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Maria Grazia Messina: The Media of 'In-Depth Perception'
The Media of 'In-Depth Perception'
(p. 481 – 494)

Maria Grazia Messina

The Media of 'In-Depth Perception'
Picasso’s Work in the Interpretation of Ivan Aksenov

PDF, 14 pages

  • gaze
  • physiology
  • history of science

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Maria Grazia Messina

is the chair of the History of Contemporary Art Department and head of the doctoral school of the History of Fine Arts and Drama at Florence University. Her field of research is mainly focused on the French first avant-garde and related criticism, from impressionism to cubism, with a special interest in connections with archaic and tribal arts. Recent studies are centered on Italian art, from the metaphysical art of Giorgio de Chirico to Arte Povera, focusing on Alighiero Boetti and Germano Celant’s criticism.
Michael F. Zimmermann (ed.): Vision in Motion

Vision is not mere registration of what enters, via the gateway of our eyes, from the outside world into our inner consciousness. Understanding the act of seeing as mirroring the outside world in mental images overlooks its temporal aspect. From Berkeley to Helmholtz, from Goethe to Cézanne, new discourses based on the physiology of the sense organs lead to new conceptions of vision not only conceived of as a mental process, but as a cognitive activity. Even before Freud interpreted dreams, seeing was conceived of as accompanying our life even when we sleep. However, to understand even the stream of the sensations, we have to configure them in pictures. Since the 19th century, the media reflect about the confrontation of seeing as a diachronic activity and of perception as coded in synchronic images. The contributions to the volume investigate the opposition of the stream of sensations and the configuration of time – from early illustrations of plants to the avant-gardes, from gesture to cinema, from decapitation to dance, from David Hume to Bergson and Deleuze. The main objective is a critical examination of images rendering vision in motion, without reducing them to the temporality of narrative.

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