Beauty At Work
Beauty at Work expands our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters. Sociologist Brandon Vaidyanathan interviews scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and leaders across diverse fields to reveal new insights into how beauty shapes our brains, behaviors, organizations, and societies--for good and for ill. Learn how to harness the power of beauty in your life and work, while avoiding its pitfalls.
Beauty At Work
The Transformative Power of Art and Architecture with Anjan Chatterjee, Alberto Perez-Gomez, Stephen Legari, and J.F. Martel
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This is a panel on the transformative power of art and architecture as part of the international symposium "Can beauty save the world?" held at McGill University, Oct 24-25, 2025.
The session begins with poetry from Olivia Wood, who moderated the panel.
Anjan Chatterjee (University of Pennsylvania) examined our vocabularies to express aesthetic experience and the relationship between transformational experience and third-person rendition. Alberto Perez-Gomez (McGill) noted that the value of architecture has always been its beauty, which orients us toward justice, festivity, and the common good. Stephen Legari (MMFA) shared how collective awe, experienced through slow looking and hospitality, can heal and connect. J.F. Martel distinguished between the beauty of the geometers vs. ecstatic beauty, and how art matters for both.
The panel was sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.
Learn more at www.canbeautysavetheworld.com and www.beautyatwork.net
#beauty #art #architecture #museum #arttherapy #philosophy #neuroscience #neuroaesthetics #philosophyofart
Hey everybody, welcome to Beauty at Work. We are in between seasons at the moment. So, in the meantime, I want to share with you a series of panel discussions from a symposium that we organized in Montreal in October 2025. This event was the launch of a new international research project called Can Beauty Save the World? The project is funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The panels feature discussions between philosophers, historians, musicologists, neuroscientists, social scientists, religious study scholars, and practitioners from a variety of domains exploring the meaning and power of beauty in a secular age. I hope you enjoy this discussion. Everyone, uh, we're gonna start up with our with our second session this this uh this morning uh on the transformative power of art and architecture. I completely neglected to introduce our uh our co-investigators in our project yesterday. So on our previous panel, we had uh Katie Bank, Rebecca Wallace, Stephen Bullivant, uh all from the UK, working on a sub-uh component of our project focused on sacred music. Uh on this next panel, we have Anjan Chatterjee from the University of Pennsylvania, uh, who is uh a pioneer of the field of neuroaesthetics. And uh so as we as we go through the day, we're gonna be asking you for some ideas on the various questions that we are the the topics we're trying to study. And so uh do do seek us out if you you have an interest in some of these questions and topics, and we'd love to hear from you. Uh, I want to introduce uh Olivia Wood, who is a poet and educator. Uh her work has been recently featured in Windfall Room, uh Recitation Journal, uh Dance Anima, which is uh forthcoming from Oxford University Press, and in One Long One, Nouveau Poem and Just for Fun Reading series, and she's going to open our next panel with some poetry.
SPEAKER_02Fantastic. Thank you so much. Uh so happy to be here. It's a real pleasure. Um, I'm going to open with um with a quote from uh Gerard Manley Hopkins, uh a bit timely from yesterday. Believe it or not, I did choose it before last night's panel. Um, so something's in the air, certainly. Uh so this is from the Windhuverm Brute, beauty, and valor and act, oh air, pride, plume here. Buckle, and the fire that breaks from thee, and then a billion times told lovelier, more dangerous, oh my chevalier. This is called Reprise Sonnet. Love bends down by Big Barnes Longside. In the ample nation of this memory, I say yes to your bring the pale in by arm crook at end of day. Inside brass bend handles sing pineapple song of Protestant hello. And there the horrible larders and earth's finite kisses, where the year leaps within our story. Yes, the silver river, yes, the living thatch, and look, it drops down like milk into the already emptying bucket, the gift you discovered and told yourself you possessed in the night. Lie down first in the chest freezers, soon you'll pack them for the season, and shed a sign of the fullness which seeks you everywhere. Let him find in me the tools of his hands. Who marks the limit? The builder on the roof, or the woman who points up from where she stands on the ground, squinting at something he cannot yet see, and says, Stop now, before he tacks thatch to heaven or thumb. I too want to transform unrecognizable and am afraid. Once, after meeting the bird's eyes with her own, as she walked directly into a ditch. What can God show me that I can't yet imagine? the fool says, laying blithely into the step that lands her in the ditch. Greedily I fall, counting on the third thing. He would lavish it on anyone, it is his nature. And as I build the cathedral of my nature, who will point up at me before my hammer falls? Find your corridor and keep it clean. Village life has ceased until I arose a mother. He ate grass like a cow and was drenched with the dew from heaven. To love is to acknowledge and affirm what is. I am subject to my wind, digging up the loam, the trade wind. Why hast thou done this to us? Love, we were both writing about helplessness, and when they leave us, I can companion them to the pond and make them stately. From my eyes I will do this for you. On my head I am bound to do this for you. I would keep my fear if I could help it. In a plank of wood behind the wall behind the icon, an Amari, another, and just half, or I'll be drunk, we laugh. Our Lady of the Mini Mart pouring out cream-colored graces onto the piazza, even in the night. And in the apartment's robust cross breeze, we wrestle like puppies, a little hapless and yet also insisting. My heart grows safe past my arms. The dignity of grasses, the thin blue dragonflies make shiny clauses from the air. A woman at her picnic holds her arms as wide as they can go. This big. How big we say? Bigger than that. Host of the world's roof, spear parliament, thought land, floor of the windshall, whale path, sister whose voice is stones glancing off the water. We are all twenty two at different times. An observation, but sometimes I think I can see my mother leafing in the card catalogue. It's hard to believe that New England is one huge block of ice stored in hay, which keeps a mound of cream solid in my mind, but it's true. Skin tomatoes, dilly beans, corn and corn and corn, the river after you die. Oh, after you die, the river. I look at it in its gold or night shift, its shore sheets of sloping heather, and darkened clams. Jetend. This the life of towns. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you for being here. Okay. This one is called Sea of Marrow. What is at the center of living trees? Waiting slow in winter. Pink blossom, I dream you. The generosity of clams, Earth's own smell, elementary as Tuesday, down at the blocked boxing cub club yard, dry and hot. For a while I take this up as a profession. A diligent builder of wind mansions, wind toiling. Mansion made of wind or mansion full of wind, you ask. From the top of the porch of my mansion, I laugh and laugh, though I am uncertain. I say finally, God, God, God, and the pain of this is yours too, and the bearing of it ours. Wind tearing through each room of howling wind, can you live here? No. But I do, as if abroad inside my prizing spirit, forgetting narrow back shielding summer whites on the line, I dream you. Speak, miracle, love again. Different now by tragedies, hundred sweet convergences, from the center of winter's living trees, I turn, I dream your turning face. Thank you so much. And now naturally to uh the transformative power of art and architecture. Um so poems are not unlike buildings, yes. Uh yes, um, I'm so pleased to introduce uh our panelists. So just very, very briefly, I'll go through everyone and then uh turn it over to them one by one. So, yes, first we'll have Anjan Chatterjee, uh, who is the founding director of the Penn Center for Neuroesthetics. He wrote the Aesthetic Brain and co-edited Brain Beauty and Art and Neuroesthetics in Practice, among many other uh very exciting things. Um, and then we also have Alberto Perez Gomez, um, who is he studied architecture in Mexico City. He was the Brompin chair at McGill University, where he is now an emeritus professor. Um, he also wrote Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, uh, an alliterative lexicon of architectural memories, most recently, fantastic title. Then we have Stephen Ligari, uh, who is the program officer for art therapy at Musee de Beaux-Arts, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Um, he designs and delivers therapeutic museum-based activities at the MMFA and uh has contributed to several texts on museum-based wellness and therapy practice within the arts and in health. Finally, J.F. Martell, who is a writer and lecturer on art, culture, and philosophy. He is the author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. Um, so first, uh, if you could please welcome Anjan Chatterjee.
