Matthew Mackisack - Discoveries: Art, Science & Exploration [exposição]

Being a selection from all eight museums of the University of Cambridge, which concern everything from archaeology to zoology, the diversity of objects on display in Discoveries is remarkable. Cultural artefacts, fossils, western fine art, and scientific instruments, all sit alongside one another. The curators have – for the most part, very effectively – grouped the things into themed sections: “Objects”, “Inscriptions”, “Illuminations”, “Collections”, and “Founders”. The latter two themes in..

Phantasia - the psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordVisual imagery typically enables us to see absent items in the mind’s eye. It plays a role in memory, day-dreaming and creativity. Since coining the terms aphantasia and hyperphantasia to describe the absence and abundance of visual imagery, we have been contacted by many thousands of people with extreme imagery abilities. Questionnaire data from 2000 participants with aphantasia and 200 with hyperphantasia indicate that aphantasia is associated with scientific and mathematical occupations, whereas hyperphantasia is associated with ‘creative’ professions. Participants with aphantasia report an elevated rate of difficulty with face recognition and autobiographical memory, whereas participants with hyperphantasia report an elevated rate of synaesthesia. Around half those with aphantasia describe an absence of wakeful imagery in all sense modalities, while a majority dream visually. Aphantasia appears to run within families more often than would be expected by chance. Aphantasia and hyperphantasia appear to be widespread but neglected features of human experience with informative psychological associations.Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC

Cancelling Phantasmata: The Fate and Function of the Inner Image

This thesis traces the roles and valences of incommunicable, perception-like thought - what I call an ‘inner image’ - in art’s reception. Recent artistic practice and its contextualisations are beholden to a critique of interiority that programmatically outlaws anything like the phantasmata that were central to pre-modern thought or the mental imagery of modern psychology and philosophy of mind. I argue that in the context of these prohibitions an inner image – as both experienced in engagement and facilitated in practice - has a critical-utopian function: critical in its evasion of communicative rationality and naturalized externality, utopian in its non-realization and incongruity with the immediate. The argument proceeds by conducting close readings of a wide range of art historical situations in which the notion of such an image is problematized: G E Lessing’s Laokoon essay; the plays of Villiers de L’Isle-Adam; Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida; the relations between text and materiality in the work of Marcel Broodthaers and Robert Barry. An instructive contrast is provided by examining the role of ‘inner images’ in scientific practice, specifically their utilisation in recent neuroscientific attempts via brain-imaging to communicate with humans in a vegetative state. Findings are framed by a critique of positivistic thought, and its relation to the utopian, derived from the Frankfurt School body of theory. It is shown that the excision from the art encounter of inner images - as a taboo on that which is not sensuously realized, which retains a halo of indeterminacy, which does not yet exist - resigns the subject to circumstance. An inner image is then the expression of the subject’s capacity as a subject to resist circumstance, if only by turning away

Plural imagination: diversity in mind and making

The experience of visual mental imagery—seeing in the mind’s eye—varies widely between individuals, but perhaps because we tend to assume our own way of thinking to be everyone’s, how this crucial variation impacts art practice, and indeed art history, has barely been addressed. We seek to correct this omission by pursuing the implications of how artists with aphantasia (the absence of mental imagery) and hyperphantasia (imagery of extreme vividness) describe their working processes. The findings remind us of the need to challenge normative, universalizing models of art making and art maker

Extended Imagining: the case of the aphantasic artist

Can visual imagining ever be other than a brain-bound, organismically internal process? The practices of artists with aphantasia - the congenital or acquired incapacity to generate visual mental imagery - suggests that it can. Here we report on a qualitative study of ‘aphantasic’ artists and find that imagery lack coincides with a dependence on external, environmental, structures to generate artwork. Indeed, physical manipulations of external media seem to take place in lieu of the ability to generate and manipulate internal, mental images. Cognitive functions that could, for the non-aphantasic, be carried out by mental imagery - such as bringing non-conscious visio-spatial relationships to awareness - can only be carried out for the aphantasic by manipulating their environment. Thus aphantasic art-making constitutes extended visual imagining. As such, it undermines the universality of the ‘hylomorphic’ model of art-making, in which the work is mentally preconceived before being realised in the material world, with the fact of neurocognitive diversity