Above: a catalog of scents from the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents in Berkeley, California, USA.
Breaking down artistic experience into its basic dimensions might reveal "holes" in artistic possibility-space where no one has made an effort to create, and for too long I've been thinking about what these basic dimensions are, and where the holes might be. Of course, at least some of those holes will exist for good reasons. By creating a list of these characteristics, we could create a matrix and more easily see where there are artistic innovation deserts. Originally I thought I would just make a chart, and look for structure in the N-dimensional space ("art forms with X usually don't have Y") and that would reveal the remaining holes in art-space. But the list is longer than I thought it would be, with approximately 10^69 possible combinations, so I just eyeballed it rather than looking for holes systematically. I include these first, along with the list of dimensions, then a final section containing thought experiments exploring the role of our connection to the artist in our experience of art.
This project amounted to a quick-and-dirty survey of the entire human artistic enterprise, and to summarize: visual art tends to be representative, sound art tends to be abstract. Using other senses in art is limited by technology, safety, and capital. Representative art usually attempts to include a coherent narrative. These are the defaults, possibly driven by biology, and departures from these tendencies are usually deliberate choices and/or driven by changes in technology. As photography drove a move to more stylized, more abstract art with a focus on concept more than execution, the same may be happening in the near future to sound art, and I predict the innovative sound forms I list here are those most likely to be explored in the next 1-2 decades.
New Forms, Based on Blank Areas in the Map of Art Space
Some of these likely exist, and I just haven't encountered them. Some of these have likely been tried, but they're just not interesting. Is that a certainty for all of them? Art varies in its capital intensiveness (movies at the apex, vs a single scribbler typing on a machine that everyone now owns) which might further limit experiments. I include only forms possible with current technology - no neural interfaces.
- Silent films - in the sense that they do have sound, but no language (including text or signs.) Some of these exist (1981's Quest for Fire), but not as a genre.
- Art with intentional synesthesia - associating certain sensory experiences or concepts intentionally, before experiencing art. If you want to fully experience it, you must train before you go! Some people study a musician's work before going to a concert. We do this unintentionally by accumulating knowledge about the world and art so that when we encounter an artistic reference, we can appreciate it (if you don't know the classics, the Bible, and Shakespeare, you're having a very different and more confusing or impoverished experience of Western art than you could be.) You recognize this when you start watching parody comedies with children who haven't yet had the time to store information about their culture.
- Interactive electronic paintings; musicians who put out all the sound files used to make an album (including ones not included) for other musicians to use.
- Scent sculptures - each object has its own fragrance.
- Video game with switched "skins". I've avoided trying to define art, but still, a boundary case that I truly can't decide if I would include is video games. Obviously there is art in video games, but would I call the video game itself art? At football games, certainly there is art decorating it, but the game is at the core, and does not fundamentally change if the uniforms, the theme of the stadium, or the logos change. This is less clear in video games and possibly even some board games. Imagine a video game with switched skin, or randomly shifting underlying mechanics. This could be done either for video or tabletop games.
- Paintings with color harmony rules similar to 12-tone serialism (using the frequencies of light of each color; note, we cannot see a full octave.)
- I was about to inlcude surrealist or abstract photography, then I discovered Aaron Siskind.
- Sound-art with recordings or imitations of natural sound, and minimal language or abstract (tonal) sound. I once saw Ikue Mori perform with John Zorn and Mike Patton, and that sounds she made were so bizarre and original that I found myself only able to connect it to plumbing sounds and the sensation of Pop Rocks.
- A "blind" gallery. There are no labels with titles, years, media, or certainly artist names. I thought I would actually find this quite distressing, but then realized that this was my experience at Burning Man, and I'm only bothered by it, now that I reflect (and want to credit an artist I reference in this article.) What if I see something I like and want to learn more about the artist? It almost feels like a waste of time. But what if you were given a notebook to write down what you thought the artist was like and what they were trying to do? I'm not a professional artist, so I don't have a sense of whether they might be more or less interested in such an exhibit, but if it causes the audience to think more about them as an artist,
- An actor who attends galleries as the "front end", a fake artist persona, with a made-up back story. Everyone knows this is the case but plays along. Gradually the actor gets involved with actually producing the art, and eventually it is suspected that she was the artist the entire time.
