ABSTRACT ¦ ART + SCIENCE ¦ MODEL / METHODS ¦ AN EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN ¦ MEDIA-SYSTEMIC ART ¦ COMMUNICATION OF SPACES ¦ COMMUNICATION SPACE AND INTERACTION SPACE ¦ THE CUE ¦ NOTES ¦
P E R C E P T I O N   -   A R T   A N D   S C I E N C E 3



Science and art have the assumption in common that they construct or reconstruct (segments of) reality by means of models, whereby deconstruction is only one of the possible methods. In these abbreviated elaborations, we assess art and science as "media" of insight.

This equation is based upon considerations on aesthetics as a phenomenon of perception 4 put forth as early as 1735 by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, for whom "art is by no means the subject of aesthetics. It ought to particularly serve the improvement of the lower, the sensory cognitive capacity." 5. Aesthetics is used in the sense of its "aesthetic significance" 6 as a sensory cognitive capacity, not as a normative discipline.

In the wake of the coupling of the process of gaining insight with observation on the part of the empirical sciences, sensory perception as a method of recognition has been shown to be increasingly problematic. At the start of the 20th century, the Vienna Circle focused on the sensory and cognitive implications of human observation, which is accompanied by perception and the linguistically transmitted depiction of its contents. Every scientific statement is then - eliminating those implications - possible in a strictly formal abstract language. In the remark by Oswald Wiener (1980) - "aesthetic experience [...] is not the opposite of recognition, it comprises recognition, it is recognition" 7 - the implications of perception in art and science are brought together.

In the empirical sciences, the process of gaining insight has methodological implications; this refers to perception as a process of constructing reality as well as to methods of recognizing reality. One of the theoretical foundations of media art is to be subsumed under this category.

Prior to every scientific insight is, indeed, the science of insights - namely, the process of working out theories and methods of gaining insights beyond the individual conducting scientific research.

It was, at the very latest, the appearance in 1876 of Gustav Th. Fechner's *Vorschule der Ästhetik* 8 and the growing cognizance of methods that would later be established as those of the natural sciences that the basis was formulated for art to turn away from its romantic attitude of sketching alternative worlds and to turn its attention toward that which is.

With this aesthetic emerged a science between science and art. Today, frequently demanded positions can be derived from the fact that "scientificness" establishes certain working relationships. Objective research necessitates, for example, the suppression of the subjectivity of the individual conducting research and integrates it (generally speaking) into an association of knowledge. In return, the creator in art mutates into the initiator, subjectivity increasingly gives way to objective observation, and art as insight proceeds from the possession of a few individuals to public "property."

Parallel to the transfer of "scientificness" into art, initial approaches tending toward the opening up of science to the potentials of art can be observed.

FURTHER

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