Research Resources

Ellen Dissanayake 

Genesis and Development of «MAKING SPECIAL»: 

Is the Concept Relevant to Aesthetic Philosophy?

in (2013) Rivista di estetica 54: 83-98

Abstract 

Noting that the ethological notion of «making special» (now also called «artification») has gained attention in several fields, including aesthetic philosophy, a brief history is presented of its origin and development over forty years. Its origin is traced to «proto-aesthetic» elements of interactions that evolved in Middle Pleistocene mothers and infants: simplification or formalization, repetition, exaggeration, elaboration, and manipulation of expectation. These operations upon visual, vocal, and gestural modalities were subsequently used by individuals and cultures in creating and responding to their various arts. Artification is a broader human proclivity than «art». Unlike other notions of art it does not imply beauty or skill although in its motivation to mark importance, the ordinary is made extraordinary. In its emphasis on preverbal, presymbolic, pancultural, participative, affective, and affinitive aspects of aesthetic cognition and behavior, the artification hypothesis provides further directions to cognitivist and neuroscientific studies in contemporary philosophical aesthetics.

Art as a Human Universal: An Adaptationist View

in Armin W. Geertz, ed., Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture (2011), Durham (UK): Acumen
This essay is adapted from its original appearance as “Kunst als menschliche Universalie: Eine adaptionistische Betrachtung” in Universalien und Konstruktivismus, edited by Peter M. Hejl (2001), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag

Harry Francis Mallgrave

MALLGRAVE, Harry Francis – Architecture and Embodiment. The Implications of the New Sciences and Humanities for Design. London & New York: Routledge, 2013

  

In recent years we have seen a number of dramatic discoveries within the biological and related sciences. Traditional arguments such as "nature versus nurture" are rapidly disappearing because of the realization that just as we are affecting our environments, so too do these altered environments restructure our cognitive abilities and outlooks. If the biological and technological breakthroughs are promising benefits such as extended life expectancies, these same discoveries also have the potential to improve in significant ways the quality of our built environments. This poses a compelling challenge to conventional architectural theory...

This is the first book to consider these new scientific and humanistic models in architectural terms. Constructed as a series of five essays around the themes of beauty, culture, emotion, the experience of architecture, and artistic play, this book draws upon a broad range of discussions taking place in philosophy, psychology, biology, neuroscience, and anthropology, and in doing so questions what implications these discussions hold for architectural design.

Drawing upon a wealth of research, Mallgrave argues that we should turn our focus away from the objectification of architecture (treating design as the creation of objects) and redirect it back to those for whom we design: the people inhabiting our built environments.

in Google Books Review

[Essay] 5 Play, rituals, and other artistic things remarques …

[Chapters] On the origin of art

                The play-instinct

                Human evolution

                From Darwin to Dissanayake

Epilogue: some concluding remarks

[…]

