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NECRO-TRAINING OF SPATIAL FORMS OF SENSIBILITY

B. Sokolov, M. Gourieva

Abstract

Forms of sensibility used for construction of the living world are not universal, but rather specific for different cultural traditions. They are informed by symbolic forms of a culture, and are constantly undergoing transformation. The dominant form of sensibility and the corresponding modes of vision, hearing etc., can be researched by analysing their representations within the manner of depiction of the visible, for instance, in painting or bas-relief. Extraction of the form pattern from artwork is possible by means of structural, hermeneutical, and phenomenological analysis, that allow elicitation of the symbolism and structure of the form realized in an artwork. The current research investigates the problem of optical patterns of photography, especially in its omnipresent forms in contemporary everyday life, as well as its possible influence on human spatial sensibility. The article specifically focuses on everyday uses of photographic images within globalized online communication spaces, such as social media. The authors argue that it is through photography that machine optics based on single point perspective train human optics through perpetual depiction of the world in photographic images. European spatial form constitutes the visible from the point of view of a single point perspective that has, since the Renaissance, claimed to be the only true means of depicting spatiality. Most often, the single point perspective of a photographic image serves as an acknowledgement of such claims. However, what we see in a photographic image is not our perception of spatiality, but rather the way it looks when captured by the lifeless and temporally discrete apparatus of camera obscura, bereft both of the symbolism of our sensibility and our axiology-based ways for constructing and perceiving the world. The parameters of single point perspective are not simply proven by photography. Photography rather embeds in us certain optics of the construction of reality. These optics are В‘observedВ’ by the non-living mechanism that camera obscura is. The specifics of the current situation are that a photographic image in everyday life, and especially in the media reality of the Internet, leaves no alternative for our visual sensibility form, turning it into the optics of a lifeless, dispassionate, dead, discrete, and extemporal machine. Thus, the current global culture provides for necro training our sensibility apparatus by replacing the symbolically rich living world of past forms of sensibility with the world of lifeless spatial forms.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2017/62/S26.035

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