Amie// Research // Research continues into Haptic Visuality & the sensation of pleasure...
Continuing my research into haptic visuality and in particular looking into the pleasure sensation following on from a previous post about continuing a theme of creating a pleasurable or powerful video from found footage. I have been recommended to read into The Emphatic Screen: cinema & neuroscience and through this I have found an article Viewing artworks generates in the brain the same reactions of being in love which is based about the neuroscientist, Semir Seki who has done studies in to the concepts of beauty and aesthetic pleasure.
ART GIVES SAME LEVEL OF PLEASURE AS BEING IN LOVE - NATIONAL ART PASS
From the introduction of The Emphathic Screen: cinema & neuroscience -
"The involvement of neuroscience in art and aesthetics is a fairly recent devel-opment; research in this area has concentrated mainly on how the brain pro-cesses images. Semir Zeki is a pioneer in this field and to him goes the merit of a new line of research, “neuro- aesthetics.”2 This approach immediately became widely diversified; some neuroscientists employed art forms just as stimuli to gain a better understanding of how the brain functions, using paintings and sequences taken from movies, with no direct reference to their aesthetic and cultural qualities, to improve comprehension of the neurobiological basis of cognitive faculties not specific to art. Others, including Zeki himself, used brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the concepts of “beauty” and “aesthetic pleasure,” and also, on a more general level, to study the neural mechanisms responsible for the visual perceptive analysis of various formal characteristics of works of art."
Link to an interview with Semir Seki: https://brainworldmagazine.com/beauty-lights-brain-interview-neuroscientist-semir-zeki/
All this research has confirmed that the feeling I would like to concentrate on visually imbuing is pleasure. Considering the state the world has been in over the last 2 years through the pandemic, I feel strongly that the mental health of a lot of people has been in a decline with the uncertainty of it all. Anxiety and depression have been on the increase and for myself, I know a lot of people who have suffered loss, addiction issues and hopelessness even more so. I feel it is important for me to bring the feeling of pleasure to my audience and to find a way of doing that through the medium of video using found footage.
