Aesthetic Research
Concept: an artist and a model meet regularly for an impressionistic, gestural, intuitive sketching session — each time, they each make some notes on how they are feeling and thinking. The note and the date of the resulting sketches are recorded. The works are reviewed, in aggregate, after a year of work.
Do the drawings display obvious visual correlations with the psychological state of either the artist or the model? E.g. are the drawings literally or abstractly ‘darker’ when the artist or model is ~sad? Are they darkest when both are sad? Are they most frenetic in character when both are energized? What happens if the artist is sad, but the model energized? Visa versa? Is there a consistent visual result? Etc.
(note, kind of aggregate review may require the daily ‘note on thoughts and feelings’ to be structured into a quantitative psychological survey, plus ‘pick 5 words’, plus ‘place yourself on this colors scale etc, plus ‘any other notes?’)
If the artist then describes their state on a fresh day, or selects the drawings that they respond to most that day, would they match?
If the aggregate works are then exhibited in a long hallway—could viewers accurately guess (say they fill out a similar survey per-sketch and drop it in a box) the states of the model or artist that day?
If viewers / visitors took a psychological survey (perhaps including a sketch of their own, or a calibration based on selecting the works that most impact them from a preset / universal / separate catalogue) upon arriving at the exhibit, then selected the works they responded to the most—would it yield consistent results (i.e. would sad people generally pick the same works)? Would sad people pick the works that the artist drew when sad? or drew of a sad model? If so, would this yield consistent results within given population subgroups? Form survey data like this and more, could you extract ~aesthetic subgroups within a population, and would these correlate with other shared traits, or would they cross new and strange and uncharted similarities and differences between people?
What happens if you do this with many artists (amateurs as well as professionals) and many models or subject matter and many viewers? What would happen if you ran this on mechanical turk with abstract art, colors, textures, realist art, or architecture, music, and movies, all with background data on the user?
Does instagram have an accurate mood-predictor? Can it effectively track the impact that has on a user’s default aesthetic preferences? What vantage does instagram or pinterest have on the aesthetic subgroups of global populations? What groups have unexpectedly similar preferences? What unexpected divergence are there?
Could you, with all that, then and eventually, have a library of tested aesthetic tools to communicate a state of consciousness from one population sub-group to another? from one individual to another? Could you build a language? Could a machine learn it? Would there be principles that extrapolated far into untested aesthetic areas, yielding more profoundly sad or joyous deeply-dreamed art than before?
Systematic impressionism? Visual or aesthetic psychometrics? psycho-aesthetics?
Could it be used in arguments, negotiations, creative collaborations, cross cultural communication, psycho-therapy, non-verbal or impaired communication, to record history?
Even if not used as a language, what would knowing of such a possibility yield?
Concept: have a light changing in the background based upon market data all the time, then ask a person to predict what the light will do next (or do this with something that people can readily develop intuitions about, like food or water or sounds or something) — can you build a sophisticated intuition for some pattern in the world by tying it to a background aesthetic component?
Perhaps traders should have a watch that glows with market volatility, perhaps with varied lights for varied market traits, or air conditioning that changes temperature based on the weather extremity elsewhere in the world; perhaps the fountain outside the Bellagio in Las Vegas should change color and pattern according to the wins and losses, or number of people circulating in the casino, or the noise volume in the dining areas or theaters. Perhaps the ice rink in central park NY, or the fountains in the lake there, or the lights in time square should augment in response to aggregate traffic, or expected weather, or measures of violence around the world, or twitter activity in the area, or web-traffic in the area, or perhaps some complex, incomprehensible, chaotic aggregation of the above.
Perhaps geopolitical researchers should plant gardens with nutrients and lighting and water continually distributed according to important incoming data on different parts of the world.
Perhaps Bloomberg data could flow through rings, each changing temperature and color according to freight (land, sea, air) volume, energy production and consumption, and mineral production.
Perhaps the record of a year of such data should be engineered into annual plants—the 2020 rose or the 2021 chrysanthemum—with a record of the prior events engineered into the strain, until genetic mutation wears it away.
Concept: systematic study of mathematical forms to identify those most aesthetically appealing to different viewers and groups — are there mathematical trends? What mathematical forms are considered most beautiful? What mathematical forms are associated with what emotions? What forms have the most consistent reactions?
Concept: testing of the subtle distinctions in color— as you go across the color spectrum, are the changes in emotional impact linear / equivalent to the change in wavelength, or are there key thresholds, where a color goes from being one thing to something completely different in an instant?
Concept: what drives our perception of taste? Can one take obviously inedible objects and arrange them on a plate beside a fork and knife to elicit mouth-watering? Can one take a recognizably delicious food and make it look and feel completely inedible? What is a deep dream of delicious? Does it still look delicious to humans? What if one searched for the universal traits of delicious appearing food by running it through mechanical turk, or studying Instagram or Pinterest data—are there clear rules of color and texture? Or is it purely dish and culture of origin-specific?
Concept: given that biology can be extremely beautiful or extremely disturbing / unnatural / in the uncanny valley, perhaps we should map out a very clear graph of how and why and what triggers those responses, and a framework for thinking about it? E.g. what are the key defining boundaries of beautiful biological forms, which, when altered in e.g. a movie representation, trigger disgust? Does clarifying or emphasizing them in a representation trigger a sense of peace or beauty? What are the general/universal characteristics of a malevolent or benevolent biological form? E.g. what makes an alien illustration look friendly vs menacing?
Links, leads, questions:
Yale Perception and Cognition Laboratory
Computer vision research
What principles of aesthetics are well studied? Which are not? Which are easiest to study? Which are most valuable? Which are highest priority? How is that information useful? What are the time and financial and education costs of running various experiments? What are the yields to the world of empirical analysis of aesthetics and how can those yields be optimized?
Pinterest and instagram research teams, broader UX/UI research teams, collaborative filtering of those data sets to identify ~’aesthetically aligned subpopulations’ (‘aesthetic genotype or phenotype’?)
MechTurk, Apple and Google research platforms
Data collection on use of spaces for architectural design
Of course, the entirety of academic art and design fields, studio practices, and private and public sector R&D, design, and development departments and consultancies.
What institutions have historically most advanced our understanding - qualitative, quantitative, empirical or subjective - of aesthetics? What knowledge has been lost and what portion of it might reasonably be recovered? What is the current relevant institutional landscape today and how has/might/will it contribute to the same? How clear is that / how likely or stable is that trajectory vs chaotic and uncertain? What are the key determinants? How might the social and institutional ecology improve?
Where might unexpected advancements come from?