A cluster of themes is apparent in this history, and it will be necessary to sort through them to decide the most useful ‘mode of attack’ for the current work. The goal is to build essential concepts into the current project, where they can be critiqued and developed by the wider community of practitioners. Many concepts in visual music are framed in terms current at the time of their invention – concepts such as ‘spiritual’, and ‘absolute’ are worth refreshing with current models in psychology, physics and culture that are arguably more rigorous.

There is foremost the assumption that music and moving images share a structure somewhere ‘out there’ in a metaphysical realm, and this transformational space needs to be located and explored. But within the idea of the transform is the expectation that music offers a model for visual art. The non-objective artists seem to have assumed that if a visual work can be recognised as having a musical structure, it will succeed in entertaining an audience in the same way. That only moves an important and difficult question along – how does music convey emotion at all?

For example both Wilfred’s lumia and Greenewalt’s nourathar involve a progression of shapes and colours that are supposed to convey a movement of emotions. How can they do this? By acting on the audience as does sound. But then, how does sound elicit emotions? If music functions entirely via physical vibration of the body, there is no place for light. If instead we find aspects of music that can be directly represented by light, we have a plausible basis for visual music.

Emotions and Music

The dictionary definition of music includes its emotional expressiveness, thus immediately requiring a definition of emotions. They are difficult to define; they are sometimes measurable, sometimes culturally based, mostly accounted in individual reports. I need to form some operational definition of emotions before I can make any progress on their place in music.

The difference between an emotion and a mood is that the emotion is contingent on an event. If a lion were to chase me up and down the campus I would show evidence of strong emotion in measurable physiological changes – rapid breathing, heart rate and so on. If many years later I was reminded of this episode I might again show measurable symptoms of fear, based on my recall. So an emotion can be seen as a process – a physiological response to a situation, or even recall of that situation.

But I may feel pride at having outrun the lion, or bereavement at having lost a leg. It is possible to report a feeling of pride and have no measurable symptoms of it, which may be described as holding an emotional state, not immediately responding to a current event.

Some viewpoints in the studies of emotion can be quickly summarised.

The materialistic view is that emotions are part of a ‘folk psychology’ that will one day be better explained as specific operations of a neural network (for example Dennett). Until that day comes, I feel we best work with what is known.

Another ‘hard science’ viewpoint following on from William James is that the physiological changes are the emotion itself. Fear is the name we give to the changes of heart rate, breathing etc. which come about by the automatic response of what he calls ‘neural machinery’. An opposing view from Roseman and others is that an appraisal is always required. For if someone spills on drink on you by accident, you will be more forgiving than if it was intended, and the extent of that forgiveness will vary between personality types. It has been shown that emotions are felt and expressed in different ways by different people in different cultures; the various cultural mechanisms of grief for example have been studied extensively.

The appraisal and neural viewpoints are compatible. It is reasonable to say that emotions are held in physiological responses, which are modulated in intensity and duration by the attention given to them by the individual. The degree of attention can be individual, contextual and cultural. Using the terms we saw before, that means the process maintains the state, in which case music could act to direct our attention to physiological affects.

Emotions would seem to have an adaptive purpose. Fear motivates flight from danger, and sadness guides us to act to avoid more sadness. But bereavement, for example, may offer no realistic learning outcome – I cannot grow back a leg taken by a lion by being bereaved. I might instead feel empathy on seeing a one-legged person, which causes me to avoid lions. This empathy seems like a mechanism by which music could convey emotions, but for whom do we feel this empathy?

A literature review by Juslin and Vastjall (2008) found that over 1400 papers mentioned a connection between music and emotion, but only 1 outlined an empirical mechanism. In response they suggest six simultaneous pathways that I can briefly summarise:

  • The acoustic signal is taken as an urgent event – such as discordant sounds being taken as threats.
  • Features of the music such as the pacing or the vocal quality of some instrumentation emulate human emotional communication.
  • The music triggers a conditioned emotional reflex, involving no recall.
  • The music is already associated with an episodic memory and recalls it.
  • The sounds evoke visual imagery, which then maps to narrative.
  • There is an exception to an expected pattern, which is socially determined.