I also asked Perplexity, and like many humans, it thinks of possible forms without thinking too much about the execution (I removed the ones with no clear means to implement.)
Synesthetic Reality Sculptures would be a groundbreaking art form that merges representational and abstract elements while engaging multiple senses in an innovative way. This art form would create three-dimensional sculptures that transform based on sensory input from the viewer, blurring the lines between representation and abstraction. Key features of Synesthetic Reality Sculptures:
- Proprioceptive Interaction: The sculpture would respond to the viewer's body position and movement, changing its form and color as the viewer moves around it.
- Sound-Induced Textures: The sculpture's surface would change texture based on ambient sounds or viewer-generated noises, creating a tactile representation of auditory input.
- Temperature-Sensitive Visuals: The sculpture would alter its colors and patterns in response to the viewer's body heat or touch, bridging thermal sensation with visual
perception.
WHAT ARE THE DIMENSIONS OF ART? The dimensions of art - its possible elements - break into two categories - sensory, and cognitive. The sensory (or innate, or physical) dimensions are those you could measure with a simple instrument - like color, time, or volume. The cognitive (or extrinsic) dimension require a human audience. The colors and shapes and sounds in a film are just projections on a screen or vibrations in the air - those are measurable physical, sensory properties of the movie. But, your brain knits together the sounds into coherent objects, assigns the sounds to them, understands the language and culture and emotions and intentions of the characters and actors and director - and you're now creating a narrative and using your theory of mind and this is central to your experience.
Initially I thought this would be a simple task, but the intrinsic physical sensory dimensions are fairly limited. What the audience - the human brain perceiving the thing - brings into the work really is quite complex.
While I'm trying to be as inclusive as possible, the emphases and omissions here will inevitably reflect my own tastes. (Imagine if everyone made such a list and it was nearly the same, or so different as to be alien - I think either possibility is interesting.) I also have next to no formal education in art history, so some of the holes I think I've found have likely been explored.
1. INTRINSIC SENSORY PROPERTIES OF ART
1.1 Time (change over time vs static)
1.1.1 Interactiveness (how does it respond to audience)
1.1.2 Rate of change
1.1.3 Is there coordination between different senses or within the same sense
1.1.4 Length
1.2 Vision
1.2.1 Number of spatial dimensions - one, two (image) or three (sculpture)
1.2.1 Color
1.2.2 Form
1.2.3 Intensity and contrast
1.2.4 Size
1.3 Sound
1.3.1 Volume
1.3.2 Pitch
1.3.3 Timbre
1.3.4 Rhythm and Tempo
1.4 Tactile
1.4.1 Temperature
1.4.2 Movement
1.4.3 Smoothness
1.4.4 Hardness
1.4.5 Angularity, sharpness, or roundness
1.4.6 Density
1.4.7 Phase (gas/liquid/solid)
1.4.8 Coherence (crumbly, intact)
1.5 Olfactory
1.6 Taste
1.7 Proprioception/Vestibular - 4D films provide this and they've become more common in amusement parks.
1.8 Passive or Interactive
Notes on the sensory dimensions:- These dimensions are both more primitive, and for that reason more difficult to consider. Of course I wasn't able to fully remove the human element even here. I suspect that this is where the most productive "mining" could happen.
