Percepcja kultury - kultura percepcji

Percepcja kultury - kultura percepcji

Abstract

“Artists”, writes Jonah Lehrer, “weave us pretty tales, while scientists objectively describe the universe”. But as artists witnessed the birth of modern science, they created their oeuvres with reference to it. Whitman and Eliot contemplated Darwin’s theories, Proust and Woolf admired Einstein, and Stein was conducting psychology experiments in William James’ lab. When looking at the intuitions of authors, we can note that these artistic interpretations of the perception process appeared before a scientific diagnosis. Let us remember a stream of consciousness or interior monologue; Gertrude Stein anticipated Chomsky, as did Marcel Proust with research on memory. “The impression is for the writer what experimentation is for the scientist” – wrote Proust, and Lehrer agreed: each great experiment, as each great work of art, has its beginnings in our imagination. In some degree, this is art which has taken over the cognitive functions. The (neuro)cognitive turn which has taken place in recent years turned out to be an interesting perspective for the humanities. The present research on the history of art, literature, language, film, music and intermedial studies is inspired by new methodological perspectives. Natural science offers a great interpretative context for the phenomena of perception and culture as well as new discoveries in neuroscience that have allowed us to redefine ideas and theories of aesthetics. The articles published in the current volume deal with the problem of different sensorial modalities (visual and aural as well as kinesthetic), the subject of perception (both human and “artificial man”), and the object of perception (reality or art). The book contains selected articles which were presented at the International Conference “Perception of Culture – Culture of Perception” which took place in April 2012 in Krakow and was organized by Ph.D. candidates from both the Jagiellonian University in Crakow and the University of Warsaw. These texts constitute the voices of researchers from different universities and concern literature and language, music and art, culture and philosophy, and cognitive and intermedial studies in order to create an interdisciplinary discussion on perception. The question of perception holds a very prominent place in modern culture. On the one hand, constant technological progress forces people to change the manner in which they experience reality while their cognitive and aesthetic sensitivity is being reshaped. These changes nurture the development of a new type of perception of works of culture, which becomes more and more interesting not only for humanists but also for scientists researching the phenomenon of the human brain. Art endeavors to fully tap into the potential of interactivity, in the broad sense of this term, while the media and technology industries base their activities on the degree to which this potential influences human perception. Thus, the “culture of perception” now covers economics, scientific research, and emerging technologies as well as areas of artistic activity."