I’ve re-organised the list to pair up three main paths that become evident in the studies that follow – features of the acoustic signal itself, memory and recall, and comparison with narrative structure.

Matravers (2011) puts the question simply – a statement such as ‘the music is sad’ is unclear. Does it mean that the music sounds sad, or that it makes one feel sad? Where is the emotion stored? He outlines the three main positions. The first is that tone, rhythm, progression etc. provide ‘tokens’ that we accept as representing emotion. Fast paced music might for example represent urgency, and discord a threat to an expected pattern (as with atonal music in the horror film soundtrack).

A second view is that music contains no emotion itself, but by presenting a flow of agreement and conflict (changes of timbre, harmony and disharmony) arouses sequential mental states that constitute a ‘terrain’ of feeling. In that case the listener’s imagination is prompted to feelings akin to those from hearing a dramatic storyline, perhaps to the point of visualising such a story, or relating it to personal experience. Opera is overt in this storytelling function, but even an exercise by Bach has an implied progression of causal events that can be storified.

The more difficult view is that music prompts the listener’s empathy with a musical persona (also c.f. Robinson and Hatten 2012). A solo violin may not only have a vocal quality (a token), but by this recognition be perceived as carrying an emotion usually ascribed to another person. It is this persona that moves through a range of emotions in a musical piece and we feel empathy for it. The listener personifies the music. This is reasonable given that we are quicker to identify emotion by vocalisation than the words themselves (Pell et al. 2015).

Each of these views has problems better handled by the others. A cymbal crash is startling and urgent, but it will have different contexts in fearful and exultant musical passages – the tokens don’t exist in isolation. We don’t experience music as disassociated sound and an additional internally generated terrain of feelings. In film music for example, we fuse the music with events on screen, rather than construct non-diegetic emotional subtitles. But a persona, properly being an aspect of personality, demands a reason why music would be recognised by the brain as such.

As with theories of the emotions, there’s room for all of these views to collaborate – music involves empathy for a persona, characterised and embodied by sound events, animated through changes of emotion that are interpreted as causal chains similar to those that we find in narratives. But why should the brain recognise music in this complex way? What is the advantage?

Narrative as a mnemonic device

Narrative structure plays a part in episodic memory, being the long-term recall of life events (as opposed to short term memory – a phone number, and categorical memory – that ‘Madrid is the capital of Spain’). Memories from one’s childhood, or a dispute at yesterday’s meeting, are both examples of episodic memory, which involves a combination of “who, what, when, where” along with the emotional context. It is the emotion that marks the episode as worth remembering – bad emotions are guides to avoiding such events in future, while good emotions encourage behaviour that brings more of the same.

The narrative faculty of the brain is used to both discard information when storing memory, and flesh out the shorthand of retrieved information. Narrative acts as a kind of lossy codec of life experience. When storing experience any commonplace aspect lacking instructional value can be left out. In retrieval we manufacture details that bridge the stored impressions in our imperfect recall (Martindale 1981 p343). In experiments with electrical stimulation of the brain, subjects describe convincing sight and sound recall of past experience, but which include impossible elements such as seeing themselves in third person. This suggests that a narrative is assembled in the brain before the vision is reconstructed. Even when brain damage or dementia erases sections of memory, this narrative system still attempts to assemble memories as a false story in a symptom called confabulation.

Studies in dreaming indicate that in sleep we replay events of the day at high speed (in non-REM dreaming) and some more complex events at normal speed (in REM dreaming) with an associated high level of brain activity in the emotional centres – reportedly mostly bad emotions. This recall has been shown in rats, which repeatedly reproduce the eye movements they had made in maze testing that day. It is still not clear whether dreaming is part of the condensation of memory, the erasure of unneeded experience, or even just an afterglow of the daytime workload. But it is clear from our own interrupted dreaming that the mind acts to form causal chains for the improbable events thrown up in the dream function.

Why is narrative an effective means to condense experience? Aristotle summarised it in Poetics, describing a properly formed story as encompassing ‘an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude’. The events taking place in a story runs from cause to effect, ideally with no earlier cause or later effect required for the audience to make sense of the narrative purpose. A well-formed story provides the least complex casual chain of events.