- I haven't expanded on olfactory and taste for a reason. Visual and sound arts, and the coordination of the two (plays, movies), are the kings of the sensory world. This is because there are physical challenges to the others. For olfactory art - control of scent in space and time is difficult. One scent at a critical point in a play would not be technically difficult, or associated with an image (remember Scratch n Sniff stickers?), but how to make an olfactory symphony with multiple scents changing over time? How to ensure the scents disperse quickly enough and don't mix? This might be something for the first artists working in pure neural interface, where we don't have to worry about the experiences having an Ex Neuro origin. There's also a contagion concern - do you want to sniff something lots of other noses have been near?
- Concerns similar to olfactory, but even greater, apply to taste-art. Food is mostly not taste-art. Yes, we "decorate" our food with extra flavors, but ultimately the reason we eat is for the physiological need for calories and nutrients, so I wouldn't count that as art. (A massive cake in the shape of the Taj Mahal that can be eaten after it is viewed? Principally for the entertainment effect - that would count as art because the fact that it is food makes it more interesting. You probably wouldn't make it at home and eat it by yourself; if you did it would be for the reward of seeing it, with - again - the thing being more interesting as a result of being edible.) Taste art would be something where the taste is mostly divorced from nutritional function. (Not e.g. diet soda, which mimics the nutritional function.)
- Taste and tactile experiences are often destructive, therefore a work of art relying on these will have small audiences, especially taste.
- I did not include all the tactile experiences humans can have (e.g. pain, vibration, itch) because those are more "invented" by our nervous system, others less so, like temperature. When something burns us, there is a measurable temperature of the object and our skin where it touches us, but the pain requires a central nervous system. That is to say: there is something hot on your foot, and your foot is in a shoe, so there is something hot in your shoe. But if there is a pain in your foot, and your foot is in a shoe, most people would not understand the pain as being in the shoe.
- Size is an underrated aspect of art with a visual dimension; quantity is indeed a quality all its own. Probably the biggest surprise I've had, and strongest emotional reactions, from experiencing something in person I'd experienced only in other media, was seeing Goya's Saturn Devouring One of His Children in the Prado - because of its size.
2. EXTRINSIC DIMENSIONS OF ART THAT HUMAN AUDIENCES ADD - while we bring these elements to art, they are inevitable to our experience. Daniel Dennett commented, in his comment on the old question "how do I know the red you see is the same as the red I see", that they cannot be the same, because of the associations we have with even basic sense experiences - you can't pry apart red from your other senses, memory, and thoughts about it.
2.1 Interpretation - these are more subjective than the sensory elements, so some clarifying comments are helpful. Here, interpretation means the effect of the art on the the audience separate from the persona of the artist.
2.1.1 Emotional experience - many of the other elements in this list are mostly a means to generate emotions, even the appreciation of abstract aspects.
2.1.2 Representative vs abstract - In visual art, an image can be either a representation of the world (or at least of coherent discrete objects in the world) or completely abstract. Surrealist or cubist paintings are still representative, though e.g. Kandinsky or Matta are not. The obvious contrast here is between visual art, that usually represents something you could see, and music, which is non-representative sound - you could argue in fact music is abstract sound-art. The nearer to pure abstraction, the more difficult to avoid being unsatisfying. You might not enjoy a performance where you're handed the sheet music to Beethoven's fifth, any more than asking to hear a song and being handed a vinyl record (most of us don't have the hardware to translate the notes into any auditory experience, any more than we can run our fingers over the grooves of the record and hear it.) Some interesting examples of pure abstration are John Cage's 4'33", or the Museum of Non-Visible Art.
2.1.3 Need for active interpretation of implied meaning - Orwell's Animal Farm has a political message and the characters are obvious parallels for (to him) contemporary political figures. Can be frustrating or tiring when the work seems to demand interpretation but you can't "solve" it.
2.1.4 Language - are there words?
2.1.5 Narrative coherence - is it a story, and does it have clear cause and effect (even if backwards like Memento), vs an abstract palette of shifting colors, or a surrealist movie with total lack of causality (Un Chien Andalou) or partial (Eraserhead.) Anything with any kind of narrative must either have the standard story elements of plot, setting, and character, or deliberately choose not to include them, and have the audience notice.
