Let's Explore: How is Art a Form of Communication

In this edition of "Let's Explore" we are going to talk about how is art a form of communication. What does a person communicate with or how does a person communicate?

These questions are personal to each of us. We know from experience that it affects our lives, being a form of expression and not an act of entertainment. So is it communication? Is it art?

Art in modern society

I want to start by explaining what, by society, we label "the arts."

In the American society we allow the common people to vote for their favorite movie, favorite book, or favorite band and the last person is the artist and the winner.

If you look at the most prominent artists, poets and novelists, they only communicate what they wish to communicate. Some of them did not even express themselves, like, Michael Schaeffer, or Andrea Kinski, because the society forced them to.

Schaeffer and Kinski are well known for their ultimate insensitivity to the viewers, for forcing you to read their poetry on the title page, showing their pictures from every side, of them with a cigarette, to the edge of an ocean.

What is interesting about Schaeffer's work is that I do not believe he liked his audience, his words only. They would not translate his poetry into another language and would only say him through the books. He's an example of someone who only wrote his work to provoke or to be bought by the public.

These ideas are interesting because if we hold these thoughts as a society, we hold aside the fact that there is art without artist, or art without art.

What does art or artistic expression actually mean? Is it based on the value and appreciation of another person's artistic expression? Is it based on an exchange or payment? Is it based on some social consciousness? Is it political? Does it affect the success or some other aspect of our lives?

Art is communication within a community

There are a lot of articles about the environment, local religions, politics, etc. From a communicative point of view, there is nothing special about a particular religion or community, the most important is the message.

Whether it is a local community, or a social movement, you need to be able to look at it as a package. You cannot evaluate a package from the outside or the package from inside. You need to look at it from both sides.

When you look at it from the outside, can you see if the package is good? Can you see if the message is simple? Does it include some value of human life? Is the message entertaining? Is it in reality important or true?

We may look at our package as a message and if we look at it from a single angle, we may think that the package is good, but if we look from all angles, we see that

Art lays at the bottom of our subconscious

Simply, when we look at an artwork and remember it we are storing a copy of the information in our brain.

If we were to look at the artwork and not remember it, we would be storing a version of the information in our mind.

You could say that we are allowing information to flow into the memory and not being a data point in it. We are building a memories of the "information".

The brain has to do this because of the various tasks that are required to store information. This is especially important in the fight-or-flight reaction, but also in cognitive tasks such as reading and memory encoding, which is why we think about art as "art".

Art begins the brain and then leaks out into the world

The first time we looked at an artwork we created a form of memory called a neural "record" of the information that we store.

We don't know how long this information will be stored, but we can never access this information to be certain that it is all there, so we rely on it's replicating itself in the brain. If we have been exposed to a lot of works of art, it will certainly influence our mental processes, and in doing so imprints memories on our neural record.

Art appears to us as an external form of information that travels through our brain and make it its external record. In this sense we can think of the artwork as a piece of software that we are interacting with, it is incorporated into our perceptions of the world and becomes a part of our memory.

The purpose of this experiment is to try to make the viewer consciously aware that what they see is an external representation of how they have experienced the world.

As a viewer you become the software that creates the artwork, so the only thing you control is the amount of energy you can bring to bear into this manifestation of the world.

If you allow your imagination to "open" up, your brain will not need any information for it's performance, and this will allow you to travel outside of yourself as you would in your dreams.