[Art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research] J M Kennedy lecture
John Kennedy
kennedy at utsc.utoronto.ca
Wed Mar 10 19:13:19 UTC 2010
Noon to One pm
on Tues 16th March 2010
Doris McCarthy Gallery
University of Toronto
Understanding pictures in vision and touch:
Lines, perspectives and metaphors from cave art to the present
John M Kennedy FRSC
Department of Psychology
University of Toronto
A 40 minute lecture on the psychology of pictures, richly illustrated.
What did cave artists discover? 50,000 years ago, we discovered how to use
lines to picture the world. Six figure-ground uses of line are possible
and one is impossible, Kennedy argues. Is it ontologically impossible for
lines to work as pictures in touch, for the blind? Kennedy finds blind
people know the 6 figure-ground possibilities. Renaissance perspective is
a discovery about perception, not an invention of an arbitrary convention,
Kennedy proposes. It is used by the blind, he finds. Figure-ground and
perspective offers a base for Realism, he contends. Deliberate
disobedience of Realism can create highly successful pictorial metaphors.
With metaphoric pictures from EW, a Japanese blind woman.
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