Experience Chapters 8-10

Chapters eight, nine, and ten present thought provoking positions on experience. Although the word “experience” is never highlighted as a major theme throughout the chapters it was an indirect argument for every position stated. Experience is the strong unifying theme for these chapters.

Chapter 8 AESTHETICS, AISTHESIS & SYNESTHESIA

“Why I (still) want my MTV” argues a relentless battle in favor of an aesthetical consideration for television. Chapter eight reiterates that fact that “Television is rarely considered aesthetically”(2).

As one reads more into the chapter, however, aspects of television- more specifically aesthesis and synesthesia- support television aesthetically.

Readers are taught early that “While the word aisthesis has fallen into disuse, in ancient Greek it meant something akin to “taking in” or “breathing in;”  a “gasp” at the wondrous encounter with the world (Hillman, 1993) (6).” This being said, anything that we take in is an aisthesis experience. For someone to watch a music video and be taken back by the shier beauty of the experience would have said to have experienced aisthesis. For someone to experience true aisthesis they would have, perhaps unconsciously, but nonetheless considered television aesthetically. The fact that the viewer reacted means that they would have judged the beauty or artistic value of the piece after their “wondrous encounter.” Because there was an experience, there was also an aesthetic consideration. Although the viewer might not have been taught conventional aesthetics, they were still able to consider the work aesthetically based on their experiences.

Likewise, synesthesia can be considered based on experience or as it was stated in the reading, a perception. Chapter eight discussed the “phenomenon of synesthesia [as] a matter of perception” but it also made the point that “it can also become a phenomenon of expression”(26) An expression such as in language, or in music are often critiqued based on aesthetics so for television to host an experience, or phenomenon of synesthesia it should not be considered any differently.    

Chapter 9 THE REVERSIBILITY OF EXPRESSION AND PERCEPTION

Chapter 9 stated that “Perception itself is never finished; it gives us a world to express; to think only through partial perspectives”(2). This was extraordinarily interesting because most people would argue that their perceptions were affects of their experiences. A child raised in a household with fifteen other people will certainty view sharing, dinnertime, family, and being alone differently from an only child in a house with one parent.

The statement expresses that unless a child could have experienced being an only child while simultaneously experienced living in a household with fifteen other people, then the child’s perspectives will always be partial. “The relationship of expression and perception is doubled and reversible, and is a foundation not only of aesthetic formations, but of cultural conceptions of the relationship(s) between human and world.” (15)

Just as a human is partial, so is technology. If a child tried to live both experiences, they would miss the fullness of both. “The poetic acts of video are used for enframing and objectifying images, if we act as if we have exhausted the possibilities of experience even for a moment, we will have missed the communicative world for a momentary conception or ideation of that world.  We will have missed the communicative world for an objectified, lifeless and dead world.”(11)

Not only is technology itself partial, but the way we perceive it is partial as well. The author wrote, “the visual surface of music television is so enveloped in music that my sight sinks into the visuals as if they were waves of sound—in depth”(12) Interestingly, his entire experience is changed not only by the intentional perception the music television editors are displaying, but perhaps also because of his personal experience with music. If he could not hear would he have perceived this differently?

 “Twentieth century art has, to a large degree, brought forth the displacement of perspective as central to the representation of reality.  Questioning, in particular, its spatialization of knowledge, and its propensity to measure all things linearly.”(20) For so many years art had to be perceived in a specific manner, then artists such as Picasso brought his perceptive of art and expressed his experiences. When Picasso expresses himself through his perspective of art, and puts it on display it is as if he is taking out his eyes- his experiences of the past, and handing them to people gazing out saying see what I have been through. Do you see that heart ache? Do you see that political mess? Do you see the beautiful women?  Since he expresses his experiences with his eyes, they become so much more clear to people who have not seen what he has seen.

An extensive part of this chapter is dedicated to the movement of a camera with the deliberate intention of revealing the countless ways to portray an experience on television. An experience can zoom, rotate, swirl, pan or repeat itself, and so can a camera. Television can be the eyes to any experience. Whether a viewer agrees with Picasso's painting, or a music video at least they can begin to experience with someone else’s perspective.

Chapter 10 FROM LOGOS TO ECHOS

Chapter 10 says that “Every technique,” Merleau-Ponty suggests (in Johnson, 1993, p. 129), “is a ‘technique of the body (2). Everything we do in body is an experience, and so technique would also have to be partially dependent on experience.  

All of the senses are stimulated by different experiences. If we smell cookies, for example, we’ve experienced the smell of cookies. Music video, and television are an experience of sounds, vision, and perhaps even a feeling if the speakers are rocking the room. Although we know logically that there will be music playing, and people on television it is our experience of the event that makes music visuality more echos from logic. “Echos describes the mode of televisual/video address as a multimedia presentation which draws on sight and sound, writing and speaking, orality and literacy, hearing and listening in its overlapping and interpenetrating presentation of images, words, sounds, music, and so on” (6)

If I understand this correctly a logical evaluation- you see a guitarist, a crowed dancing, and you hear music and an evaluation of echos would lead you to believe that the man is playing the music that the people are dancing to. Echos combines the three experiences into one experience. Two visual, and one auditory experiences are logical but Echos is the sum of the whole experience. The logic is necessary, but the big picture is, well, the big picture. “Musical visuality is an aural-visual aesthetic in which music and dance become the logos of video, the logos of images.  I have suggested, moreover, that with this technique perhaps logos has given way to echos, and in the following I wish to deal more thoroughly with this suggestion”(2-3)

Together

Experience is certainty a connective theme throughout the three chapters. Aesthetics, aesthesis, synesthesia, reversibility of expression, perception, logos, and echos are very different topics, but under the experience of television and art, they seem to relate very well.

photo:http://images.google.com/search?as_q=guitarist&tbs=sur:f&biw=1159&bih=703&sei=YfNZUbH0INPK4APW44GYDA&tbm=isch#imgrc=_NRDS7k65WvizM%3A%3BTzNMmolQTxvE4M%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fupload.wikimedia.org%252Fwikipedia%252Fcommons%252Fb%252Fbe%252FAn_electric_guitarist.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fcommons.wikimedia.org%252Fwiki%252FFile%253AAn_electric_guitarist.jpg%3B1024%3B685