The value attached to the event chain is described in the associated emotion. The emotions we feel from reading, hearing or watching stories, and our selective recall of them over long periods of time indicate that these are valued in the same manner as personal experience. That music evokes emotions, is strongly associated with past events, and that we prefer music from particular periods of our life are all evidence that hearing it forms episodic memory, in which case it is (perhaps as a false positive) condensed as a narrative structure.

The Persona as an animated caricature of emotion

In narrative film there are traditions for designing engagement with the audience (e.g. McKee 1997 p135, Field 2005 p20). We are shown a protagonist, in an unsatisfactory situation. They begin a process of self-development, which leads to antagonism and conflict, which needs to be overcome. At the end of this journey the protagonist is shown elevated in their position, and wiser to the workings of the world. They earn this wisdom even in tragedies, in which they lose the conflict. The simplest template of this narrative structure are fairy tales, where a lowly, virtuous character defeats an evil foe to be able to marry their prince, or princess and live ‘happily every after’ (Bettelheim 1976 p35)

From Joseph Campbell we have the suggestion of monomyths that have appeared in different cultures around the world, being universal mythic tales providing both explanations for the operation of the universe and moral guidance for living in society and nature. He found for example, many variants on the death and resurrection story at the heart of Christianity. There is supportive evidence from other methodologies such as phylogenetic studies of folkloric elements (Graça da Silva & Tehrani 2016). The monomyth suggests that the human mind is attuned to a particular narrative form, involving an individual’s life journey and struggle.

Carl Jung named this shared preference as the collective unconscious, in which there are found symbolic actors or archetypes such as the wise woman and the trickster that enact specific roles in myths and tales (Fordham 1961 p47). He described this as a genetic memory, although subsequently we have preferred to see these universal symbols as cultural rather than biological (Richerson & Boyd 2010). It is through Jung we use the psychological term persona, originally being the caricatured masks worn by stage actors. In the context of this discussion, music can be compared to a series of masks that convey emotion – or perhaps a single animated mask.

The persona identifies a character class, with a function (much as ‘a judge’ can be anyone dressed in the correct robes and wig). The identity of the actor behind the persona is secondary to their function in the narrative structure. Another way of saying this is – given the chance, the audience will assign the person of the actor to their role (dare I call this ‘the James Bond effect’?)

But do we have to provide a ‘somebody’ behind the mask? Does this persona have to be based on a realistic image of a person? It may not be necessary. An interesting finding from animation is that an audience will more likely empathise with a simple caricature than a naturalistic humanoid. A character such as Wall-E is simply a cube on which are stacked cylinders and triangles. This however is more effective than the complex and realistic humans that populate ‘realistic’ animated films such as The Spirits Within. One reason appears to be the exaggerated facial expressions and movements that these shapes can provide fill more of our visual field. Another is that ‘realistic’ animated characters leave less blank space for the audience to project themselves into being the character. This may also be why some human actors, particularly comedians, disguise themselves with simplified high contrast faces and costumes.

There seems to be no lower complexity limit for empathy, as characters such as those in the 1965 short film The Dot and the Line made clear. As long as we are able to identify a narrative, we will apply motives even to fundamental shapes. Personification was at one time described a primitive or childish means of understanding the animation of objects, which is eventually dropped in favour of more sophisticated understanding. It has more recently come to be seen as part of reasoning by analogy, in the situation where one’s own consciousness is the best available model for a comparison (Inagaki & Hatano 1987). At least in terms of our consumption of art, if walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s probably an animated duck.

So in an abstract video there need be no identifiable person visible to convey emotion. Instead the features of the image – colour, form and the contrasts of harmony and discord – may provide a sequence of events sufficient to be recognised as a narrative, involving a persona, for which the audience feels empathy. For example, when music is sad, it provides cues in its pacing, timbre, texture and so on that have the tokens of sadness. Rather than specify all of these factors, we shorthand our experience in the analogy that the music is itself an entity, for which we feel sad.

If we accept that an artwork can hold a representative character, it may be possible to measure and then control it. We talk of ‘a sad melody’ or ‘a brooding image’ for example, based on the feelings that they evoke. These terms could be translated into parameters that allow the notation of feelings within the framework of an individual score for visual music. To be clear, the measurement is not a scientific result in the real world, but rather the use of a well defined rule within the internal logic of an artwork. In a later section of this chapter I’ll come back to the comparison between this internal logic and the metaphysical and spiritual spaces of previous visual music.

