Aaron Parker

aaronp.me

Meaning, prims, and sense-making mechanisms.

Last night I visited @sorornishi's Second Life art exhibit, Transubstantiation. I'd read an interesting blog post on it by @botgirlq (who's Machinima I thoroughly recommend you check out!) so thought I'd drop by. As beautiful as it is, one thing I found particularly intriguing was the philosophy behind it. Soror writes:

"The Prim ¹ contains my body and my blood... my essence. How? ....Every Prim I build is actually a REAL part of my psyche... (there is nothing virtual in this argument/statement). .. and so this artistic process is a transubstantiation. I am a god, The Prim is a god, I am in The Prim and I manifest through Transubstantiation."

Soror has hit on an interesting subject - what is an object and how do we make sense of it? Is what an object means to one person the same as what it means per se? Although one can give an object shape and substance, can one actually give it an essence, which is to say meaning? My feeling here is no, but that isn't to say it's meaningless.

There is no meaning inherent in objects, and thus there can be no meaning given to them. Buddhists have got it right when they talk about the dichotomy between (to borrow a phrase from Shunryu Suzuki) mei (light) and an (darkness). Whereas mei refers to the thinking world, the meaningful and interpreted world that we see around us, an refers to the way things actually are in their purest state, absent of thought. Meaning is something entirely attributed by the person perceiving the object based on an array of different variables unique to them. I might see an object as being beautiful because I have a concept of what beauty is, or I might try to eat it because I've eaten things like that before. Situational, cultural, and historical factors all have their roles to play, even our identity affects how we shape the world. A person who's never used Second Life before may fail to see why anyone would want to spend a dollar or two on a virtual chair. Yet an SL resident interprets it using a different framework and sees it not as just a virtual chair, but one they can interact with, decorate their virtual home with, and socialise using. Both the outsider and the resident share the concept of chair, but they do not share the background relevant to the interpretation of its virtual aspect.

So art and design aren't about imbuing an object with meaning, 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' after all. Instead it's the artist's attempt to accurately predict the sense-making mechanisms of his or her audience in order to create an object that leads them to draw particular conclusions. And should the object be particularly complex or novel, an artist may supplement the audience's sense-making framework itself with new information (such as a background philosophy). If successful, the artist demonstrates the overlap between creator and perceiver, where shared understanding and an almost intimate cognitive link is achieved. So rather than simply imbuing an object with meaning, an artist or designer utilizes their remarkable understanding of human psychology to manipulate their audience's  sense-making frameworks into attributing complex principles to quite unique creations.

Notes:

1. For readers unfamiliar with Second Life, prims are the basic shapes (such as cuboids and spheres) that Second Life users can create, manipulate, and transform in order to create more complex objects. ↩

Related posts:

Virtual World Design Guidelines Courtesy of Microsoft Between 1995 and 2001, Microsoft developed and oper­ated it’s own social vir­tual...

Maybe Second Life isn’t that far from Reality A little while ago I stumbled across a very inter­est­ing art­icle in a philo­sophy journal....

A Tale of Two Avatars I’ve made no secret of the fact that my avatar, Az After­thought,...

Copybotting as ‘intentional human error’ I’ve been read­ing quite a lot of blog posts on the topic of...

Click to read my latest blog posts about Historical, Second Life, Thoughts. Or more specifically an, art, buddhism, buddhist, creations, creativity, design, human factors, linden, linden lab, linden labs, linden research, meaning, mei, object, objects, philosophy, prims, psi, psych, psychology, Research, sandokai, science, Second Life, semantics, sense-making, shunryu suzuki, sl, suzuki, usability, virtual worlds, zen.

08 Apr
2011

+ Share?

3 Comments.

1. 

   “an artist or designer util­izes their remark­able under­stand­ing of human psy­cho­logy to manip­u­late their audience’s sense-making frame works into attrib­ut­ing com­plex prin­ciples to quite unique creations.”

   This state­ment sup­poses the philo­sophy behind my cre­ations to be con­trived, with a manip­u­lat­ive aim in mind. My per­sonal ‘mean­ing’ behind that which I cre­ate is not, in any way, depend­ent on an audi­ence. An audi­ence is the last thing on my mind dur­ing the cre­at­ive process.

   “There is no mean­ing inher­ent in objects, and thus there can be no mean­ing given to them.“
   I would debate this point. Whereas I can under­stand if you believe that there is no mean­ing in objects, I can­not agree that no mean­ing is given to objects. Simple shapes of objects stir deep archetypal emo­tions, let alone size, col­our and tex­ture. You mean to say that you think that no mean­ing should be given to them. That is a belief sys­tem you have chosen, not an object­ive truth, which is how you present the idea.

   …and lastly I would remind you that “dual­ity is the start of all delusion”.

   :)) great post.

   Comment by sorornishi — 9 Apr @ 1:24 am
2. 

   Hi Soror, thanks for your com­ment — glad you liked the post!

   Apo­lo­gies for the use of the word ‘manip­u­lated’, look­ing back on it I can see how it sounds con­trived. I under­stand what you mean though, I per­haps wrongly assumed that all art is designed to be shared. But pre­sum­ably the ones you chose to share are the one’s you expect your audi­ence to be able under­stand? Maybe it is only design­ers who cre­ate for func­tion, that manipulate.

   As for what you said about shape, col­our, etc. stirrring cer­tain archetypal emo­tions — I agree in as much as there are basic physiolo­gical mech­an­isms com­mon to us all that respond in cer­tain ways to cer­tain things. There are neur­ons that fire only when presen­ted with lines of a par­tic­u­lar ori­ent­a­tion, for example. Whether what we deduce from these basic mech­an­isms is uni­ver­sal though, I’m not so sure. In West­ern soci­ety the col­our red is asso­ci­ated with danger and anger, yet in China it’s a lucky col­our asso­ci­ated with good for­tune. And if you were from the Dani tribe of Papua New Guinea you wouldn’t even acknow­ledge red as a dis­tinct col­our (it’s lumped together with orange and yel­low). For­tune, danger, and well… who knows, are mean­ings based on a person’s cul­tural con­text, not due to any mean­ing intrinsic to red itself.

   But like you said, this is my belief sys­tem and not an object­ive truth. I think that’s a fair com­ment to make :-)

   Comment by admin — 9 Apr @ 1:25 am
3. 

   You are abso­lutely right that the exper­i­ence we derive from objects is sub­ject­ive and cul­tural (though some may tran­scend cul­tures if an arche­type is stirred).

   I would have to quote Rene Mag­ritte how­ever, in con­nec­tion with my build at UWA, “ceci n’est pas une pipe”… no objects were involved.

   I would hold that using form and scale in my ‘build’ makes it less cul­tur­ally sens­it­ive than many Sym­bols (all the ‘objects’ I use are alien to all humans, in that they do not exist on Earth) but, as mean­ing is such a tricky sub­ject to tackle, I would have to con­cede I may be wrong in that assumption.

   Comment by sorornishi — 9 Apr @ 1:25 am