1 23 Psych of Art Michael Leyton Book The Structure of Painting if you know the book you will easily get an A 1 exam the final 50 MC Tests both book lecture notes Homework readings every week from the book Main Topics 1 How to read the composition of a painting 2 How the composition relates tot eh emotional expression The composition pulls the emotions out of the viewer We will go deeply into how the artist achieves this 1 28 Composition an organization created by shapes The shape structure produces a tension The tension give the emotion stored in the artwork How does a shape store the emotional tension Consider for example the Picasso The shapes give us dynamic information information about movement The word emotion means E outward motion movement So the shapes in the painting give us information about the So the shapes have acted as a STORE for those movements So to understand how an art work functions we have to understand how the viewer can RECOVER from the shapes the E MOTIONS of the artist Therefore the shapes are acting as a memory store for those E MOTIONS Leyton s books have developed new foundations for geometry in which the fundamental claim is SHAPE MEMORY STORAGE E outward movements of the artist This goes against the foundations of geometry that have existed from Euclid to modern physics In his new foundations Leyton has argues ART WORKS ARE MAXIMAL MEMORY STORES Memory information about the past Memory store any object that yields information about the past This is why art works are so highly valued 1 30 1 3 The World as History We will define Consequently define Claim The entire world around us is memory storage ex information about the past Each object around us is memory of the history of processes that form it We shall now see how to extract this history from the objects This will show us how to extract the emotional tension stored in an art work 1 4 The Reconstruction of History Fundamental Laws History can be recovered from many different typed of sources In fact there are probably infinitely many types of sources However Leyton showed that on a deep level all of these sources have only one form First fundamental law of memory storage Leyton 1992 memory is stored only in asymmetries Second fundamental law of memory storage Leyton 1992 memory is erased by symmetries Begin with simple example Consider the sheet of paper shown on the left in Fig 1 2 p7 in the book Even if you had never seen that sheet before you would conclude that it had undergone twisting The reason is that the asymmetry in the sheet yields information about the past That is From the asymmetry you can recover the process history Now un twist the paper thus obtaining the sheet shown on the right in Fig 1 2 Show this straight sheet to any person in the street Would they be able to infer that the sheet had once been twisted NO bc the symmetry of the straight sheet has wiped out the ability to recover the preceding history This means that symmetry is the absence of information about the past In fact standardly one assumes from a symmetry that it had always been like this Ex when you take a sheet of paper from a box of paper you have just bought you do not assume that it had once been twisted or crumple Its very straightness symmetry leads you to conclude that it had always been like this 2 4 The two diagrams in Fig 1 2 illustrate the two fundamental laws of memory storage given above These two laws are the very basis of Leyton s foundations for geometry He formulates these two laws in the following way Law 1 Asymmetry Principle An asymmetry in the present is understood as having originated from a past symmetry Law 2 Symmetry Principle A symmetry in the present is understood as having always existed The way to use these two laws Procedure for recovering the past EX Psychology experiments by Leyton showed these results fig 1 2 p8 in book 1 Partition the situation into its asymmetries and symmetries 2 Apply the Asymmetry Principle to the asymmetries 3 Apply the Symmetry Principle to the symmetries When subjects are presented with a rotated parallelogram they refer it in their heads to a non rotated parallelogram which they refer in their heads to a rectangle which they refer in their heads to a square What the subjects are doing is recovering the history of the rotated parallelogram That is they are saying that prior to the current state the rotated parallelogram was non rotated and prior to this it was a rectangle and prior to this it was a square ex the squares are running time backwards Will now see that the subjects create this sequence by using the Asymmetry Principle Symmetry Principle ex applying the procedure for recovering the past First note asymmetries are the same as distinguishabilities In the rotated parallelogram there are 3 distinguishabilities 1 The distinguishability between orientation of the shape and orientation of the environment 2 The distinguishability between adjacent angles in the shape they are different sizes 3 The distinguishability between adjacent sides in the shape they are different lengths Observe in the sequence from rotated parallelogram to square the 3 distinguishabilities are removed successively backwards in time Therefore each successive step is a use of the Asymmetry Principle First note symmetries are the same thing indistinguishabilities 1 The opposite angles are indistinguishable in size 2 The opposite sized are indistinguishable in length In the rotated parallelogram there are 2 indistinguishabilities They Symmetry Principle says these two symmetries in the rotated parallelogram must be preserved backwards in time Observe they are 2 6 HOMEWORK read and learn pages 1 10 in book 1 5 The Meaning of an Artwork The meaning of an artwork is the process history recovered from it 1 6 Tension Artists know that artworks are defined by the structure of tension However in the entire history of art there has been no theory of tension However using Leyton s theory of shape as memory storage we can now give a theory of tension First Fundamental Law of Tension Tension is the use of the Asymmetry Principle That is tension occurs from a present asymmetry to its past symmetry We will demonstrate this with many examples from art Immediate illustration rotated parallelogram Rotated parallelogram has 3 asymmetries Tension Memory Storage WHY Tension is the recovery of the past 1 The distinguishability between the orientation of the shape and the orientation of the environment