Lecturer: Claudia Muth
Fields: Cognitive Science, Design, Art, Psychology
Content
Embodied and enactive approaches in cognitive science emphasize that perception and cognition are strongly connected to the body, its motion, organization, precariousness and needs. Here, action is no consequence of representing and processing an input. Instead, it is part of sensorimotor patterns and can even embody knowledge, as when we move our fingers to count. Both cognition and action are deeply embedded in a *designed* environment – they are interwoven with material as well as social structures: e.g., tools limit or expand our reach, strength and precision, clothing enables or restricts postures and architecture shapes movement, orientation and perspective but also social encounters and hierarchies. However, such affordances are never preset: Sense-making and behavior can be said to emerge dynamically out of the individual and culturally scaffolded entanglement between mind, body and material. In this course, we explore the role of design for cognition, the materiality of creative processes and the destabilizing potential of art.
The Design of Sense-Making: Materials as Co-Creators
When we interact with or transform materials and things in order to get something into view, create form or reach a goal, we use the world as a resource (Clark, 2016). Meanwhile, it seems that we not only externalize cognitive processes by that. Material encounters might be linked with cognition more fundamentally: A notebook is not only part of one’s memory as it stores contents, but part of a memory process that is different from remembering without a notebook (flipping pages, reading, recognizing marks…) – Material-Engagement-Theory suggests that materials and things even co-determine cognitive and creative processes (Malafouris, 2013). We might thus say that the “design” of things, spaces and situations provides a structure that is deeply intertwined with action and cognition. And “to design” refers to a process of transformation that might be thoroughly grounded in material qualities.
The Art of Sense-Making: The Pleasure of Instability
When engaging with art, we might sometimes even become aware of our own habits of active sense making: artistic means of disruption can be “Strange Tools” (Nöe, 2015) by which we investigate ourselves. When experiencing multistability, ambivalence, uncertainty or indeterminacy, instabilities in sense-making might furthermore cause specific affective dynamics beyond the pleasure of familiarity (Muth & Carbon, 2022; Muth, Hesslinger & Carbon, 2018). In these cases, we might rather be driven by the open-ended activity of sense-making itself than by the resolution of ambiguity.
This course
In this course we will discuss theoretical accounts of the relationship between mind, body and material as well as the crucial role of design in shaping this entanglement. We will actively explore the role of materials for creative processes and the potential of art to provide experiential access to our own active sense-making.
Literature
- Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty — Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
- Malafouris, L. (2013). How things shape the mind. A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge, London: The MIT Press.
- Muth, C. & Carbon, C. C. (2022). Ambivalence of artistic photographs stimulates interest and the mo-tivation to engage. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/aca0000448
- Muth, C., Hesslinger, V. M., & Carbon, C. C. (2018). Variants of semantic instability (SeIns) in the arts: A classification study based on experiential reports. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 12(1), 11-23. doi: 10.1037/aca0000113
- Nöe, A. (2015). Strange tools: Art and human nature. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Lecturer
Claudia Muth is a cognitive scientist and perception researcher with a background in fine arts and design. She worked as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Bamberg and for a hands-on museum on perception based in Nuremberg. Her main interest concerns the experience of disordered, ambiguous or indeterminate situations, artistic research as well as enactive approaches to design. Currently, she holds a substitute professorship for “Psychology of Design” at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle.
Affiliation: Psychology of Design, Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, Halle, Germany
Homepage: https://www.uni-bamberg.de/allgpsych/alumni/claudia-muth/