SPEAKER_00Thank you.
SPEAKER_06Thanks so much. I want to thank Brandon for inviting me here. Um it's not often I'm in a room where I'm vastly outnumbered by philosophers. So Elaine mentioned yesterday that for most scientists, beauty never left us. I think uh in this idea, Brandon has demonstrated. Brandon has demonstrated in his work that a lot of scientists are motivated by notions of beauty, by aesthetic emotions of wonder, uh, and it drives us. We are also, we also evaluate each other's work sometimes on beauty criteria. Was that a beautiful experiment? Was that a beautiful idea that came out of it? But it's quite something else if beauty is the object of your inquiry, and that becomes for some people more problematic. And there is a way in which, if what you think of is the lifeblood of what you do, which is measurement, are you actually destroying that which is what you're interested in? Does measurement destroy the magic? Did Newton destroy the wonder in a rainbow? And so those are the kinds of questions we think about. And some of the topics that came up in yesterday's panel also pervade our thinking, which is what's the difference between something that is particular and something that is general? What's the difference between an individual experience and can we make any claims to universality of such experiences? Uh, are the kinds of questions that pervade what we do. So to start with, the framework. So, as a neuroscientist, how one might think about the nature of aesthetic experiences, and this is kind of a general framework we use, sometimes referred to as the aesthetic triad, which is to say that there are these three large-scale neural systems that contribute to our aesthetic experiences. So you have all of the details of the sensory and motor systems. Um Jonathan mentioned in his talk very briefly, as a parenthetical point about if you just think about the auditory system, how complex that can be, and the same applies to pretty much every sensory system and the organization of our motor systems, uh, which becomes very important for people who think of aesthetic experiences as embodied, as corporeal, as we heard about in the previous panel. And there's the the notion of emotions and valuation. At the simplest level for beauty, there's a sense of pleasure. Uh quite consistently seems to activate reward systems in the brain when people have an experience of beauty, but not just pleasure. Uh, that there are presumably more complex inner mixtures of emotions and affective responses that we try to get a handle on. And then finally, what we think is the largest source of variability, which is what we bring to the experience, our knowledge, meaning, our expertise, our cultural background, what we were exposed to, uh, a bit of what Gombrich, um, the art historian, talked about as the beholder's share. And so if you think about the organization for our sensory systems, we tend to be more similar than different, unless you have some kind of developmental uh problem. Uh, with emotions, there's still more commonality, but differences start to come to bear on the experience. And then uh really our own personal histories, cultural histories, all the baggage we come, uh, whether it's baggage or it's a way to look at uh at things, the contextual information is where people diverge quite a bit. So we started this project to say, how can we talk about aesthetic experiences? And the analogy might be to something like wine tasting, which is a complex sensory experience. And most people, if you enjoy wine, you might take a sip of wine and say, I like it, or I don't like it, or you're not sure, but you say it's kind of interesting, and most people get stuck after that. But if you have a Somalier who then gives you a language and says, there are hints of berries in there, or there's an icky finish. It's a truism in psychology that we are better at matching things than we are at generating things. And so once you are told there might be some chocolate in there, and you recognize if it's there, you start to recognize the underlying notion here is that having a vocabulary can potentially enrich the experience. And so the question is, can we come up with a similar vocabulary for the way art has an impact on us? So the way we went about this was to get um several experts from different disciplines. The idea was to try to expand how we thought about this past the constraints of our own imagination based on our disciplines. Um this is Noel Carroll, is a philosopher, some of you might know. Ellen Winner is a psychologist, uh, Natalie Carnes is a theologian, and Matt Milner is a historian with somewhat of a theologic bent. And so we what we did was people generated this group, we met several times, we generated a lot of terms, and I'm just going to focus on the impact terms, which started with uh something like 87. We reduced them to 69 after a lot of discussion, the potential impacts that art could have. And then we used some more recent statistical methods called exploratory graph analysis, where we crowdsource this. Uh, and what you do is you give people large numbers of people, in this case, we started with a thousand, where they take each term and they generate a whole bunch of associated words with it. And what you're looking at is the correlation of the kind of association, the semantic cloud that you get out of this, and then you can create this kind of semantic network. Okay. And it's the sort of thing you can spend, we hours of the night, just looking at it and looking at how each words connect to each other, and the thickness of the lines has to do with how correlated they are and closeness and so on. You can also start distilling it statistically into what ends up being 11 dimensions, and then further you distill that even more. And it looks like at the coarsest level, there are four categories of responses people have, which is there's a positive affective response, a negative affective response, a sense of immersion, and then the possibility of transformation, which is what we're all interested in. But now that we have this tool, we've done this in several experiments that might relate to transformation. We've looked at how public art, for example, uh, when people are engaged with public art, Philadelphia has 4,000 murals. It's probably the largest open-air art gallery in North America that every section of the city has. How does that change perception of neighborhoods? How does it transform how you think about a neighborhood? We've looked at art making in veterans with post-traumatic stress and what's the trans, what's the emotional transformation they have? But I'm going to talk about one experiment, which is uh on slow looking. And here the idea is that most of us in this room, and I suspect most of us in our culture live hypomanic lives. We're rushing from place to place. The empirical evidence is that when people go to museums and stop at artworks, the median amount of time they stop at an individual work of art is 27 seconds. And some of that is spent reading the plaque. So ask yourself what kind of transformation is even possible in under half a minute. So we've developed a method using the aesthetic triad of slow looking, and we take students and ask them to spend 15 minutes with the work of art. Now you can imagine how torturous this is. And again, this needs to be validated by humans. So there's a lot of methodologic work to be done. But the kind of information we're getting is the source where a lot of generation happens in a dynamic sense tends to be excitement, awe, calm, impressed. The target of people's responses, if you look at how they're move dynamically, tends to be curiosity, distress, interest, feeling small came up before, unsettled. Um curiosity, awe, sadness, and disgust seems to have the most impact across narratives. And then there were these key transitions from pain. Pain came up earlier, pain to curiosity, excitement to interest, calm to smallness, and contemplation to sadness, as specific to these works of art. And then when we go back to the taxonomy, what you see is the bottom left quadrant is where the bulk of the transformation is happening. And we're just hovering at the edge of that. We haven't gotten there in these first-person accounts. But the idea is if we can get people to slow down to immerse themselves, we'll get more of that. So I'll end it there. You know, scientists work in community. So these are really the people that helped with all of this. So thank you.
