The Deep Time Project on Climate Change
ACSA/EAAE Conference: Design (in)Action, 2021
- Title
- Tectonics of Perception
- PUBLICATION
Journal of Architectural Education. Volume 73, 2019. Issue1: Atmospheres.
- READ
- AUTHOR
Cristina Parreño Alonso
“For indeed ‘out there’ there is no light and no color, there are only electro-magnetic waves; ‘out there’ there is no sound and no music, …. only periodic variations of the air pressure; ‘out there’ there is no heat and no cold, … only moving molecules with more or less mean kinetic energy …”
PRINCIPLE OF UNDIFERENTIATED ENCODING
Cognitive Scientist Heinz von Foerster developed the “Principle of Undifferentiated Encoding,” a critical characteristic of perception that explains how “the environment as we perceive it is our invention.”
Perception operates as a symbol system where each image corresponds to one item in a field of references producing abstract representations of reality; which, according to Foerster, are reduced versions of what is “out there.”
GOODMAN AND ALLOGRAPHIC ARTS
In allographic arts, abstract schemas of notation precede the tangible form of the work.
As symbolic representations, they contribute not only to making worlds, but to knowing them.
SYNESTHESIA
The stimulus of sound can be perceived as smell; smell as vision; vision as touch; touch as taste.
Perception does not reproduce reality — it actualizes it differently through rules of translation.
SYNESTHETIC NOTATION
If synesthesia enables the transposition of sensations — a bright sound, a warm red, a soft light —
synesthetic notation enables transpositions between creative works:
a drawn line that produces sound,
a music score that becomes architecture,
a dance translated into sculpture.