected by visit duration and preference for minimal art. We hypothesized that the museum would be perceived as restorative, that this effect would be amplified by preference for minimal art, and that the perceived restorative potential would be higher with an optimal relative to a too short or too long visit duration. In a between-subjects design with 63 participants in total, participants stayed either 10, 45, or 110 min in the museum. Immediately before and after their visit they completed a restorative potential questionnaire. After the visit they completed a preference questionnaire as well and they reported whether they felt their visit was too short, too long or optimal. We found that the museum was overall perceived as restorative, and that the perception of restorative potential was stronger when participants had a higher preference for minimal art museums. The effect of reported appropriateness of visit duration was also significant. A too short or optimal stay in the museum led to a higher perception of restorative potential of the museum than a too long stay. We conclude that minimal art museums can be restorative environments and that the perception of restorative potential is modulated by museum preference and visit duration.

Ecological Art Experience: How we Can Learn from Ecologically Valid Settings and Contexts

Claus-Christian Carbon

University of Bamberg, Germany

Abstract

One point that definitions of art experience disagree about is whether this kind of experience is qualitatively different from experiences related to ordinary objects and everyday contexts. Here, we follow an ecological approach assuming that art experience has its own specific quality that is, not least, determined by typical contexts of art presentation. Practically, we systematically observe typical phenomena of experiencing art in ecologically valid or real-world settings such as museum contexts. Based on evidences gained in this manner, we emulate and implement essential properties of ecological contexts (e.g., free choice of viewing distance and time, original scale of artworks and exhibition context) in controlled laboratory experiments. Thus, we found, for instance, that when inspecting large scale paintings by Pollock and Rothko preferred viewing distances as well as distances inducing most intense art experiences or even art epiphany were much farther away than typical distances and inspection was much more intense and affectively accompanied. Following Carbon’s (2019) terminology of measurement strategies of art experience, the combined use of “Path #1” (real-world context) and “Path #2” (mildly controlled, still ecologically valid settings and contexts), enables us to understand and investigate much closer what is really happening when people experience art.

Cutting Across the Matter/Meaning Divide with Artistic Inquiry: An Argument and an Illustration of a Material-Discursive Analytical Apparatus that Moves Beyond Numbers and Narratives

Karin Hannes, Sara Coemans, Theresa Bengough, Chloé Dierckx, Lynn Hendricks, Anemone Seutin and Qingchun Wang

KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

What happens to our analytical research processes when we adopt physicist Karen Barad’s (2007) notion that all bodies, not only human bodies, come to matter and that there is no valid reason to believe that any of the bodies or phenomena we encounter are fixed entities that we can study independently from the scientific apparatus we are imposing on them? We embarked on a collective journey to explore the potential of a material-discursive analytical lens to study a complex phenomenon such as the relationship of people with their living environment. In doing so, we used the art of creation (figure 1) as a way of acknowledging the co-constituting character of inquiry; how the medium in which we work shapes us as inquiring subjects as much as we shape it in our study of the sensorial experiences (Rosiek, 2018). To investigate material, embodied and tacit dimensions of place experiences, we turned to John Dewey’s (1934) pragmatic aesthetic inquiry, an aesthetics that starts from everyday events and scenes in which the interaction between humans and their environment plays a central role. We argue that the rejection of dualisms between doing and thinking, reflecting and acting, creating and knowing, opens up a horizon for embracing a flattened research logic “where discourse and matter are mutually implicated in the unfolding emergence of the world” (MacLure, 2013, p. 660).

Found, Faded and #FF0000: An Artistic Practice of Visual Perception and Political Persuasion