SPEAKER_00Thank you very much. I'm uh grateful to be included in this uh very important discussion, actually. It's driven uh my own work uh uh uh from the beginning. I'm particularly uh honored by the panel last night, uh the work of the of our colleagues that we so much admire. So indeed I've dedicated my life to to understand and convey to others how architecture may matter in our technological world, our secular world. This is not obvious given how buildings and planning can be vehicles of political domination, oppression, or even more benign objects of fashion or consumption. If architecture matters, it is because at its core, and I say this historically because I guess I am partly philosopher, but also fundamentally a historian, a historian of architectural theories, historically its fundamental vo value has always been beauty, even though one could argue that this has been corrupted in all sorts of directions. And most of you in this room already know that when we speak of beauty in architecture, we must resist the temptation to think only of style, fashion or decoration. Beauty is not a surface effect. It is not the glossy image of a novel building standing out like a sculptural object, though this has been fetishized a lot in our contemporary media culture. We may catch glimpses of beauty as we visit famous buildings in our trips or guided tours, unquestionably. But the nature of architectural beauty is never merely visual as a detached museum piece, speaking only to our undivided attention. Architectural beauty appears as a given fact to kinetic embodied experience, to the fullness of pre-reflective and reflective consciousness. It is in this modality that it partakes from Homeric doprepon, that which is clearly seen, heard or smelled appearing as conspicuous, as inevitable and eminently appropriate even in the sight of gods because it is experienced in lived life as a temporal duration architectural beauty has been understood historically as similar to music and, perhaps paradoxically for some of you, only in the last few centuries through its more obvious resemblance to painting and sculpture. This analogy I must say is much more fundamental and basic than the specialized cases that are fascinating that we heard in the last panel but are only instances of this much more general connection between architecture and music. The centrality of music in Western culture is what is at stake. Architectural beauty as experience is kindred to truth not in the sense of the Platonic episteme but of Aristotelian phronesis. This may add something to what was said last night about the circularity of this beauty and truth connect connection so it's more about phronesis, the truth disclosed by poetry and rhetoric a truth that is emplaced, topical right emerging through natural language from the gestural and habitual foundations of a culture. It is thus we also read Heidegger with my students kindred to Alithia so still the modern Greek word for truth an unveiling of something perhaps forgotten or tacit its appearance bound to place and time yet transcendent potentially universal. Beauty in architecture is the experience of meaning in the lived actions and rituals that buildings and spaces frame and enable. This is a primary emotional cognition that may convey the sense that the world discloses itself to us through such actions that we are however briefly in tune with being beauty matters in a way that other heroes of mind philosophers Hans Georg Gadamer and Ernesto Grassi have made clear to us it is not merely a subjective taste or a projection of our feelings. Beauty is encountered as something that claims us. When we are moved by beauty in a work of architecture we may feel addressed by the world itself was particularly true in traditional architecture forever since the the beginning of our of our practices as humans we are called out of ourselves and invited into resonance with something greater. This awareness has had and would still have transformative capacities in our conflicted world as Elaine Scary has eloquently shown us beauty is real and as such it has the capacity to ask something of us. It reorients our desires not towards possession or consumption but towards careveness. Beauty, as Charles Taylor tells us, connects us to the larger order of the cosmos and in doing so it reminds us of our obligations to the earth, to one another and to the future. For architecture this means beauty is never optional. In traditional architectural treatises the Vitruvian Venustas is shorthand for meaning and psychosomatic health the central and dominant value to be sought in any work providing a sense akin to musical harmony in lived space the term venustas refers to the seductive quality of Venus, disclosing human space as the ambit of desire while providing solace and temporary completion. It is thus never merely a synonym of comfort as in modern functionalism but a synonym of meaning often like love, bittersweet. Architecture is thus capable of conveying emotional wisdom, multi and cross-sensory in the sense of ancient Greek aesthesis. Its uses of materials and ornament are never merely accessory and at best when further in this aim beauty then appears as the measure of whether a building has truly responded to its place, its site a priori pregnant with climatic, cultural and historical meanings, to its materials shown respect through caring craft and to the rituals and memories of those it shelters where beauty is absent a building remains mute, alienating or perhaps even violent where beauty appears we feel resonance a resonance that is both aesthetic and ethical so beauty cannot be separated from justice. To make a place beautiful is to create conditions for human dignity. It is to enable dwelling that honors both the individual and the community it is to fashion a world where we may live attuned to each other to history to the fragile earth on which we depend. Now let me perhaps land these brief reflections with a small example just entering the Piazza del Campo in Siena the space opens before you like a great shell, sloping gently towards the Palazzo Publico. It is not symmetrical, not monumental in the modern sense and yet it feels inevitable, as though the city itself has exhaled, gathering its life into its embrace into this embrace here beauty is not spectacle. The piazza is beautiful because it enacts justice. It has always been the place of city gathering, festival, markets and the famous palio horse race that still binds Siena's neighborhoods together. Its form sustains a life in common notice the scale it does not overwhelm back it is not overwhelm it includes its curve draws every gaze towards the center and towards one another in this piazza you are never isolated you are always among citizens. The materials worm brick, rough stone, speak of the Tuscan earth time lives in their texture and as you stand there you feel attuned to the ground beneath, to the sky above, to the collective presence around you. The Piazza del Campo is beautiful because it orients us ethically it allows justice to appear in space that is lived, embodied and festive. It tunes the individual to the collective and the collective to the earth architectural beauty is disclosed in the atmospheres it creates enabling fulfilling just and healthy life it is both ephemeral and lasting particular and local and with the capacity to touch us universally. Thus appropriately understood beautiful architecture completes us like an ancient Greek symbolon and makes the gift of present time as a lasting thickness it is often a gift of belonging of home a gift of silence to create beautiful architecture the architect must prioritize the common good overests a difficult task that demands political wisdom one that is vested in the building's program not a simple list of parts with square footage or a diagram but a narrative that envisions a good life.
