The Filters through which We Live

Work thumb

Views: 430

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2017, Common Ground Research Networks, All Rights Reserved

Abstract

In an era of networked individualism, a prolificacy of online images necessitates of us a visual literacy. In what way do emotions encode the aesthetics of digital media? To what extent does cultural learning influence the social expression of these emotion states? How do our bodies and their interaction with the environment inform how we image the feeling of emotion? Probing the interaction between emotional processes (with which we perceive, engage, and regulate our experience of self) and photo-editing software (through which we frame, appraise, and communicate our imaging for self), Devon Schiller curates renditions of a kiss on the computer desktop that is my canvas. Crafting a multimodal visual inquiry (screenshots and textual witness), Shiller employs cultural analysis informed by the paradigm of mind science to investigate this reciprocity between the internal character of emotion (its biological causality, environmental induction, and inwardly-directed aesthetic re-presentation) and the external exhibition of these activation states (bodily posture, social valuation, and mimetic expression). With neuroimaging and the science of emotion inspiring an evolving art history, Schiller demonstrates how digital art may advance a critical awareness of emotion and its imaging in society.