Pictures are created objects that have the function of generating a perceptual experience. In this sense, they are “experiential artifacts” (Terrone forthcoming). The experience elicited by pictures – usually visual (but for non-visual pictorial experience see e.g. Lopes 1997) – is a composite perceptual experience, in which the “perception” of the depicted scene (which is not in front of us) is generated by and experienced along the perception of the marked surface (the object that is actually in front of us). (...) This experience is usually called a “pictorial experience”. A philosophical analysis of such an experience amounts to answering the following questions: How should we describe the phenomenology of pictorial experience? What is it like to experience pictures? How should the “perception” of the depicted scene be characterized? Is it really a form of perception? How does it relate to the perception of the marked surface? (shrink)

Evolutionary aesthetics (EA) investigates the origins and evolution of aesthetic preferences and artistic behaviors, along with the underlying capacities that support these preferences and behaviors. EA is a multidisciplinary approach that intersects various disciplines – e.g. evolutionary psychology, biology, neurosciences, art history, archeology, anthropology, philosophical aesthetics – providing a comprehensive framework for understanding the deep-rooted biological and evolutionary underpinnings of human aesthetic preferences and artistic expressions. Central to EA, in fact, is the exploration of when, how and why aesthetic preferences (...) and artistic behaviors originated in human history, as well as understanding whether these behaviors are evolutionary adaptations, by-products of evolutionary processes, or nonbiological cultural products (Killin 2021; Richards 2022). (shrink)

Can static pictures depict motion and temporal properties? This is an open question that is becoming increasingly discussed in both aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. Theorists working on this issue have mainly focused on static pictures of dynamic scenes and streaky images – such as futurists’ paintings or long-exposure photographs. And yet, we could ask: if there is some success in creating an illusory impression of movement in a static image - as is the case in optical illusions of (...) movement, such as Bridget Riley’s Fall (1963: Tate, London), or Kitaoka’s Rotating Snakes Illusion - is this to say that such static images depict movement? As far as I know, no one working on the depiction of motion has specifically and systematically tackled motion-based illusions nor tried to answer this question. This paper considers two cases of optical illusions of movement and concludes that one of them is involved in the depiction of movement. While the declared goal of my analysis is to answer a quite circumscribed question, it is also the occasion to tackle motion-based illusions tout court - to account for the complex visual experiences they elicit and related phenomenology. Moreover, this account has interesting consequences for theorizing depiction and pictorial experience in general. In particular, it constitutes a counterexample to resemblance theories of depiction. (shrink)