How to account for the power that art holds over us? Why do artworks touch us deeply, consoling, transforming or invigorating us in the process? In this paper, we argue that an answer to this question might emerge from a fecund framework in cognitive science known as predictive processing (a.k.a. active inference). We unpack how this approach connects sense-making and aesthetic experiences through the idea of an ‘epistemic arc’, consisting of three parts (curiosity, epistemic action and aha experiences), which we (...) cast as aspects of active inference. We then show how epistemic arcs are built and sustained by artworks to provide us with those satisfying experiences that we tend to call ‘aesthetic’. Next, we defuse two key objections to this approach; namely, that it places undue emphasis on the cognitive component of our aesthetic encounters—at the expense of affective aspects—and on closure and uncertainty minimization (order)—at the expense of openness and lingering uncertainty (change). We show that the approach offers crucial resources to account for the open-ended, free and playful behaviour inherent in aesthetic experiences. The upshot is a promising but deflationary approach, both philosophically informed and psychologically sound, that opens new empirical avenues for understanding our aesthetic encounters. -/- This article is part of the theme issue ‘Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives’. (shrink)

This essay empasizes the dimensions of opticality in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and in Caruth's Parting Words. Thinking how to move from the ‘o‐o‐o‐o’ to the ‘a‐a‐a‐a’ central to the Fort/Da game, suggest that ‘u’ must be drawn into the creative act that inspires testimony, critical theory, psychoanalysis and love.

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

This article brings together and compares my own artistic practice of drawing/painting and the eighteenth-century novel Tristram Shandy. In both cases, there is a free play of lines, textual or graphic, which sets ‘all things out of rule’. A whole typology of lines is woven throughout Sterne’s text and reappears, alter-inscribed, in the artworks. The article presents an account of these lines: rectilinear, hylomorphic, fractal and nomadic, as well as the line of incision (or the cut). Each is explored as (...) a specific mode of line with differing effects. To follow these lines is to enter a world of material expressivity, to be exposed to an ontology of becoming and change, of flows and transformations, that overturns the traditional ontology of being and stable identity. Sterne’s use of wild digression, doodles and graphisms, establishes certain proximity between writing and drawing. Both may be seen as types of ‘figured metaphysics’ and as ways of bringing something new into the world. The article concludes with some philosophical observations on the strange event of drawing a line, with reference to the work of Heidegger and Deleuze and Guattari. (shrink)

This review essay develops Gordon Bearn's interpretation of Deleuze's philosophy as an aesthetic existential indicative of the creative practice of life drawing. Life drawing requires moving beyond various forms of representation that stultify the movement of becoming and limit our ability to appreciate sensuous singularity and intensive pluralities. Sholtz offers an original account of the singularity of sensual existence, amplifying the tenuous relationship between beauty and suffering, or the intensification of life, which Bearn courageously explores. The article addresses several important (...) themes which are used to carve out a new aesthetico-ethical path of existing: beauty as imperfection, affirmation of pointlessness, the disarticulation of the aesthetic from the formal realm of art, the existential recognition of the eliminable multiplicity of possible paths, and the indeterminate nature of a true event. (shrink)

The paper deals with the possible parallels between Heidegger's aesthetic thinking and aesthetics of the Bauhaus art and design. The authors examine to what extent could philosophy of given period interfere with the development of modern art, while exploring and analyzing different theses of theorists who have expressed on given subject. Heidegger wrote three key texts, which embraced the theory of design. The authors of the paper examine to what extent could Heidegger theses have an impact on contemporary product design.