SPEAKER_03To build justly the architect must respond with care to the world as it addresses us, crafting places that are welcoming and that sustain human dignity that allow the inhabitants to feel if only for an incandescent of untold duration a true sense of belonging thanks fantastic thank you so much it's hard not to use the word uh beautiful many many times today beautiful thank you uh I'd like to invite Steven up next please okay fantastic thank you good morning everyone a pleasure to be with you when I was preparing for this I wondered what contribution I might make if you've read the bios of uh the other panelists um I wanted to include my own humble piece uh to this conversation about the transformative power of art and um I thought I would speak as we say in French from the terrain so I speak to you from the work that we're doing on the ground uh at my museum it's it's not my museum it's actually everyone's museum. And it's really nice to be back in Thompson House. Uh I used to have to do those dreaded group projects that I now get to assign my students. And uh so there is a bit of beer and uh nachos missing from the familiarity of this place. But it's lovely to be here. Munchal Museum of Fine Arts is where are we? Let me situate myself just over there. Thank you. Yeah um a little plug I highly recommend going to see the Kent Monkman exhibition if you are in town long enough or you live here it's nothing short of transformative. And uh so this museum is 165 years old. That's a little bit of context. A few things I'm not I'm not an art historian. I'm not a museologist uh I'm not an art educator I'm not a guide what I am is an art therapist. Are there any other art therapists in the room? So I'm often a unicorn in that respect. If art therapy or art therapist is a profession you're not familiar with, just imagine sort of the the machinations of or the usefulness we hope of psychotherapy with art making as the primary mode of communication not to the exception of talking but rather we use art as a means of helping our clients to confront their problems and hopefully transform them as well. Since 1999, which is technically the last century, we've had really, really robust uh program inaccessibility and that parasol term means that we've been able to welcome what we call non-publics to the museum through various points of entry. My own point of entry is to bring them in for therapeutic groups. And the word group is going to be said over and over again in my presentation because that's what I want to talk to you about this idea of the collective awe. So in preparing for this I wondered well what would I do? Would I explain the programming that we do would I provide you lists and statistics and numbers of all the the souls that we hopefully touched? I thought no what I would like to do, I'd like to show you some art. And I'd like to show you some art and then give you a little bit of the context of how we use the fine arts hopefully as a vehicle for transformation with groups of people. The group in my work and in the work that we do in what is called the Division for learning and community engagement. It's a title that keeps changing every few years depending on who's in charge but that's basically the crux of it. The groups come from clinics they come from community settings and they also come from educational settings as well. So this particular painting is currently being used in our work with med students. You may have encountered the arts and humanities in medicine may have an image of doctors in an atelier painting away and we have evidence that this is actually helpful in them retaining some semblance of their humanity as they go on to become really skilled in diagnosis and caring for patients. What we're trying to do is get in there early. So we have an agreement a partnership with the Faculty of Medicine and the University of Montreal we have 400 first year students that come through our doors three times a year and we sit for 30 minutes in groups in front of this is one of the paintings and we use something you might be familiar with visual thinking strategies to elicit different kinds of responses to promote critical thinking frustration tolerance right we're not allowed phones either empathy and appreciating multiple perspectives on looking at the same object and other things happen as well. In this approach we don't offer any historical information on the object we don't give it context or even why you might find it in late 19th century romantic gallery. We just want to know the answer to a few questions what is happening in this image? What is it that you see that makes you say that and what more can we find? And we use the grace of paraphrasing as a means of validating the perspective of each student and letting them know that there is no right answer, which for med students is very frustrating. This is a painting that you will find in the galleries called the Art of One World on the fourth floor. Please remember to go to the fourth floor people miss it quite often. And this is um the perspective of the artist on his grandmother although he calls it autoportrait Manuel Mathieu who's an Haitian born artist and this is a painting of his grandmother in her garden in Blainville. This is a painting that we use quite often with our community program that brings in up to 15 people at a time they may share a diagnosis in mental health long-term illness uh they may share an experience of marginalization um due to our history in society but we use these pre-patterned experiences in selecting different artworks that we hope are going to connect with their different histories and their different stories. In this approach we use more of a narrative intervention we hope that they're going to share their emotions, their ideas, their memories, their delight or their disgust with what they're seeing. We'll then have some coffee and tea because hospitality is incredibly important when you're working with groups of people that don't feel they belong in a museum. And then we get to make something so they're guided through a semi-open creative experience and hopefully they leave feeling a little bit better than when they arrived. This is a painting I used a great deal during the pandemic. So in the culture sector we all went online and learned clumsily the tools of virtual connection and I reached out to our various partners five minutes thank you um it doesn't matter how many paintings we get through actually isn't that great you could stop here and it would be totally fine. This is a painting by Gerhard Richter and one of the things that I noticed with the different groups that were joining me online was that uh there was this famish for landscape. People were stuck inside I know none of you want to remember that because we're all here in a room together breathing each other's air but there was this incredible appetite for landscape and this one kept coming back over and over again. And again it it promoted all kinds of reflections on grief which is very transformative hope or even the the dalliance of being able to walk over the rolling hills I took the time to have one quote from Richter my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic with a romantic or classical suggestion of lost paradises but above all untruthful the beauty of a landscape each thing that delights us the harmony of colors the peace the violence of an atmosphere the softness of the lines the magnificent spaces all that our projections that be could be erased so as to see only what is loathsome and ugly. What beautiful words to consider as we're also talking about beauty I'm gonna skip ahead God I love this painting so much. I want to skip ahead one to this image and to stay within my time limit because it's important to see the group this is any group and what we have is the intermediator. In French we call then le mediate muséal the museum mediator doesn't really work in English because we have such a fixed idea of what a mediator is are they angry? Is there some kind of law that's been broken that they need to negotiate with Monet so I don't know what the equivalent is an interpretive expert but basically what we have here is a braiding of stories that's happening. And I'd like to finish with Olga we have at the museum what's called the Art Hive. It's a community studio open five days a week drop in free for anyone and everyone who's either curious, an art maker, a non-artmaker but when you come through the door you are an artist and you are greeted by an educator and an art therapist you can't tell them apart and that's kind of the point. And you join perhaps a table or a corner and up to 30 other art makers on any day of the week and you decide what you're going to do. This is a non-programmed space. So when we think of spaces where we gather and the kind of spaces that we need in the 21st century together and the kind of activities that we need to do beyond speaking in the 21st century together this is one offering that we gather around art making which we've known how to do for a very very long time as human beings. This is a reclamation of that this is a third space to do something else and to be other parts of ourselves together. Olga's 92, she recently lost her sister in Germany. She's grieving her she came in the other day and brought me a little snack and cake in her pocket. She always brings me something to eat and is incredibly generous both with her time and her attention to other people I think I'll stop there. Hopefully I've left you with the impression of what one museum can do. Whatever its scale our cultural institutions are players in how we move forward collectively and you all have a role to play in what those museums can do.