2.1.6 Identifying with the performance - imagining your own body moving in the way the dancers are moving, or how you as an architect would have chosen materials for the building.
2.1.7 Permanent or temporary - sand paintings; or Agrippa A Book of the Dead by William Gibson, which physically deteriorates after being read once.
2.1.8 Tone - serious, comical, whimsical, dark.
2.1.9 Status/community validation - basking in the glow of the Mona Lisa, knowing you will be able to tell others you did so. The crowds in front of this, versus at any other location in the Louv're reveal its importance in most humans' actual experience.
2.1.10 Live or recorded performance (or not applicable) - would you watch a composer putting together a piece of music? Maybe, if she was also the performer, and was improvising jazz. It's harder to imagine watching a novelist typing or an artist painting, rather than their final effort. Then again, people pay to say symphony practices.
2.1.11 Medium or instrument - I include this in the cognitive aspects rather than physical, because part of the experience here is not just the physical properties of the medium, a known medium the experiencer recognizes - a convention. (That's a trombone; that's burlap; that's tinsel and bronze.)
2.1.12 References (in reverence or parody) - sometimes referred to as "literary reference" in media outside writing. Borges carried this idea to its extreme in "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", about a writer who reproduces exactly the work by Cervantes.
2.1.13 Style (and collision of style) - is it an Aztec codex? A Victorian dress? Some cross-fertilization of the two? In visual art, thanks to AI, we're flooded with these.
2.1.14 Simultaneous experiencing (fellowship) - laughing at a comedy in a crowd is very different than watching it at home.
2.1.15 Source of inspiration
2.1.16 Driving medium in the creative process - is the music a score to a film? Or is it a music video where the music was primary? A novelization of a movie or a film of a novel? (Or created in parallel like 2001?)
2.1.17 Innovativeness - (To keep our interest, art must continually walk a line between habituation to the familiar, and incomprehensible chaos.)
Above, Triumphant Scale by El Anatsui, a Ghanaian/Nigerian artist who creates art objects (images? sculptures? textiles?) from found materials. Below, Frontier Psychiatry by The Avalanches, built out of samples, with the video made from found materials as well.
2.1.18 Use of new technology or technique - separate from innovation. Without naming the specific technology or technique, there is an experience of seeing an early adopter at work - e.g., continuing of action in the Great Train Robbery, or Uccello's use of perspective.
2.1.19 Exploration of limits and advantages of medium - Disneyland has a light show using water jets, which are projected onto as a screen, or in some cases directly illuminated from underneath (it's a nice way to create a 3D light saber.) Magritte's This Is Not a Pipe draws attention to the uncrossable gap between image and object. Extreme musicians try to affect their audiences physiologically with the "brown note". Twentieth century writers exploring and cleaving aspects of the authorial role and voice were using this element.
2.1.20 Space/time/cultural context - is it in a museum? Someone's home? Is the building a former factory, or prison, or near a political leader's office? Is it a brightly colored object in a gray place, or is it made from local stone?
2.1.21 History of the individual artwork, its history within the medium, and history of the medium itself. This is separate from merely reference to other works. For instance, capoeira as a form of dance emerging from slaves trying to conceal martial arts training.
2.1.22 Expectation - are the actors remaining on the stage, or running through the theater? Are objects in a museum that you thought were purely functional actually part of the display? For the last one, at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, a railing on a stairwell was actually an installation that looked like a railing and served that function, but furtively also included warm running water on the surface where you'd place your hand.