At what level should the control take place? Two of Juslin and Vastjall’s list of pathways describe designed actions in the music – urgent events and disruptions to an expected pattern. Should a notation specify the content of these events? For the aims of this project it is better to differentiate between the score and the performance, or to use film terms, between the directing and the acting. The arrangement and orchestration of the work is left up to the individual performance of the score; the event could be indicated in any of a rapid change of colour, or cutting between discordant images, or in the motion. It is the intent that a rapid change of mood takes place at this point that appears in the score. The correct level for the notation is in directing the emotion of the persona over time.

Psychology offers competing ‘deep’ and ‘shallow’ theories for the description of personality. The ‘depth’ systems such as those put forward by Freud and Jung do not rest with the apparent emotion, but go on to hypothesise hidden origins for it. I only really need to notate that an image is intended to be ‘angry’ – the artist and audience will find their own narrative for it. That’s in keeping with a piece of music having meaning for the listener’s own life experience.

The so-called ‘shallow’ theories such as Behaviourism and Individual Psychology only deal with what is visible. The latter is particularly concerned with taking inventories, and categorising attributes, which is ideal for this task.

The next problem is that thousands of terms for emotions exist – a person can be ‘angry’, ‘irate’, ‘furious’ and so on. These can all potentially be seen as controls on an interface, and need to be somehow reduced to the smallest viable set. It is inevitable that we must cause some violence to the language and need to have a good reason to do so. Fortunately much work on terminology has already been done in Individual Psychology, and rather than having to invent some new and idiosyncratic field of knowledge, as did the visual musicians of the previous chapter, we can borrow from a well-documented practice, with all the justification that brings.

Individual Psychology as the model for an interface

Individual psychology describes what is evident in a single person’s behaviour and from this predicts how they will act under given circumstances. In contrast the ‘depth’ theories involve multiple dynamic personality forces in conflict. For example, the Freudian system invests every person with invisible mental organs called the ‘id’, ‘ego’ and ‘superego’, the conflicting motives of which struggle for dominance.

It is different to Behaviourism, which describes all behaviour as learned responses to stimulus (such that emotion is always a process). Instead it describes a trait as a tendency held despite such circumstances – such as a person’s shyness over all encounters, not just a particular event. Traits are long term, consistent tendencies to emotional responses. Any individual may become angry over a difficult situation that they face in their life, but this is different to the attribute of being ‘quick to anger’. The responsive emotion is modulated by a slowly evolving temperament.

Personality attributes are a very old concept that has only recently come back into repute. Galen described four personality types around the 2nd century – the ‘phlegmatic’, the ‘sanguine’, the ‘choleric’ and the ‘melancholic’. All of these words remain in use, and their meanings roughly consistent over 2000 years. Galen’s error was to seek an overarching physical reason for these temperaments. The mechanism of the body recapitulated the composition of the universe, being made of fire, air, water and earth in different combinations. The enthusiastic ‘sanguine’ for example, were those that had an abundance of blood. They were a different category to the slow ‘phlegmatic’, which had too much phlegm. This idea led to treatment of personality disorders by the draining and feeding of liquid ‘humours’ – which did little to help the patient. By the time Kant described personality in his Anthropologie of 1798, these descriptions had disconnected from the humours, although ‘humour’ remains a relevant part of our language.

Francis Galton was a Victorian polymath best remembered for inventing fingerprinting, word associations and the word ‘eugenics’. In 1884 he put forward a lexical hypothesis (Galton 1884 p181). The more essential an attribute is in social transactions, he said, the more likely it will appear as a term in active use. Such that being ‘irate’ is distinct to being ‘furious’, but both are useful descriptors aligned with the more popular term ‘angry’. The more terms that cluster around a central concept, the ‘bigger’ it is – not in worth, but in inclusiveness. He estimated that over 1000 words in Roget’s Thesaurus described the emotions, but believed they could be collected into factors, as they ‘are so intermixed that they are never singly in action’.

