Synesthesia  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 22:27, 26 February 2013; view current revision
←Older revision | Newer revision→
Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Synesthesia in art

Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia, plural synesthesiae or synaesthesiae)—from the Ancient Greek (syn), meaning "with," and (aisthēsis), meaning "sensation"'—is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. While cross-sensory metaphors (e.g., "loud shirt", "bitter wind" or "prickly laugh") are sometimes described as "synesthetic", true neurological synesthesia is involuntary.

The French Romantic poets Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire wrote poems which focused on synesthetic experience, but were evidently not synesthetes themselves. Baudelaire's Correspondances (1857) introduced the Romantic notion that the senses can and should intermingle. Kevin Dann argues that Baudelaire probably learned of synesthesia from reading medical textbooks that were available in his home. Rimbaud, following Baudelaire, wrote Voyelles (1871) which was perhaps more important than Correspondances in popularizing synesthesia, although he later admitted ""J'inventais la couleur des voyelles!" [I invented the colors of the vowels!].

Artistic investigations

Synesthesia in art

The word "synesthesia" has been used for 300 years to describe very different things, from poetry and metaphor to deliberately contrived mixed-media applications such as son et lumière shows or odorama. It is crucial to separate artists using synesthesia as an intellectual idea—pseudo-synesthetes such as Georgia O'Keeffe who used such titles as "Music-Pink and Blue"—from those who had the genuine perceptual variety, such as Wassily Kandinsky or Olivier Messiaen.

Synesthetic art historically refers to multi-sensory experiments in the genres of visual music, music visualization, audiovisual art, abstract film, and intermedia. Distinct from neuroscience, the concept of synesthesia in the arts is regarded as the simultaneous perception of multiple stimuli in one gestalt experience. Only recently can science verify and study synesthesia in artists; for deceased artists, one must interpret (auto)biographical information.

Synesthetic art can refer to either art created by synesthetes or art that attempts to convey the synesthetic experience. It is an attempt to understand the relation between the experiences of born synesthetes, non-synesthetes, and an appreciation of such art by both groups. These distinctions are not mutually exclusive given that art by a synesthete might also evoke synesthesia-like experiences in the viewer.

Contemporary synesthetic artists such as Carol Steen and Marcia Smilack (a synesthetic photographer who waits until she gets a synesthetic response from what she sees, and then takes the picture,) have described in detail how they use their synesthesia to create their artworks. They demonstrate the complex interplay between personal experience and artistic creation.

Synesthesia has been a source of inspiration for artists, composers, poets, novelists, and digital artists. Nabokov writes explicitly about synesthesia in several novels. Kandinsky (a synesthete) and Mondrian (not a synesthete) both experimented with image-music correspondences in their paintings. Scriabin composed color music that was deliberately contrived and based on the circle of fifths, whereas Messiaen invented a new method of composition (the modes of limited transposition) to specifically render his bi-directional sound-color synesthesia. For example, the red rocks of Bryce Canyon are depicted in his symphony Des canyons aux étoiles ("From the Canyons to the Stars"). New art movements such as literary symbolism, non-figurative art, and visual music have profited from experiments with synesthetic perception and contributed to the public awareness of synesthetic and multi-sensory ways of perceiving.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Synesthesia" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools