Időpont: 2012. október 11. 17:15

Helyszin: BME, 1117 Budapest, Magyar tudósok körútja 2. Q ép., A szárny, 1. em., 123.

Az előadás magyarul lesz.

De az absztrakt angol:

Kristóf Nyíri:

The Visual and the Motor

Abstract

The world as we see it, so cognitive science tells us, is a construct of the brain, produced

every few seconds anew, in accordance with our biologically inherited model of reality, on

the basis of the data received by the eyes, but also on the basis of data delivered by all other

senses, in particular the tactile and the motor. Eyeball movements, and bodily movements

generally, generate information upon which our three-dimensional vision fundamentally

rests. Two-dimensional images rely on a process of being scanned by eyeball movements

in order to become meaningful. Also, the thesis has been put forward that eyeball movements

picture not merely images, but also verbal thought-processes: verbal meaning depends

on imagery, and imagery is bound up with eyeball movements – patterns of eye

movements and patterns of thinking mirror each other. Indeed towards the end of the nineteenth

century the position was formulated that, more broadly, it is the whole body, the

entire motor system, that underlies not just visual imagery, but abstract thought, too. In the

last decades of the twentieth century this position was revived by Rudolf Arnheim, and –

actually in Arnheim’s wake, but in a much weakened version – by conceptual metaphor

theory. My planned talk will urge a return to the stronger version of the motor approach.

Motor experience, I marshal arguments to show, gives rise to inner images, the inner image

translates into metaphor, metaphors tell us in words about our non-verbal world. A domain

in which the connections between the visual, the motor, and the metaphoric become especially

conspicuous is that of architectural theory. The idea of the embodied mind has been

clearly foreshadowed by German thinking on form and architecture from Vischer through

Wölfflin and Lipps to Schmarsow and Hildebrand, and both this idea and the idea of metaphor

as an irreducable cognitive device was explicitly put forward by Geoffrey Scott in his

brilliant 1914 book relating architectural beauty to our pleasure in movements, an ease imparted

to some of our “visual and motor impulses”.