The first clearly identifiable individual psychologist, Gordon Allport, held that psychology should avoid universal structures such as ‘the ego’ and instead accurately describe every individual. He expanded the number of instinctual drives from Freud’s libido and thanatos to around 18,000 terms and 5,000 concepts. But in doing so he was forced to condense their meanings into six ‘values’ for his inventories, which were never fully resolved. Seeking to avoid factors, he instead demonstrated their necessity.

Factorial analysis is a computationally intensive process and it was not until psychologist Raymond Cattell gained access to the first electronic computer at the University of Illinois in 1945 that Dalton’s idea developed into a feasible study. To put it very simply, words like ‘irate’, ‘angry’, ‘enraged’ and so on are strongly related, and less related to others such as ‘calm’ or ‘relaxed’. By repeatedly grouping words into statistically significant clusters, Cattell was able to reduce the number of factors to 16.

Although this seems to be a purely computational process, it is open to bias in the variables supplied and the names given to the results. If for example a factor turns out to hold conflicting ideas (e.g. ‘mirth’ and ‘irritability’) it’s possible to choose a summative name that hides one or both. Cattell’s 16 factors are not a system of equivalents, instead a mix of abilities (‘Intelligence’), temperaments (‘Affectia–Sizia’) and transplants of Freudian constructs (‘Ergic Tension’) (Ewen 2003 p273). For this reason, and through increases in computational power, competing systems of factors came into being. To Cattell’s 16 traits, Eyesenck prefers only two. Others have six. I have deferred to the judgement of the current psychological community, in which there is a fortunate consensus around five factors.

The ‘Big Five’ taxonomy does not belong to any individual researcher, being rather a finding replicated over many studies, starting with Tupes and Cristal in 1961 and receiving strong support from Goldberg in 1990, who was able to reproduce the factors over a variety of analysis methods and with a revised and corrected list of terms. The ‘Big Five’ is a ‘highly regarded mechanism for consistently describing personality’ (John & Srivastava 1999 p44).

The taxonomy grades an individual personality on factors often called Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Anxiety and Neuroticism – a convenient mnemonic for this is OCEAN. However as they are not equal in size or coherence, they are properly numbered in order of their statistical certainty. Here they are in that order, with the equivalent OCEAN name and some quick descriptive terms:

  • Extraversion – Sociable and assertive. Enthusiastic and excitement seeking.
  • Agreeableness – Trusting, forgiving. Compliant and modest.
  • Conscientiousness – Self-disciplined, orderly, deliberate.
  • Neuroticism – Anxious, hostile, impulsive and vulnerable.
  • Openness – Curious, imaginative. Creative.

Each of these vectors is scored negative to positive – so it is possible to measure the opposite of the descriptions listed above. The five factors do not constitute a theory, and are not seen as disproving other possible systems that may be useful (for example factors 1 and 4 are similar to Eyesenck’s system). They are instead used as a psychological instrument for placing the individual personality within a five dimensional continuum. Taking a survey of the five factors detects individual differences to a statistically valid degree, such that two individuals with the same score on the Big Five will share predicted behaviour.

At the large end of instruments is Costa and McCrae’s NEO Personality Inventory Revised, with 240 questions. As this can take 45 minutes to complete, more work is done with smaller instruments such as John & Srivastava’s Big Five Inventory of 44 questions. Gosling et al. (2003) trialled instruments down to a bare five questions, and found that a 10-question instrument is still statistically valid. They suggest the use of the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (or TIPI) in circumstances where time is limited. Here is the crucial part of the TIPI:

Five questions are self-rating on the positive terms in a factor. Question 1 for example is a positive assessment of extroversion. The other five are negative ratings. Question 6 is the opposite of extroversion (sometimes called introversion) and will be offset against the results of question 1.

I use a modified version of the TIPI in this project. I’ll give a quick overview of its use now, leaving further details and the reasoning to the next chapter. The TIPI is used as an index in both scoring and orchestration. This allows visual music compositions and assets to be created separately and connected in multiple versions and styles.

In scoring, a composer assigns a TIPI reading to the persona of the visual music at events over the duration of the work. This results in a graph of five contours describing an emotional scale. Then the orchestrator is required to rate each asset on the TIPI. Any source materials that can be assigned a TIPI rating can be arranged over this score.

