The pulse of modernism: experimental physiology and aesthetic avant-gardes circa 1900

Brain, Robert

doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2008.06.011

Cited by 42 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…This is similar to recent arguments that research experiments (so‐called perceptual tests) into the broader psychophysics of sense perception usually assume a neutral, a‐cultural body that is examined, probed, and, in fact, instantiated within the conditions of the laboratory. For example, recent studies on the impact of psychoacoustic procedures in developing MP3s on listening subjects (Sterne ) or the manner in which laboratory studies of psychophysical phenomena at the end of the nineteenth century shaped modernist aesthetic forms of knowledge (Brain ) bear this area of study out.…”

Section: Part I the Senses Rescued And Revealedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disturbance, Translation, Enculturation: Necessary Research in New Media, Technology, and the Senses

Salter¹

2018

Visual Anthropology Review

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This article examines a research program centered at the nexus of five seemingly unrelated fields: art practice with new technologies, anthropology, cultural studies of technology, the development of new technologies that seek to make new forms of sensation, and Indigenous new media studies. First, I articulate a broader area of interdisciplinary research called sensory studies. Subsequently, and switching to the pronoun "we," I briefly describe the aims of Sensory Entanglements: a collaborative research program that asks how different bodies and cultures can transform/resist dominant paradigms of power and oppression through the senses. Finally, I conclude with a broader set of questions around the increased role the senses are playing in the organization of new modes of political-socio-technical reason.

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Section: Part I the Senses Rescued And Revealedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disturbance, Translation, Enculturation: Necessary Research in New Media, Technology, and the Senses

Salter¹

2018

Visual Anthropology Review

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“…In this way we turn to the photoplay, at first with a purely psychological interest, and ask for the elementary excitements of the mind which enter into our experience of the moving pictures. (Ibid., 65) Münsterberg here alluded to the new field of “physiological aesthetics,” which had its roots in Helmholtz's great investigations in the physiology of musical perception, and had since burgeoned as a field in pockets across Europe and North America (Allesch 1987; Brain 2008; Brain 2011; Drüe 1983; Jarzombek 2000; Nachtsheim 1984). The general aim of the field, as British writer Grant Allen explained, was to “elucidate physiologically the nature of our Aesthetic Feelings” and “to exhibit the purely physical origin of the sense of beauty, and its relativity to our nervous organization” (Allen 1877, 1–2).…”

Section: Experimental Aestheticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-Projection: Hugo Münsterberg on Empathy and Oscillation in Cinema Spectatorship

Brain¹

2012

Sci Context

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ArgumentThis essay considers the metaphors of projection in Hugo Münsterberg's theory of cinema spectatorship. Münsterberg (1863–1916), a German born and educated professor of psychology at Harvard University, turned his attention to cinema only a few years before his untimely death at the age of fifty-three. But he brought to the new medium certain lasting preoccupations. This account begins with the contention that Münsterberg's intervention in the cinema discussion pursued his well-established strategy of pitting a laboratory model against a clinical one, in this case the “master-trope” of early cinema a spectatorship drawn from hysteria, hypnosis, and related phenomena like double-consciousness. Münsterberg's laboratory-oriented account also flowed from his account of cinema technology as an outgrowth of the apparatus of his own discipline of experimental psycho-physiology, which entailed a model of cinema spectatorship continuous with the epistemological setting of laboratory relations. I argue that inThe Photoplayand related writings projection functioned in three registers: material, psychological, and philosophical. Münsterberg's primary concern was with psychological projection, where he drew upon his own work in experimental aesthetics to articulate an account of how the basic automatisms of cinema produce a state of oscillation between immersion and distraction. I show how Münsterberg's experimental aesthetics drew upon German doctrines of aesthetic empathy, orEinfühlung, which Münsterberg sought to modify in accordance with the dynamic and temporal characteristics of psycho-physiological experiment. Finally, I argue that Münsterberg's cinema theory was enfolded in his action or double-standpoint theory, in which the transcendental self posits the material, objective conditions of laboratory experience as a means to know itself. This philosophical projection explained cinema's uncanny ability to suspend ordinary perceptions of space, time, and causality. It also made cinema uniquely suited for the philosophical emancipation of a popular mass audience.

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“…This article will answer these questions by mapping diverse approaches to the passions and the emotions that were developed in the related fields of psychology, psychiatry and physiology in France in the second half of the 19 th century. Studies have already demonstrated the mutual influence of physiology and psychology over modernism and the arts around 1900 ( Silverman, 1989 ; Micale, 2004 ; Brain, 2008 ). However, the specific role of photographic practices in these cultural exchanges, particularly in relation to scientific approaches to the passions and the emotions, has been overlooked.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From facial expressions to bodily gestures

Pichel

2015

History of the Human Sciences

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This article aims to determine to what extent photographic practices in psychology, psychiatry and physiology contributed to the definition of the external bodily signs of passions and emotions in the second half of the 19th century in France. Bridging the gap between recent research in the history of emotions and photographic history, the following analyses focus on the photographic production of scientists and photographers who made significant contributions to the study of expressions and gestures, namely Duchenne de Boulogne, Charles Darwin, Paul Richer and Albert Londe. This article argues that photography became a key technology in their works due to the adequateness of the exposure time of different cameras to the duration of the bodily manifestations to be recorded, and that these uses constituted facial expressions and bodily gestures as particular objects for the scientific study.

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The pulse of modernism: experimental physiology and aesthetic avant-gardes circa 1900

Cited by 42 publications

References 28 publications

Disturbance, Translation, Enculturation: Necessary Research in New Media, Technology, and the Senses

Disturbance, Translation, Enculturation: Necessary Research in New Media, Technology, and the Senses

Self-Projection: Hugo Münsterberg on Empathy and Oscillation in Cinema Spectatorship

From facial expressions to bodily gestures

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