Wing Ki Lee

Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

Abstract

The presentation addresses the questioning of visual perception (media) and political persuasion (message) through an artistic practice. Recent scholarship in media studies, media-archaeology and artistic research advocates a shifting focus from ‘message’ generated by media art practice to the ‘practice’ or the operation and performativity of ‘media’ and ‘materiality’ per se (for examples, McLuhan; Ernst; Parikka; Huhtamo; Cox). The author, also an artist-researcher, would like to argue for an inseparable relationship of message and materiality informed by a recent artistic practice, titled ‘Faded’. The artistic practice investigates and performs the notion of ‘faded image’ as conceptual, physical, visual and cultural-political phenomenon by reinterpreting a collection of media artefact from Communist China, Hong Kong and North Korea. The importance of materiality in this body of work could only be contextualised by the politically-charged intent. For example, ‘red’ (or #FF0000 in HTML colour code) is habitually associated with communism in political art in the East Asian context. The political undertone of ‘red’ should not merely be considered as a context, but also an embedded materiality. While exhibiting this body of work in Japan, ‘Iroaseta’ (a Japanese translation of ‘faded image’ or ‘faded colour’, also the exhibition title in Japanese) describes the disappearance (of image) on both physical and ideological levels. The dichotomy of ‘message’ and ‘media’, of different cultural dispositions, of analogue and digital artistic practices, between artefact and reinterpretation will be brought into the discussion and scholarship in media archeology, visual perception (science) and artistic research.

Are Art and Life Experiences ‘Mostly Perceptual’ or ‘Largely Extra-Perceptual’?

Sue Spaid

Independent, Belgium

Abstract

These days, philosophers of mind continue to actively debate the Cognitive Penetrability Hypothesis (CPH), whereby “what we think literally influences what we see.” Those who uphold CPH consider perception susceptible to internal factors (visual memories, color memories, “wishful thinking,” concept possession, attentional bias, pre-cueing, practical knowledge), as well as external ones (perceptual knowledge). If CPH is true, then our experiences of art and life share two basic features: 1) routine perceptions are coloured by factors that lie largely beyond our control (concept possession, prior experiences, memories, prejudices/biases) and our awareness, and 2) the magnitudes of such factors are not only indeterminable, but they cannot be turned on/off at will during perception. One question remains, however, are visual art’s contents perceptual or extra-perceptual? Extra-perceptual contents refer here to after-thoughts, prompted more by the imagination, such as new information, curiosity, playful activities, emotions, and social engagements; than in situ (real space-time) perceptions. Using tracking data collected from people experiencing actual art exhibitions, this paper aims to prove that the contents of life experiences are primarily perceptual, while those of art experiences, which require interpretations, are “largely extra-perceptual;” since such assessments tend to occur post-perceptually. The main ramification of such a view is that extra-perceptual contents fill in for perceptual contents that fail to be conceptualised and tend to supplement cognitive penetration, yet cognitive scientists tend to recognise only the latter category.

The Persian Dance Movement Library: Creation Procedure and Validation Study

Julia F. Christensen ¹ , Fahima Farrahi ² , Sina H.N. Yazdi ² , Shahrzad Khorsandi ³ , Meghedi Vartanian ⁴ , Khatereh Borhani ⁵ and Vincent Walsh ⁶

¹Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Germany

²3FISH Corporate Film, Turkey

³Shahrzad Dance Company, U.S.A.

⁴University of Teheran, Iran

⁵Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

⁶Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, U.K.

Abstract

This poster presents the creation procedure and cross-cultural stimuli validation study of the Persian Dance Movement Library; a library for empirical research in the fields of cognitive science and neuroscience of action perception, affect perception and neuroaesthetics. The library has been created by an international team including leading Persian Dance scholars, cognitive scientists, and a documentary film team. The library contains videos of Persian dance movement sequences from the Persian Dance Movement Syllabus by Shahrzad Khorsandi (book title: “The Art of Persian Dance: Shahrzad Technique”). A total of 20 movement sequences were recorded in front of a greenscreen with a professional Persian dancer. To obtain the typical stimuli categories of stimuli libraries in emotion psychology, the dancer danced these 20 dance movement sequences five times each, with five different emotional expressions: happy, sad, angry, fearful, and neutral (no emotion). The total number of video clips in the library is 100, divided into five categories of emotional expression. During the creation process, we sought to follow the indications of previous dance libraries (e.g. Christensen, et al., 2018; Christensen, et al., 2014): The clips contain no facial information, colour nor music, each clip has been faded in and out, and stimulus length has been equalised (~8 seconds, 8 counts in dance theory). Two online surveys (one with Persian participants and one with English participants) via Qualtrics provided emotion ratings for the stimuli. We outline further upcoming validation experiments and look forward to constructive feedback about further options from the VSAC community.