Mechanisms of the Aesthetic Experience

Rifts, Signalling Compressed Information

An introduction to the upcoming series of articles on aesthetics, dedicated to JF Martel

Compressed information is everywhere. It is a biological necessity :

Signalling

Nature has developed a manner in which to convey information effectively. She utilises signalling, that is, compressed information expressed, or embedded. Animals and plants embed information in their behaviour and physical characteristics.

Even humans do it all the time, in fact, I think most human interactions are signalling.

For example, flowers signal to bees through colours. Certain colours and smells mean the flowers contain certain desired characteristics for the bees. 

Flowers need pollinators, so they attract them through signalling.

Note that some flowers exploit that mechanism and have evolved to lure bees with fake smells and colours.

Craft

Signalling communicates compressed information.

Similar to computers, it is best to share and communicate compacted information than to share entire files.

When the artist concretizes the work, he embeds information in it. It is inevitable that he does so. Although rhetorics require the active imprint of connotation, often the references and subnarratives of a piece aren’t consciously intended by its maker. ¹

In fact,  this is so natural that there are many situations in which we don’t intend to transmit any additional information and we fail to do so. For example, when lying under extreme pressure, one’s internal psychological reality inevitably increases blood flow, turning one’s face red, thus ruining the deception.

We are complex creatures, after all.

This is also why Craft is so crucial for the success of any art:
Craft imprints meaning at a higher rate.

We have an eye for craft, and it plays a crucial role in our aesthetic experience.

Rifts

So the work inevitably displays patterns embedded in its body, and the aesthetic experience is engaged whenever we manage to glimpse these patterns.

The work does that through the manipulation of symbols², which compose sub narratives and themes. In fact, symbols are a natural choice, for symbols are more primitive than language.

Symbols can carry information not only inside them but also in the relationships they form with other symbols, thus increasing complexity exponentially.

Through the manipulation of symbols, the sub narratives are established, and these point out to higher truths, certain patterns of its structure, which tells us something about the nature of reality itself, for reality, is fractal and is inevitably expressed in the work as such. So for example when you see the structure of a story, you can apply that same structure to any level of reality.

In his book Art in the Age of Artifice, JF Martel calls these glimpses the rifts in a work of Art, the moments we are able to see the real, take a peek behind the curtains of reality for a fraction of a second.

In this series, I will elaborate on the mechanisms for why that happens, and the specific mechanisms that engage it in each of the disciplines.

The Mechanics

So it is the unveiling of the layers of meaning, the unpacking of that information that engages the user aesthetically. Art will induce a higher aesthetic response, but artifice can engage it nevertheless:

Often artifice engages it even more, in a similar way to a hyper-palatable food that can taste great for the desensitised.
This is very clear in pop music, there is a lot of work that goes into getting the combinations of elements in a track to sound extremely “tasty” instantaneously, but it has nothing beyond that, making it shallow and dull, to the point of it being quickly forgotten and easily replaced.

Again, I’m not saying that modern artifice does not engage the aesthetic experience, on the contrary. It does so but to the detriment of its Rhetorical value and loses profundity as a consequence.

Artifice engages the aesthetic experience to the detriment of its rethorical value and loses profundity as a consequence.

Taste

This is why taste is increasingly rare and valuable.

In the same way, it takes patience to appreciate a great wine over coke, listening to a Bach choral will engage the aesthetic experience slowly, but in a deeper manner. You learn more with each iteration, it doesn’t get boring, old, or cliché.

Compressed information underlies music, architecture, paintings, poetry, and stories. It points out the structure of the artwork,  to a higher pattern(truth), and the unpacking of that information is what engages the aesthetic experience.

We will explore the mechanisms in each of these disciplines in the coming articles.

1. This is where magic comes in, coincidence and synchronicities:
This is the very interesting aspect of highly complex works of art such as cinema and music, where out of small, seemingly insignificant coincidences emerge dense implications. And generates material for music analysts to work on for centuries, and for fanatic conspiracists to find confirmation for their hypothesis in Kubrick's movies.
It is the power of confirmation.
The entity that is the oeuvre creates a magical environment, and all that are involved participate in it, like a massive intelligence capable of mind control.

2. Informationally dense and highly connected objects(objects as in entities that exist in the work, not necessarily physical objects).
We first developed symbols to communicate experience, and later organise these symbols more efficiently, and that is the definition of a language. But more on that in another article.