Wednesday 3 September 2008

Synesthesia and Abstraction


One point of view may be that synesthetic experience, as subjective as it may be, is as concrete of an experience of one could have. Though emotive and visceral it is often illusive, inexplicable, and un-categorical. More abstract experience is developed through human manipulation to create agreed upon uses of concepts and objects, therefore allowing for a certain level of objective discussion. At the same time, what is referred to as abstract art, which, very often, is representative of the more concrete experience of the sometimes inefable and often synesthetic, subjective yet frequently shared experience. On the other hand a "realistic" photograph of an every day scene captures an often inhuman angle of an instance, abstracting it from its context and delivering it as a grouping of symbols whose deeper meaning supersedes it true nature. Are the terms "abstract" and "concrete" missused in artistic and documentary visual representation? Perhaps they are terms belonging to another era to which we no longer belong? Could it be that such archaic terms impede our understanding of the current level of human consciousness and the human condition?

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