This took me a while to get my head around. Searle’s “collective intentionality” of institutional facts refers to the construction of reality, in that a group of people, or an institution, has decided that these facts are real. A decision was made that a certain type of paper-scrap would be worth £5 in the same …
Category Archives: Part 1
Exercise 1.4 Digital Art: Possible and Viable Meanings.
Wilson and Lack (2016 p88) state that the first use of the term “digital art” was in the early 1980s, after Harold Cohen had used a computer paint program called AARON, which was essentially a robot made to draw on large sheets of paper on the floor. They go on to say that this evolved …
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Exercise 1.3 The Condor, The Vacuum Cleaner and Alice
In what sense (speculatively), could a Dyson vacuum cleaner, Tenniel’s “Alice” illustrations, and the Peruvian Nazca Lines be works of art? “People have praised the look of Dyson products- our use of bright colours and clear plastic, the industrial appearance- and the vacuum has been called a design icon” (Guardian, 2016). So the Dyson has …
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Exercise 1.2 Theory- or Not.
Identify three works of art in which theory plays a decisive role and three works of art in which theory seems absent. Three pieces of art in which I think theory plays a decisive role: Psychoanalysis developed in the early 20th century as a “science of the unconscious.” Artists have drawn directly from theories of …
Exercise 1.1: Max Ernst’s “The Eye of Silence” and the Phenomenon of Pareidolia.
Max Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism. He used a process called Decalcomania, which is described by Tate as “a blotting process whereby paint is squeezed between two surfaces to create a mirror image” (tate.org.uk). I remember doing this at school with paint and paper, and trying to see faces …
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Exercise 1.0: The Construction of Social Reality
“There are portions of the real world, objective facts in the world, that are only facts by human agreement. In a sense there are things that exist only because we believe them to exist… Yet many facts regarding these things are ‘objective’ facts in the sense that they are not a matter of preferences, evaluations …
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Understanding Visual Culture with the Open College of the Arts 