The last of the essays considers the new issues that anthropology and ethology are currently delineating—specifically the evolutionary basis for artistic play and its connection with social rituals and ceremonies. Homo sapiens , with a lineage of only around 200,000 years, is a relatively young species. And there is a growing body of evidence that hominin forms of ritualistic behavior extend back much further, perhaps beyond a million years, which points to the great antiquity of what some refer to as the “artistic instinct.” Such a possibility once again returns us to the issue of culture. For if the origin of art seems to reside in social relations and the way in which we make something “special” through our dexterity and care-inspired participation in these communal events, then the artistically minded architect might perhaps assume a different persona than someone simply creating a self-satisfying “object” of design. Rather, design itself might be viewed as a playful exercise of elaborating skills within these same social relations, a field that allows us the possibility of projecting ourselves—through our artisanal competence—into form. Otherwise, architectural creativity tends to be subdued or overtaken by algorithmic possibilities and technological ambitions, and each generation, one after the other, bears the brunt of pretending to deliver yet another revolution. None of these themes, I believe, defines a single strategy for design or an over-arching ideology. The world does not change in such dramatic ways and the human organism has its own ways of taking in the world. Nor do they contemplate the suppression of existing technologies or in any way inhibit experimentation. And it is not by chance that the better artists of each generation have traditionally taken note of new discoveries and the new models of our environmental fields. When James Turrell and Robert Irwin, for instance, first began to experiment with light in the late 1960s, they sought to understand its parameters by undertaking a series of “sensory deprivation” experiments at NASA-funded aerospace facilities in Los Angeles. With our new tools and understanding of things, one might contemplate returning to perceptual ground zero today in a very different way. In 2009, a generational successor to these earlier artists, Olafur Eliasson, founded the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments) in Berlin as a school to foster the study of such sensory and perceptual issues, which he has partnered with the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and the Association for Neuroaesthetics. Similar cross-alliances of artists and scientists are now replicating themselves in various artistic fields across the different continents. Architects up to this point have been reluctant to participate in such discussions for a number of reasons. One is simply the fact that many of the humanities, once a mainstay of architectural education, have been pushed outside of the boundary of curricula by intensifying technological and professional demands. Another is that our multisensory, three-dimensional experience of the built environment cannot be so captured with current scanning technologies, which presently confine one to a motionless condition within a lab. Whereas this limitation is an obvious one, it is not necessarily an insurmountable one. The perceptual studies of materials, colors, textures, and forms, for instance, have direct relevance to design. And important research with regard to the proprioceptive talents of dancers, for instance, can be translated into the architectural experience of space. Moreover, biology and neuroimaging technologies in themselves are rapidly advancing and current limitations will no doubt disappear in the not too distant future. Other reasons for our reluctance to take heed of this work are less easy to explain away. Our ivory-towered design studios remain uncritically saddled with conventional axioms regarding the objectification of form—the building as object— and the profession at large seems content to practice, in the words of Richard Neutra of a half century ago, “the pure aesthetics of a bygone brand of speculation.” 16 This is unfortunate, because the insights of science, together with the new humanistic models, lead us back to some very basic questions that historically have constituted the heart of architectural deliberations. On what levels does the architectural experience unfold? What is its relation to rapidly changing cultural conditions? What are the implications of digitalization in design, and how might designers better accommodate or employ these new technologies? Are creativity and aesthetic appreciation learned or indeed biologically ingrained within our behavior? Why do we have this striving to produce that skilled level of tectonic elegance that we call craftsmanship? Wherein resides the “art” within the so-called art of building? We seemingly have become too sophisticated, or at least too busy, to pose such questions, and perhaps for many designers there is the uneasy feeling that such pursuits may not have a satisfying answer. The design fields, as well, have had more than their share of tangents over the past half century, and designers have rightfully grown weary or distrustful of theory and its extracurricular “-isms.” But something new is distinctly coming into view. We are beginning to understand not only the biological complexity of our embodied natures but also our profound implication with the physical environment at large. All of this should give us pause for reflection. It may even return the focus of design back to where it formerly

It may even return the focus of design back to where it formerly resided—the human individual inhabiting our built environments. This book may have had its beginning in the studies I undertook in the early 1990s on German theories of Einfühlung , but it has been much aided along the way by a number of individuals. A conference at the University of British Columbia in 2008 brought home to me in a surprising and forceful way the relevance of this research within the context of contemporary scientific efforts. An essay by David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, cited in chapter 4 , provided an helpful with their comments on various chapters are Ellen Dissanayake, Vittorio Gallese, Jonathan Hale, Barbara Maria Stafford, Helene Furjan, Lars Spuybroek, and John Ronan. Christian Hubert supplied me with a copy of a lecture he gave at the University of Toronto. Heinz Tesar, Timothy Brown, Logan Reed, Nicholas Kahler, Dirk Denison, and Lilia Guerrero provided photographs, and Abby Bristow and Michael Mastriano applied their design talents to the neurological illustrations. I thank Alan Cramb for the timely sabbatical, and during this departure from my normal duties Alan Balfour was kind to invite me to give a seminar at Georgia Tech and share the intellectual energy of his program. In the three years in which this project was developed, I offered themes in seminars and was rewarded with the feedback from students. I thank Mohammed Alkhabbaz, Jessica Butler, Brendan Casidy, Ibrahim Dil, Peng Du, David Edwards, Timothy Footle, Larissa Groszko, Diane Hoffer-Schurecht, Christopher Kupcho, Michael Mastriano, Augustine Meinzer, Courtney Moran, Maraya Morgan, Jesse Nguyen, Jeffrey Nosich, Jennifer Nowak, Lucy Peng, Benjamin Riley, Goran Simic, Jeffrey Snodgrass, Costis Alexakis, Eric Bellin, Fred Esenwein, Ariel Genadt, Martin Hershenzon, Gideon Fink Shapiro, Rui Morais e Castro, Anna Weichsel, Lauren Cundiff, Michelle Everett, Myung Seok Hyun, Ralf Iberle, Nicholas Kahler, Ka Yeon Lee, David Moore, Jeremy Nash, Zachary Porter, and Emily Tuttle.

  

in Chapter 5 Play, rituals, and other artistic things [pp. 165-2….]