2.1.23 Moral judgment, disgust, or shock - (Above, gold-plated poop by Terence Koh.) I give this its own category apart from other emotional impacts because it tends to be a brief experience. Even horror films are not end-to-end torture porn. Dada was an early incarnation of the genre. An example, where I wish I knew the artist's name: at Burning Man in 2000, I was riding around looking at art. It was nearing sunset, and I approached a structure made from a dozen ten-foot-tall glass columns arranged in a circle, about ten feet tall, stabilized and connected where each column met a horizontal ring about every two feet. Coming closer, each column was actually a stack of jars, each a subtly different shade of yellow or orange, some almost clear, sparkling in the evening light. Still closer and I could see that it was not the glass itself that was colored, but a liquid in each jar. And each jar had a person's name on it. They were each filled with someone's urine. I try to tell the story in this way over the years so others can share the full experience - the curiosity, the revulsion, then a shift to slow-clap congratulations to the artist. I lingered at the spot for some time, watching others approach, inspect with furrowed brow, then shout "Eeewww" and cover their mouths, exactly as I had (and if I did my job, as you just did.)
2.1.24 Cleverness - considerable overlap with abstraction. There is a Bay Area artist (who I cannot recall or find online; if you know, please comment) who once had an apparently popular exhibition where attendees paid five dollars for the experience of giving him five dollars.
2.1.25 Intentional or serendipitous creation - da Vinci's experiment with tempera on stone for the Last Supper makes for an interesting story, but since it was flaking off within his lifetime, probably not his intention. Sometimes objects are created without the intention of being an art object, but people who went to college in the 90s will recall the beautiful blue Arizona Iced Tea bottles that found their way to people's dorm rooms as vases. And finally, outsider artists often seem to have a different experience of what they create, or do not predict or understand their effect on an audience. Wesley Willis does not appear to have been trying to make comedy music that made people laugh, but to many people, it's funny. This made some people uncomfortable, but he kept selling records and touring.
2.2 Characteristics of Creator - As time passes, this has become more important, and I suspect will only increase with the use of AI to make art.
2.2.1 Persona and life history - feeling you have an understanding and connection of the person, and can see the influence on what they produce.
2.2.2 Body of work, style, media worked in, consistency with other work - (Above, an early work by Mondrian. Yes, he drew curved things at one point.) The thing I found most remarkable about the Dali museum is the number of media he worked in. Auto body detailing, jewelry, it was hard to think of one where he hadn't tried his hand, and this now influences my experience of his work.
2.2.3 Sense of mastery - Vermeer's curtains are famous for their realism; on the other hand, you can't help but notice mistake in an attempt at a realistic portrait; or you see a statue, and wonder if it posssibly could been intentional. Close inspection of the Velasquez paintings in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum shows that much of the background were just dashes of dark color, which initially I found disappointing, but then stepping back to a proper viewing distance, I realized it produced exactly the represeentative effect he probably intended. In some ways mastery and innovation are opposing forces - it's too easy to explore an interesting new angle than just try to improve your technique, and in a competitive environment, comparison is easier, much like competition on price in economics (and the resultant race to the bottom, or some sort of shrouding behavior to avoid this.)
Above: a Strandbeest by Theo Jansen.
2.2.4 Authenticity of artist's life experience - imagine if you had bought turquoise jewelry from a Native American artist in Winslow, Arizona. Later you click on a story about an artist who was found to fraudulently claim he was Native American but was in fact Italian, and the picture in the story is the artist you saw. Do your feelings change about the jewelry? It's still the same object. (Similarly, once at a Bad Religion show, the singer made a comment about having signed to a major label after one of their albums came out. The crowd booed this development, at which point the bass player asked the crowd whether the quality of the already-recorded album somehow changed after they signed.)
2.2.5 Artist's position in history and relationship to other artists and historical figures - did Verdi write a part specifically for her? Did she make a dress for a Persian shah? Was she arrested as part of a protest or revolution? Were any of her family members famous?
SIDEBAR: THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS ON THE ROLE OF THE CREATOR IN THE EXPERIENCE OF ART ART
Above: the No Name Art Museum in Jiaxing, China. This museum displays pieces by the artist collective No Name which consisted of Zhao Wenliang, Yang Yushu, Shi Zhenyu, and Zhang Da’an.