Let’s say I wish to convey an agreeable, sociable personality that falls into an anxious despair. I might start my score with high levels of extraversion and openness, with the opposite of neuroticism. Over time I move through these scales to the opposite ends, and so direct the mood of my persona to introversion, closure and anxiety. Such shifts of emotion continue over the duration of the piece. The average point of each vector over the entire work describes the overall mood of the piece.

An objection might be raised here that music has a far more detailed scale in notes. How can we score a change of key? How the persona conveys the changes must be left up to the ‘orchestration’ of the individual performance, and not made part of the score. A temptation is to go on to define rules that respond directly to each factor with rules such as ‘more openess = warm colour’. By confining the scoring to one particular topology or rule set, it represents this as the universal scale.
(paper on colours not mapping to pitch).

A long-term aspiration for such a system is that particularly effective scores can be re-used in many different artworks, in the same way as a western and a science fiction film can share many of the same plot points.

Redefining ‘The Spiritual’ as Creative Practice

Using the TIPI in this way is a useful pseudo-science of the sort described in the introduction. It allows the illustration of an idea, which leads inspires and entertains a thought without claiming to convey specific reproducible information. I’ll argue that the internal logic of ‘the artwork’ is the contemporary version of metaphysical spaces such as ‘the spiritual’ that once housed such transformations. Then, that artistic logic is now part of the current definition of ‘creative practice’, which is a cultural construct as much as spiritualism once was. This enables me to design my visual music scoring to reflect current terms and conditions.

In the previous chapter we saw that non-objective artists have used imaginary spaces to house the logical core of their work. For example, Rudolph Steiner’s assertion that visual after-images are accurate perceptions of a spiritual ‘plane’, which lead to the development of Theosophical thought forms, employed by Kandinsky in his book On The Spiritual In The Arts. The more recent ‘apparatus worlds’ of the digital platform and the ‘cyberspace’ of the Internet indicate that these metaphysical realms remained useful even when moved from the cosmic to the computational. They are a black box in which connections can be made between ideas contrary to existing scientific knowledge.

We should start off by describing this kind of space as a ‘rule set’ than a ‘world’, as the latter implies a location you might one day occupy. By ‘rule set’ I mean they are maps of statements like ‘red means anger’ or ‘blue is higher than red’. They are topologies – transforms and connections mapping between disparate concepts. In some cases such as the DVD, some of the topology is visible. As I pointed out when describing McLarens’s sound animations, these rules sets have moved over time from the absolute and therefore mysterious, to the personal and therefore bespoke. They have also gone through some paradigm shifts, such as the introduction of electricity.

One way of describing the space is by the supposed identity of the engineer that constructs the topology. For Castel it was God that set the rules for his instrument, for Kandinsky it was a supernatural order, for McLaren it was the designers of optical sound recording, and the current aspiration is that we have all become ‘makers’ through the use of Arduino and the like.

Some examples may help clarify this collaboration between engineer and artist. The engineers of Photoshop provide a platform in which an artist creates their work. They assist creativity by providing tools, but restrict the result in that the tools express a way of working – in this case brushes, erasers and so on. It is as if they set the language in which ideas can be expressed on their platform. In an earlier study I attempted to compose a single piece of music in a manner appropriate to every available sound recording medium. What I found was that the music changed its nature to reflect the engineering design of each format – for example falling into two movements for an LP record. It was very much as if recorded music is composed by collaboration between the artist and the engineer.

There has been a recent movement to artists creating their own tools in software such as Processing with the hope of at least diminishing this platform influence. The visual musicians built their own instruments, but instead as an attempt to maximise collaboration with a rule set extending out into the entire universe.

There seems to be a clear historical progress from the universal to the personal unless one considers some recent claims in artificial intelligence. We’re told that artificial neural networks are now too deep to comprehend, and that Big Data is able to discern connections not visible to the individual. This has more than a small element of ‘mysterious ways’ in it. Complexity is in itself not a proof of artistry – the complexity of a neural network is no more than that of the individual photons that form an image on a piece of photographic film, and it is in directing the camera where the artistry takes place. But rather than enter into a debate, it is simpler to locate the intent. Intent lies with people that outline the task and recognise the results. The problem with both the spiritual and the personification of big data, is that it attributes intent where there is none.