SPEAKER_02They belong to you and me as well thank you very much wonderful thank you so much so nice to be reminded uh that it's our museum uh thank you Stephen and I would like to invite uh JF up next to speak who I had the pleasure of seeing a couple years ago at the New York encounter so I'm excited to see you again all right hello just quickly get organized here I had slides but I'm not going to use them um because I've decided not to follow my script and instead approach you as just a a very vulnerable person who thinks a lot about these topics.
SPEAKER_07I am not uh a professor in a university I am a writer and a podcaster I have a podcast uh with the musicologist Phil Ford called Weird Studies which is a discipline that cannot exist even though now tremendous pressure is being exerted in order to force it to exist I guarantee you it never will because the weird is what is in between existences, right? The weird is what escapes capture and so can't be jammed into a discipline. So what we do on this podcast is we we have a verb for it. We weird things. And so what I want to do today is to you know just um going off of all the wonderful things that have been said and one thing that struck me at this conference is that everyone says that beauty is undefinable, but in a sense we all kind of know what it is at the same time. So in a sense we're all aware that there's an aspect of reality That is undefinable, that escapes conceptual capture, and that does this as a matter of course and an essential way, not in a way that we could one day resolve. The famous hard problem of consciousness, which you may be aware of if you know about the philosophy of mind, is kind of an expression of this as far as I'm concerned. It's a way of expressing the aporeia where we realize that our concepts will never encompass what is out there, what is real, what is before us, even though concepts are tremendously useful as a fan of philosophy and a dabbler in it myself, I'm the first to say it. Extremely useful for trying to navigate our way through this mysterious reality. So, what I want to do is to weird a phrase, a very popular phrase that originally comes from Aristotle and I think has been understood in different ways over time. The phrase or the sentence or statement is art is the imitation of nature. And you may remember this from uh Aristotle's Poetics. It's often been used to qualify uh a Platonic aesthetics, so the aesthetics of Plato, even though Plato doesn't say this. The word here, the imitation here, is a translation of mimesis or mimesis in Greek. Uh, however, Plato does talk about art and how it represents, how it imitates reality in the Republic and elsewhere. Now, if we take Aristotle and Plato for themselves, we'll notice that they are very subtle, complex, sophisticated thinkers who may uh be um we might be actually betraying insofar as we try to encapsulate their thought in a kind of easy, facile interpretation. Nevertheless, the phrase art is the imitation of nature has uh has become for us a kind of inherited opinion, an idea we have of what art does, namely that art represents the world. And it might represent it in a positive way. So Aristotle would say something like, perhaps uh art uh draws the perfect form out of the imperfections of nature. It calls us to the perfection of the form. Uh, whereas Plato might say something like, art uh badly copies the mixtures of the world and gives us reality one further step removed from the intelligible world, which is the proper domain of truth for him. Now, again, these are caricatures of both of those thinkers, but these are what we live with. These are kind of ideas which those of us who are familiar with philosophy kind of just we find ourselves kind of sprung back into these opinions almost as a matter of course. This phrase, art is the imitation of nature, uh, gets to the heart of the matter, the the connection between art and representation, art and how it represents the world that we experience. And this is a problem which artists, especially modern artists, but I think artists forever, since you know, it's even the artists of the Chauvecave were confronted with this philosophical problem of what does it mean to represent reality? And um, in what sense is the artist responsible for a kind of responsible to a particular conception of truth which would require them to represent reality in a faithful way? This is a problem that is central to modern art. And as an example, I'm gonna cite um Werner Herzog, uh, the great German filmmaker who who uh has been for decades making documentaries that cheat, that stage, that pretend, that uh falsify. And for him, this was always always said this very clearly. This is in order for the documentary to express truth that he does this. In order to be truthful, he has to cheat. So here we have two very different notions of truth, which he uh articulates in his famous Minnesota Declaration in the following terms. He says, first of all, there's factual truth. This is the truth that obtains when a statement corresponds to an external state of affairs. For example, I say 12 crows are flying over the field, and it just so happens that 12 crows are doing just that. There's a correspondence between my statement and the and reality. He calls this the truth of accountants, counting crows and whatnot. Uh the other form of truth for Herzog is ecstatic truth. And this is the truth that he is after, and it's the truth that he believes art by its nature is after. And this is a this is a truth that gets us beyond the truth of accountants. It's a truth that confronts us in itself by nature, confronts us to the aporeia of the truth of accountants, to the way that the truth of accountants cannot capture what it means to be in this world, what it means to live, what it means to exist. And so that requires the various falsifications that he resorts to, he says. And here, so we have a connection here between truth and beauty, uh, because art, of course, is traditionally uh associated with beauty. And I was wondering, and um, if we can find these two kinds of truth, you know, if Herzog can give us these two forms of truth, can we find two forms of beauty? And would they reflect these two types of truth? I'm engaging in a bit of accounting right now as I speak. And my answer, at least as far as I was able to cobble one together in my book, was that yeah, there are two types of beauty. And, you know, in the history of philosophy, we see this. For example, uh Kant's idea of beauty and the sublime. The first type of beauty we might call the beauty of the geometers, and that would be the beauty that corresponds to the pleasingness, the pleasantness of symmetry, proportion, harmony, etc. And there's no doubt that these are expressions of beauty, and there might be strong evolutionary reasons why we find that type of form beautiful. But there's also another type of beauty, what Kant calls the sublime, which is a beauty that outstrips our conceptuality, a beauty that challenges us to feel in a way that we can't, in such a way that we can't translate our feelings into thoughts. And this would be what I'm calling ecstatic beauty. And it would correspond to Herzog's ecstatic truth. Here we have a nice play, a nice dichotomy of what uh uh Professor Carney was talking about last night with hexayity, hexayity being the this-ness of an object, the fact that an object is singular, unrepeatable, new on the one hand. And we could we might contrast that with what the medievals called quiditas or quidity, which is the whatness of an object, what is the form that it embodies, etc. So the beauty of the geometers would be the beauty of quiddity, the beauty of forms connecting together in an intelligible whole, whereas the beauty that is ecstatic would be the beauty of hexate, the beauty of the singular, the unrepeatable, etc. Now, uh, I can find some allies uh in thinking along these lines. For example, Charles Baudelaire wrote beautifully, I think, le beau est toujours bizarre. The beautiful is always bizarre. And by this he meant something like there's always something in the beautiful object that I can't quantify. And it's precisely in that aspect that I can't quantify, which in my book I call the rift, that uh elicits suddenly the opening where a feeling of the beautiful might arise in me. If we're going to um trouble the expression art is the imitation of nature, it's going to have to be uh in by by way of another distinction. Okay, we've made a distinction between two types of truth, two types of beauty. Now let's make a distinction between two types of nature. And philosophy has done that for us already in different and radically different ways, using the same words. Um, I'm thinking here of the philosopher Spinoza, who, working off of his medieval predecessors, developed the notion of two forms or two aspects of nature. He called one natura naturata and the other one natura naturans. Natura naturata is nature-natured, and that is the world of ordered things, the world that we can count, that we can conceptualize, that we can do accounting in, or science for that matter, the quantifiable aspect of the world, which is undeniably part of the equation. Natura naturans, by contrast, is whatever it is that makes things happen in this world, whatever it is that gives us a world that's quantifiable to begin with, whatever it is, and I'm saying whatever it is, I'm thinking here of uh Jean Kelevitch, uh the great French um musicologist, his expression was le je ne sais quoi. The je ne sais quoi, the I don't know what in the real that present that that results in events which we then can try to capture with concepts. But that becoming, that that emergence of the real always precedes the thought as to what it means. You see this in David Hume when he says the causality is always an a posteriori idea. We come up with the idea of causality once something has happened, but that something happening is always dependent upon the metaksu, the in-betweenness of whatever we determine was the cause and the effect, the happening that nothing can actually, that our brains can't actually ever quite uh encompass. So, what I would like to suggest here is that art does imitate nature, but art, insofar as it results in strength in transformations, and transformations should always be a little uncomfortable. If we're not uncomfortable with the transformation, it's probably because we're not really transforming. Art imitates natura naturata, which is naturing nature, the radical mystery that even in our most sophisticated intellectual moments, we ultimately have to admit exceeds, transcends, outstrips our capacity for intellect and leaves us in what Plato famously called a state of Thaumazign or wonder. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02Okay, fantastic. Thank you so much to our panelists. Perhaps we could collectively thank them. Um yes, okay, great. You guys are all joining. So now um Yeah, we'll have a bit of a QA. Very rich panel, extremely generative and wonderfully uh programmed, such like an intuitive line through through these four talks. Fantastic. So perhaps I'll kick us off by just um inviting any of the panelists, if there's uh something that was sparked for you as one of your colleagues was speaking. If anybody wants to speak back to anyone's work, anything kind of emerging for you there?