Section 2.2 is still certainly incomplete. Much of what we get out of the experience of art is the experience of knowing about another person's inner life. An art museum with no name plates by any of the pieces might be quite frustrating to many people. AI is forcing a reckoning of how much knowing about the creator, the creator's characteristics, and even the existence of a creator matters to our experience. It's worth compiling some boundary cases about what it means to create something, and who or what can do, to as a vehicle for exploring this question.
The Role of Personhood in the Experience of Art, Case 1: Intention versus Randomness in Method If you found out that Jackson Pollock had actually just used a fan to randomly spray paint onto canvas, rather than deliberately placing it, how would this affect your experience of it?
The Role of Personhood in the Experience of Art, Case 2: The Influence of Species
Form your impressions first:
The Role of Personhood in the Experience of Art, Case 3: Taylor Swift Does Not Exist
(Title stolen from a hilarious piece by Sam Kriss.) Taylor Swift's fans feel they identify with her, they understand her, they connect with her. Imagine that you find out that she has actually been at the cutting edge of technology, a kind of marketing experiment that was successful beyond the executives' wildest dreams: from the beginning of her career, there was an music-composing AI system (like the ones we can all play with now) writing her songs. She's a real person, she's just singing lyrics and melodies composed for her by a machine. This would profoundly change the way her fans react to her and her music. Of course, the disaggregation of roles in art production is not new. Why should we assume the best composers are the best performers? Holly Knight wrote hits for Pat Benatar, Tina Turner, Bonnie Tyler, and Aerosmith among many others, yet she's not a household name, for exactly this reason.
The Role of Personhood in the Experience of Art, Case 4: Proximity of Agency and Consciousness of a Human to Your Experience of Art
From the AI art test results on Astral Codex Ten. Worth clicking through to try it yourself. The caption for this one is: "One of these two pretty hillsides is by one of history’s greatest artists. The other is soulless AI slop. Can you tell which is which?" Try looking at both and imagining the person behind it - or, if youre like me, once you know one is AI and one is not and you can't tell which, suddenly it's just a blank.
Above, Aditya Ramesh, lead engineer on DALL-E 3. Below, the Wintergatan marble music machine, with Martin Molin, the machine's creator. If you think Ramesh is NOT creating art, but Molin is (or at least performing it), why?
The Role of Personhood in the Experience of Art, Case 5: Deliberate Creation as Art
Above, we wondered about the proximity of agency to the artistic experience, how directly causal it was; what if there unambiguously was no agent causing it? Imagine we lived in a universe where Mark Rothko had never lived. You're hiking in a desert area, on the Earth of this Rothko-less universe. You see a pattern like this on a rock, composed of lichen and mineral deposits.
Orange, Red, Yellow, Mark Rothko (1961) "Pretty, and how strange that it made that geometric pattern," you might think. You might take a picture of it, but it may or may not be your favorite thing you saw on that hike. (There are lots of areas on Earth that look manmade, many of them wall-like.)
This is a very different experience from the one you have in this world, where Mark Rothko did live, and you see what he did deliberately placed on a canvas for others to look at, likely in a high-status place and knowing that other people have viewed it and gained pleasure from doing so. You place it in the context of Rothko's life experience and his other work.
Even if, in our Rothko-ful universe, you went for a hike and saw that same pattern, you might think, "How strange that it made that geometric pattern, it looks like a Rothko." You might take a picture of it, but it may or may not be your favorite thing you saw on that hike.
A picture I took as I flew south over California's Central Valley during a late winter's afternoon. On social media I referred to as a Rothko sunset. I actually don't even like Rothko, but I do like status, and comparing the sunset to it lets other people know I am the sort of person who knows Rothko. - Proprioceptive Interaction: The sculpture would respond to the viewer's body position and movement, changing its form and color as the viewer moves around it.
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