Borrowing the ‘Big Five’ instrument from psychology provides simple grammatical rules for scoring that have already been scrutinised and critiqued, but it is the creative use of that instrument that is part of a greater rule set, that of the artwork. The error in the previous inventions has been in attempting to claim a general scientific principle – for example in defining a universal colour scale. Even in the case of synaesthesia, which is supposed to involve a disruption of brain function, there is no standard set of colours. Rather than red having a universal meaning, red has meaning to a particular artist working in a particular culture, as will any element they include in a work.

There is a recognisable difference between a photograph of sunflowers and images sunflowers painted by Vincent Van Gogh. His technique can be simulated by a set of convolutions iterated by a neural network, but artistic intent is apparent in all artworks – even a ‘readymade’ such as Duchamp’s urinal, where no visible technique is employed.

The ancient Greeks held this separation in the idea of techne and mimesis. The process of art, the skill was techne, from which comes ‘technique’. Mimesis was the mimicry, the representation of something from which we have ‘mime’. But mimesis also meant the imprint that the artist makes into a medium, like a stamp into wax. The wax is the work, while the imprint is the character invested in the work. There is a related idea in ownership, that a mass produced object such as a book becomes more valuable for having been a person’s possession.

Kant in his Critique of Judgement points out that art is not a single impression, rather something that is shared and communicated (Hofstadter & Kuhns p297). His terminology being that something may be ‘pleasant’ for one person, but ‘beauty’ is something that must be conveyed to another, even if there is no accepted meaning in the work (which otherwise he calls ‘good’). The definition of art has been debated over time, and is exhaustively examined by Wollheim in Art and its Objects in which he discounts so many conflicting theories that his final synthesis has the ring of being a reasonable truce.

Wollheim makes at least two points that are useful here. Firstly, that there is no absolute metric by which art may be defined. There is no attribute in the artwork itself that maps exactly one to one with the expressive intention. It is for this reason that red cannot equal anger, and that visual music cannot be scored purely around the symbols preferred by the one musician.

“If we cannot identify the state except through the work, then we have at best poor or highly generalised expression … it must be emphasised that the difference between the two usages of ‘This expresses a particular state’ does not correspond to any difference in the expressive function of the work, in the sense of either of what is expressed or of how it is expressed.” (Wollheim 1985, p127).

Art is housed inside a historical context.

“ … when we consider the question asked of any particular stuff or process, Why is this an accredited vehicle of art? … the answer it receives will in very large part be determined by the analogies and the dis-analogies that we can construct between the existing arts and the art in question.”

Something can be ‘not art’ in one period, and become ‘art’ in a later period. It can then fall back into ‘not art’ if that’s the way the creative culture moves. Part of that culture is expressed in the staging of a work. When for example Wilfred performed his lumia in concert halls, he employed a connection for the audience between what they had previously heard and what they would see. When recent artists place sound in gallery spaces, it becomes ‘sound art’ based around the materiality of sound. The staging of the work is part of declaring the intent.

Some of it is in the culture as a whole. Over the history we see that visual music tended to flourish in times when religious and romantic beliefs held sway. At many times it has been part of an avant-garde or counter-culture: Castel being a Jesuit scientist, the Theosophists in the 1930’s, the video synthesists within the alternative culture of the United States in the 1960s.

Our current artistic culture is described in terms of ‘creative practice’. While anyone is free to make autotelic ‘art’ that satisfies his or her own ambition, to have ‘a creative practice’ implies patronage. In Australia a fair proportion of this comes from government, which seeks to define and measure the benefit of the practice to the public purse. There is some overlap between artistic and academic practice with practitioners slipping between these roles as funding becomes available. ‘Creative practice research’ is a recent formula that promises new knowledge from creative practice combined with writing.

From the Australia council website for Emerging and Experimental Art:
The projects we fund are highly conceptual, contextual and relational. They play with or invent new forms, methodologies, technologies or explore non-material ideas. These sometimes include art/science research collaborations, bio art, live art, socially engaged practices and new technologies. They often explore ecology, sustainability, urban renewal, and other cultural issues.

(The chapter is unfinished.)