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Network EcologiesMain MenuCoordinatesNetwork Ecologies: Designing Scholarly Rigor in Innovative Digital Publication EnvironmentsNetwork Ecologies IntroductionArchive ArchitecturesTransmedial Publishing Interfaces for Open Learning SystemsDisplacement PathsOrganisms in ReticulaLetters From Distant Lands: Carolingian Intellectuals and Their Network(s)Living Network Ecologies: A Triptych on the Universe of Fernand DelignyA three-part introduction to Fernand Deligny from his English-language translatorThe Entity MapperAn Introduction to the Development and Application of the Open-source Software for Visual Data Analysis in Qualitative ResearchJourneying A Thousand MilesA Developmental Network Approach to MentorshipNetworks, Abstraction, and Artificially Intelligent Network(ed) SystemsA conversation with UNC RENCI's Dr. Reagan Moore and Dr. Arcot RajasekarArchitecture Networks: Interview with Turan Duda and Jeff PaineExhibition: Network Ecologies Arts in the EdgeDuke UniversityKarin Denson & Shane Denson: Sculpting DataKarin Denson & Shane Denson: Making Mining NetworkingRebecca Norton: The Edge LibraryNetwork Ecologies SymposiumContributorsAuthor and Editor BiographiesImprintAmanda Starling Gould88396408ea714268b8996a4bfc89e43ed955595eFlorian Wiencekce1ae876f963bfc3b5cf6c3bbd8f57daf911e67fFranklin Humanities Institute
Aha
12016-01-04T10:14:53-08:00Amanda Starling Gould88396408ea714268b8996a4bfc89e43ed955595e25534plain2016-08-07T15:31:59-07:00Amanda Starling Gould88396408ea714268b8996a4bfc89e43ed955595eCoordinatesEarly on in this essay I said that I like for a viewer to be "moved" by a painting. By this I mean that I would like a work of art to titillate a person’s senses and thrust him or her into new configurations of space and perspective. An excitement of body is an excitement of the mind, and it is this kind of positive provocation that I would like to suspend a viewer in by leading him or her through every incidental painterly gesture and expression. Stimulation prompts responses, drawing upon complexities of experiences stored in the recesses of our memories (those intelligence banks constructed through sensorimotor and idea-motor activities, to borrow some terms from Piaget and Inhelder). Visual, audible, tactile and sensual stimuli play on our sentiments, tastes and impulses. Jean Piaget says many times in his studies with children that it is their desire for the seen object that first arouses their interests and motivates their actions. Giuseppe Longo, too, repeatedly acknowledges that to want is an infinitive that affects all living organisms. Organisms, he says, generate movement through bias. No movement is an act of pure randomness.
For myself, mapping abstractions in affine has become its own journey. I was attracted to this geometry because of the sound of the word said aloud in my pronunciation of it (“uh-feen”) and because I could not find a suitable visual translation of it that could help me understand its linear logic. I liked that this word implied a geometric diagram for a figure, and this reminded me of the practice of Phillip Otto Runge, a Romantic German painter whom I greatly admire. The generative structure and movements of this mathematical abstraction maps spaces beyond traditional perspectives in that it does originate from a ground and its structure need not bear on its origin (by definition, affine geometry loses its origin in its progression of transformations). Visualizing these abstractions in painting allows me to suppose hypothetical ways of experiencing the world and imagine new possible trajectories for thought. Exploring them expands my intuitions of spatial and gestural relations.
As for the gesture, the allure of its mark in a painting is similar to the feeling of suddenly being hit with a new idea. Both are products of an immediate, intuitive act that cannot have occurred in isolation, and which cannot be reduced to its parts. Next time I am confronted with another’s painting, I will have this in mind: A painting is composed by countless numbers of gestures, acts that not only structure thoughts, but embody them as well. A painting emerges from the actions of a person and these actions express a continuity of life and a residual of networked relationships between painter, viewer, light, and color.