How does your degree of openness or susceptibility affect your relation to artworks?

Auke Tellegen studied humans openness/susceptibility to hypnosis. One result was construction of the Tellegen Absorption Scale (TAS). TAS is a multidimensional measure that assesses imaginative involvement and the tendency to become mentally absorbed in various daily activities.

Several versions of the absorption scale are available, a very recent version defines nine subscales within the Tellegen Absorption Scale:

• responsiveness to engaging stimuli
• responsiveness to inductive stimuli
• imagistic thought (thinking in mental imagery)
• ability to summon vivid and suggestive images
• cross-modal experiences — e. g.: synesthesia
• absorption in thoughts and imaginings
• vivid memories of the past
• episodes of expanded awareness
• altered states of consciousness.

As a participant moves, interacts, relates to an artwork – we engage in stimuli and  respond to the given input. Expanded sensual experience can occur, synesthesia. The involvement and relation to the artwork is a property that the participant has in the instant they engage in and respond to the artwork. The sensed experience consists of short temporal intervals – real time – responsive and elusive – I believe that via a high degree of openness and susceptibility – I as a participant would not be able to sense these temporal intervals – I wouldn’t experience realtime.

 

My sensed experience in relation to the artwork would have no relation to time, no sense of the time that passed while I was responding and involved with the artwork.

18 May This entry was published on May 18, 2014 at 8:33 pm. It’s filed under Art, Philosophy and tagged art, Atkinson, Auke Tellegen, experience, perception, sense. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.