SPEAKER_07To what I said at the beginning, which is that beauty is one of those topics that can be uh, or truth for that matter, one of those topics that can be talked about in a thousand different ways. We can have different theories, but always the conversation only begins with the assumption that we all know what we're talking about to a certain extent. If we can talk about beauty and truth, it's because on some level, uh, even if the details elude us, we are already kind of meeting on the ground of beauty and truth. Would would you say that that's makes sense? Or yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yes, in a way. I think I come from a slightly different uh uh background than some of you. I my mentor story with Patoska, he was an architect, a Czech architect, and I started uh originally or Tegiga set and existentialism and phenomenology. And I think for us uh within this tradition, this question of um of truth, I mean the issue that I brought up slightly because I have to summarize so much in fifteen minutes, uh, is that what is at stake when one speaks about uh beauty is not episteme, uh it's not truth as correspondence, is always uh Alicia or Phronicis, which is a different kind of truth. And you know, Aristotle makes this very clear distinction, right, because the truth of the craftsman, the truth of the philosopher, and the truth of the of the rhetoric or the poet. And uh I happen to believe that the one that matters most is the truth of the poet and the rhetoric, not episteme. So it is at that level that I think one finds the most fruitful correspondence between truth and beauty. If you try to look for the other one for episteme, you run into all sorts of problems that that that uh re result in 18th century aesthetics, judgment, the the misunderstanding that aesthetic judgment is actually aesthetic feeling, which you know very well from which most philosophers know very well. So I think that's where I that's what I would say about that. So yes, but with that being very clear that this is because we usually take truth to be epistemic today. We don't uh allow the other possibility.
SPEAKER_07I I compl I completely agree with that, and uh I hope that was clear from what I said, because uh, however, I think that episteme to a certain extent does have a part to play. We need an intelligible world before Alithea can arise in it. We need the mountains before the temple can be there. And so I completely agree with you. I don't even want to uh but my path is a little different in the sense that I I kind of try to get around phenomenology by going through Al Hibilak Sun and and uh but I think that ultimately, again, this is kind of proving I think what I was trying to say, which is that we agree despite these differences, yeah.
SPEAKER_00I I I think the connections with Epistemia became were very um we're very natural in a great part of the of the of the tradition. It becomes much more difficult after the beginning of the 19th century. You know, or um one of my compatriots, a favorite of mine, uh Octavio Paz, uh, often argued that art takes the place of religion precisely for the reasons that we've been talking about here. In traditional world, the it was easier to under to believe that there is a kind of uh connection between the clarity of the geometry that you mentioned, you know, which is also the clarity of the of the architectural project, the obsession with proportions, etc. etc., and the order of the universe that was self-evident to everybody. But when that breaks up, you know, starting with modernity, then we're into a different uh condition where we have to valorize much more phronesis, I think.
SPEAKER_02Fantastic. Yes, would you like to pick up on that? Thanks, Sergeant.
SPEAKER_06So I I want to return to this idea, I think, uh, that has come up several times of how one might get close to beauty but not truly grasp it. And at least in my world, the the term that comes up a lot is ineffability. So my question for any of you is what is ineffable for a child might be very different than what's ineffable to an adult. And I think this came up in the conversation yesterday about you know different kind of developmental uh stages. But it raises the possibility that whatever this domain of the ineffable itself is malleable, and itself can be one might not ever get to the end, but one can get closer and closer. And I would be because otherwise you just say, oh, we can't do it. We can maybe talk about it and metaphor it at best, but I I just like your opinion uh of this notion that it's not enough to say it's ineffable and we can't get to it. But what are the properties of the ineffability in the sense of is itself is it modifiable? Can we shrink it? Can we get closer?
SPEAKER_07Very good points. Um one way to look at it would be there's a phenomenon in psychology called defamiliarization or derealization, which is a state in which a percipient suddenly experiences that which is perfectly effable suddenly in a manner that makes it ineffable. The question for me is always what is real? And so, in that sense, I would say, as Bergson himself said said it in a letter once, he said, I am a realist of the most radical kind. So for me, it's not so much that there's no point to thinking quantitatively or measuring. In fact, the fact that we can measure is itself what is so strange and mist mysterious, but to me, there's an irreducible ineffability in the very possibility of science. And this is what Joseph Ratzinger, for one, um, the former pope, called um the you know he made an argument for the existence of God, and he called it the argument from intelligibility. And the fact of the intelligibility of the world is already in itself, I think, part of the world's ineffability. And what calls upon us, calls from us a response that affirms a kind of fundamental mystery, as opposed to simply uh a mystery that's like a can you could kick down the road forever, where the ine ineffitability is shrinking uh like a like the the isymptote, the asymptote or whatever you call it, and that we're just kind of just delaying the moment where at some point we'll be thoroughly we'll have thoroughly effed the world, so to speak.
