Module 2

Video and Article review

1.
I think the key concept of the first video "Aesthetics: Philosophy of the Arts" is that beauty and aesthetics have different meaning for each of us, and it is hard to define something as beautiful because everyone has their own interpretation of it, just like the big philosophers of the history did.

The second video by CARTA talks about how brain recognizes life in art. It can associate lines and colors, and it likes symmetry. The brain is wired to try to assimilate shapes and colors to something it already knows.

The CNN article has a similar idea. We don't see lines on objects to indicate that the object is there, we just see the object, but when we see lines on paper we try to assimilate those lines to something we already know. We can tell that those lines make an object, or objects that we already know about. The brain is always trying to assimilate new things to something it already knows, that's why we see objects in clouds, and faces on 2D images when there aren't any. 

2.

I think the most important theory on aesthetics belongs to Aristotle, a philosopher in ancient Greece. His idea that the chief forms of beauty are order, symmetry, and definiteness is an important step-stone in the history of art and what is considered art. He wrote the book "The Poetics" in which he describes the principles to how plays are constructed and that poetry is a form of art, contrary to his teacher Plato that considered that authors only imitate things they don't know about and it cannot be considered art.

3.

Both Changeux and Ramachandran take a similar approach in their presentation, and use the way we react to our surroundings as and example to talk about why our brain reacts the way it does. I think that is a good example to use because it's something we do on a daily basis. I think the most interesting thing from Changeux's presentation is the idea that the brain uses different parts of its structure to analyze art, and his example with the woman and the old man face image, demonstrating how our brain interprets art consciously and non consciously. The most interesting thing from Ramachandran's presentation is the example with the tie and the lion. One thing that we do very often is match clothes based on their colors. When we do that our brain uses the same neural circuits that our species developed over thousands of years in order to detect camouflage, and recognize things in places that are hard to see.

4.

The videos and the article take a more scientific approach than the textbook, however they both develop and add to the same concept of aesthetics, and how we interpret art and aesthetics.

5.

The videos add a new layer of detail on how art and aesthetics are interpreted by people. It adds context on why we view things certain ways and how we process art.