SPEAKER_02I wonder, so for me, I'm sensing like two beautiful movements in in all of your work, like one towards a lexicon, um like seeking uh a vocabulary with with with which to kind of tool beauty and and perhaps an another movement towards understanding the ineffable. And I wonder, Stephen, if you who kind of lead programming, you know, working with people, working in in the realm of art therapy, kind of perhaps more like hands-on in a sense, uh, if there's any anything that you feel like you can speak into this.
SPEAKER_03I don't know that I'm gonna speak directly to a question. The image that came up for me, and I I actually teach the DSM the I was like, oh, we're gonna talk about derealization, okay. All the things that I have to share are gonna are gonna sound similar. It's like there I am in a room with a group of people who are all grieving because they've all lost someone they love. And whether that's been six months or five years, and most of the people in their lives are waiting for them to move on to another stage in their grief so they become a more tolerable person to be around because the grief is so all-consuming. And what happens, whether we're talking about specifically about a bereavement group or people who share psychosis or a diagnosis of psychosis, what happens is the experience of isolation starts to diminish as the I and the U find some common ground in each other's voice, in each other's story, and that art is this mechanism by which that becomes possible. So we're we're we're moved towards it, so we're moved in connection to each other, and that the experience of loneliness and what I estimate to be only my experience, then becomes all the less so because you have experienced it too. And if art can be that which moves us into that place of connection, then we have uh the opportunity to mobilize it everywhere.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. I wonder if anyone um among us has a question.
SPEAKER_04Thanks so much. Um so I think I came into the conference thinking that beauty could potentially save the world. Um and I think I'm only affirmed in that. I think uh, you know, on let's say an individual or small community level, uh, if you bring someone people into a museum um or out in nature or to a beautiful building, you make people sit and look at something longer than they want to, I think it can be extremely transformative. At the same time, though, um, the university where I'm based, arts and humanities enrollments have been tanking for a long time. If you go to a classical music music performance, there's a decent chance that there's gonna be pure white hair everywhere you look. Right. Um it's predicted that within the next century the majority of humans will live in cities and won't have a ton of contact with you know a kind of rich, full experience of the natural world. And so while I think beauty could save the world if we let it, um, I don't know if it can. I don't know if we're gonna let it. And so I wonder if we could speak a little bit to what are the blocks to beauty saving the world and how might we think about it.
SPEAKER_06I have some thoughts. Um there is a version of this where if you adopt an evolutionary psychology version, right, there's a way of thinking about how our brain is fashioned and was fashioned during the Pleistocene in an environment that's very different than where we live and how we live right now. And there's a notion that we are an old brain trapped in a new environment. That new environment has been going on for the last 10 or 12,000 years, but has especially accelerated in the last, say, 150 years and especially in the last 20 years with the digital environment. And so I think there's this kind of acceleration. And I I can't remember who I was speaking with last night, just talking about 1879 when Edison first turned on the first light bulb. I mean, we even used the light bulb as a metaphor for insight. But it came with with all of these boosts and productivity at a huge cost, which is it disconnected us from circadian rhythms, affected our sleep, and so on and so forth. And that's just one piece. So I completely share your sentiment that we are in an environment that conspires against us, against how we are designed. It conspires against us to pause, it conspires against us to appreciate beauty, and it to our detriment, and the distraction is efficiency and productivity. It has its benefits, but we don't think enough about the costs. And so what's the resistance to that? I think is partly why we're here.
SPEAKER_00But one could perhaps think that uh that there is some saving grace in uh in what is happening, you know. Like perhaps imagine that artificial intelligence will bring us back more to the complexity and fullness of embodied consciousness. That that we may realize that uh that it's all uh smoking mirrors and that and that what really matters uh is the conversation face to face. I think we have to be hopeful. The obstacles are enormous. I I think that some of the of the uh artistic endeavors that that engage the media are of course uh very crucial uh in the possibility of reactivating beauty, something like good cinematography, I could imagine. You know, that could be more more accessible to the kids that I don't even know what they are thinking about these days. I'm so happy I'm retired because it was such a torture, you know, to imagine what these kids are actually interested in when I'm teaching them about Vitruvius and Palladio and all this thing. And so this is uh it's a challenge for all of us. But I think it's in it's unquestionable, at least in my experience, that moving works of art are transformative. We have to expose ourselves to them. And this is what our colleague is talking about. But they are there to be experienced, you know. I mean I had the I remember this memory of uh arriving at Montreale, the the basilica close to Palermo during Easter. You know, I'm not particularly Catholic. I was raised Catholic, but what an amazing experience. The ritual when when the when the church is used for what it is. It's like transformative. You know, you understand so much about what matters in life. So I don't know what to tell. I that's what I would always tell my my students. Go take a look, you know, don't be silly. Don't just I mean we didn't have too many, so many phones back then. I don't know. It's it's a real challenge for young teachers.
SPEAKER_07If I may, um I I I agree with you um wholeheartedly. I uh I also you kind of hinted at something that I think is very true, which is I think that we're in for what you know, what the Greeks called enantiodromia, which means like a reversal. And I think that what's happening with AI and especially with um AI-generated art, AI generated text, is that the rewards for investing any type of fidelity into these things is going down as more and more images are fake. I would predict uh a return to the analog coming in our lives. Not that these technologies will disappear, they'll just be less screens, they'll be more, um, they'll be more embedded in our lives, but they'll be in in our day-to-day life, I hope that uh within 10 or 20 years, we'll see a lot more analog engagement with the world, one-on-one, eye thou, that sort of thing. So I thought that that's because if art has that power for real, as your research seems to indicate it does, then it has that effect for real, which means that there is real benefit in this. And at some point, reality tends to win in in reality. The other thing I wanted to say is that even if it fails, beauty might still save the world, uh, if only you know, with this one caveat that we subtract humans from it. And that's a horrible thing to say. But there is uh a movie by Lars Lars von Trier, Melancholia, uh very beautiful film that ends with the world being destroyed by this uh the this gorgeous kind of cyan or turquoise planet crashing into the earth, and it ends with uh, I think it's Wagner at the end, and the the planet and the world ends, but it ends in beauty. And this, for me, as someone who actually I am religious, to me, uh it's a cynical way of expressing something important, which is that uh, insofar as the world is worth saving, it can only be because it has this pre-existing value, that it has this essentialness to it, that it has this essence that is expressed in the language of the beautiful, the true, and the good. And if that's the truth, if that's the truth, then the world's already saved in that. Uh, and it's up to us to come to terms with that and to live by that.
SPEAKER_04Well, I would add that uh the year that came out, it was it was beat out for the Palme d'Or by Terence Malik's Tree of Life. A tremendous year fulfillmaking. Um one small note of hope. I do I do think that we're starting to see an element of oversaturation, especially among the truly digital native younger generations. There's this terrible website called 4chan, which I I guess I could describe. But anyway, it's a message board, lots of vile stuff happens on it. Last year, they there was a list of the top hundred books that have been discussed in literary forms on 4chan. The first one happened to be the best book of all time, the Brothers Karamazov. Um, and it didn't get that much worse, actually, as you went down the list. So I I do think that among students there's a currently kind of Sama's data a little bit below the surface, like longing for reality and for beauty and spirituality.
SPEAKER_07So there's also been an uptick in religious participation recently.
SPEAKER_06Add one little anecdote to that. Um, I live in a very urban environment, and just next to my house is one of these game cafes, and it is packed every night with young people sitting at tables playing analog games.
SPEAKER_02Excellent. Thank you. I think we have a couple more questions from the audience.
SPEAKER_05Can I ask uh Steen if you could say a little bit about uh mediation? Uh and I and I wonder just the extent to which works of art are have have important like how how uh how much mediation is possible? Like, you know, or do certain words or lend themselves more easily to be mediated? Can a mediator have sort of infinite power in taking anything that maybe people are really having a hard time accessing? And uh, you know, it's a this is uh somewhere I just feel there's a tension between the ability of structures, even architectural structures. Um speak to us, there's especially with the neuroscience, there's ways in which the structures impact us. Um I think the certain structures that we're drawn to, the construction that we feel more at home, etc. How much can mediators uh work with these constraints of structures? I don't know if my question is making sense, but it seems there's a tension somewhere between the power of the work of art or architecture of itself, and then that power of that mediator somehow translate and make meaningful things that may not be obviously transparent to us in in their view.
SPEAKER_03I'll do my best. It's an X excellent and complex question. I I was immediately thinking of uh so the architect of the the the second oldest pavilion of the museum is designed by Moshi Safti. And the steps that you take to go down to the bottom level, contemporary art, which will lead on to your question, are intentionally disrupting your rhythm. They're they're frustrating to a lot of people because you don't know whether to take them at one or two at a time. But it brings you architecturally and design-wise into the environment to reconcile with. You have to decide am I going to go swiftly or slowly? Um, but you definitely notice that your body is doing something different as you've entered the museum. Mediation as an art and a practice is not only about imparting the significance of the artwork, why is it part of this collection, who made it and why, and what were their intentions? Mediation is, as I use the word braid, is that braid of the stories being told as people encounter it. When we move into contemporary and conceptual art, there are keys to the castle that must be handed over. Otherwise, you are intentionally frustrating people with obtuse objects that they may not find beautiful and they're suddenly having a very lousy time. But when you hand over those keys and something else happens in how they see the work, they adjust themselves to the angle as the shadow falls on the piece of copper, and you say, This is about do you see it too? That is also the role of the mediator. The mediator is also there to hear a very sad story. The mediator is also there to let you be quiet if you do not want to speak. So the mediation happens as this bridge between the art object and the group experience, and as much as you can in the 50 minutes that you have with this group, but maybe you're moving between three different artworks in that period of time amongst the myriad of other voices of school children, of adults, of people spending their 27 seconds in front of a given work of art. That's what you're trying to get at, a human connection experience in those isolated moments. Sometimes it's achieved, sometimes it's not. It's also very difficult to measure.
SPEAKER_02Lovely. Thank you. Uh we have time for, I think, one more question, maybe two possibly.
SPEAKER_01So uh now that Ian's talked about 4chan, I do want to actually uh JF, return to some of your comments about the internet and perhaps sort of ask you to help me work through something I've been wrestling with, which is the simultaneous kind of flattening and weirdness of the internet culturally. Um, something that I'm I've been struck by as I've been trying to think through uh what is sort of colloquially called AI slop and the sort of the generality of certain kinds of beauty or or attempts at beauty that seem to me, at least you know, purely anecdotally, to fail because they exist at some kind of sort of vague middle point, you know, the sort of the obvious analog is Instagram face. But there is something I think those of us who who spend too much time on the internet would probably intuitively say, like, there's something very, very weird about uh the experience of encountering people and encountering certain kinds of weirdness online. Sometimes, uh, as in the case of 4chan, a weirdness you probably don't want to uh a rabbit hole you don't want to go down, certainly not in an academic context. But I wonder how might we creatively theorize the uh the bizarrness, the strangeness, the particular, as well as the kind of perhaps triumph of a certain vision of the generic uh that we're seeing online. Are these are these categories that can help us make sense of the internet as a as a place?
SPEAKER_07Oh, that's fantastic. In esoteric studies, there's this idea that um, you know, okay, I'll I'll just there's a thing there's a phenomenon called EVP, which you may have heard of. It's electronic voice phenomenon. And this is one of the ways in which, actually, while I'm on this, a great English translation for Midziatao might be medium, like the medium at a seance. Um, because the uh there's a thing called EVP, which is uh essentially people take bad radios, radios that emit a lot of static, in or in other words, radios that create a kind of aleatory matrix of randomness. And from that randomness, form emerges. So they'll hear voices of the dead, they'll hear voices of famous people, they'll hear voices of demons, uh, etc., or sounds, music, and uh, it's a fascinating area, um, EVP. Uh and that's just one example. Another example of how the aleatory or the random tends to generate form for us is, of course, the i ching or the tarot, right? Where you you uh you randomize a draw, a selection of elements, and then the the kind of hexayity, the just so n of this particular draw relates to you in your life. So you're drawing again meaning out of the meaningless. Sometimes that's referred to as paridolia, which is just a capacity we have as humans to find form wherever it might, wherever we can, for example, seeing faces in clouds and all that. So I think that maybe some of the internet weirdness has to do with that, just the sheer amount of data being generated for uh such a multiplicity of purposes and intents, generating a kind of aleatory matrix out of which form emerges. Uh, and in a sense, you could even construe LLMs as operating along lines of this sort where they're proceeding probabilistically and identifying the next best word, but generating meaningful statements out of that. So I think it's a fascinating area. I don't have an answer, except to say that I think that um again, it's it's almost kind of natura naturata sneaking in through the back door of the sorry, natura naturan sneaking in through the back door of the natura naturata of the internet as a uh a very firm and kind of like quantified data set. Something more is coming out of it.
SPEAKER_01Um if I may ask a follow-up, uh and I'm this is what I'm wrestling with and hearing you talk. Is there a sort of qualitative difference between the kind of the the the word the phrasing I think you use was meaning out of meaninglessness, uh, in the kind of imposition of artistic form on the data of the internet versus the imposition of artistic form as sort of as an artist or respondent uh on the more physical natural world? Uh is is one a reflection of the other or are they the same thing? We are out of times of perhaps a quick response.
SPEAKER_07Oh well, that's it, it would take a long answer, so I'll just probably talk about it afterhand.
SPEAKER_02Uh thank you so much, and thank you to those who also had questions. I hope you will discuss them with the panelists and with each other. And perhaps I will hand it over to Lee. Thank you again to our wonderful panelists, and thank you to you all.
SPEAKER_05All right, folks, that's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven't already. Thanks and see you next time.