Barbara Stafford is at the forefront of a growing movement that calls for the humanities to confront the brain’s material realities. In Echo Objects she argues that humanists should seize upon the exciting neuroscientific discoveries that are illuminating the underpinnings of cultural objects. In turn, she contends, brain scientists could enrich their investigations of mental activity by incorporating phenomenological considerations—particularly the intricate ways that images focus intentional behavior and allow us to feel thought. This, then, is a book for both (...) sides of the aisle, a stunningly broad exploration of how complex images—or patterns that compress space and time—make visible the invisible ordering of human consciousness. Stafford demonstrates, for example, how the compound formats of emblems, symbols, collage, and electronic media reveal the brain’s grappling to construct mental objects that are redoubled by prior associations. On the other hand, she compellingly shows that findings in evolutionary biology and the neurosciences are providing profound opportunities for understanding aesthetic conundrums as old and deep-seated as the human urge to imitate, the mapping of inner space, and the role of narrative and nonnarrative representation. As precise in her discussions of firing neurons as she is about the coordinating dynamics of image making, Stafford locates these major transdisciplinary issues at the intersection of art, science, philosophy, and technology. Ultimately, she makes an impassioned plea for a common purpose—for the acknowledgement that, at the most basic level, these separate projects belong to a single investigation. (shrink)

There are now many important contributions to the scientific study of the brain-mind continuum. These results come both from research into non-ordinary states of consciousness and into the brain's intrinsic, largely unconscious mechanisms. The larger potential of such investigations consists precisely in making the parameters of our cognitive system apparent. But they also reveal the socio-cultural uses to which these parameters are currently, or in the foreseeable future, being applied. This article wrestles with that fact. Specifically, it examines the implications (...) for those of us interested in the dynamics of visual awareness and the structural and phenomenological aspects of noticing. Because some of the key characteristics of consciousness are so ingrained that we are usually blind to them, it is all the more important to understand how and why we pay attention to certain features of our environment. Subjective consciousness pertains to the realm of inner experience as well as focusing on the external world. What Daniel Dennett terms `intentionality' or directedness towards an object is a sign of our connectedness to the outside world. Beyond connection, I am interested in how complex works of art help us cognize, confer reality, or have knowledge of what lies before our eyes. I will argue that this calibration of the agent's experience and her perception of the world is under threat today. (shrink)

Barbara Stafford is a pioneering art historian whose research has long helped to bridge the divide between the humanities and cognitive sciences. In _A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field_, she marshals a distinguished group of thinkers to forge a ground-breaking dialogue between the emerging brain sciences, the liberal arts, and social sciences. Stafford’s book examines meaning and mental function from this dual experimental perspective. The wide-ranging essays included here—from Frank Echenhofer’s foray into shamanist hallucinogenic visions to David Bashwiner’s analysis (...) of emotion and danceability—develop a common language for implementing programmatic and institutional change. Demonstrating how formerly divided fields are converging around shared issues, _A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field _maps a high-level, crossdisciplinary adventure from one of our leading figures in visual studies. (shrink)

Received opinion holds that it would be more efficient, hence more economical, to compress and thus dissolve the holdings of the Warburg Institute Library into an overarching university library system. This essay argues two points: first, that we should not be automatically persuaded by the popular and largely unexamined goal of efficiency; and second, that the Library indeed requires its own space but that that space must now be reconceived. In line with Aby Warburg's belief that the past should engage (...) the present by expanding and refreshing it, the Warburg Institute Library's rare and singular collections are less about the books and more about the uniqueness of the content and what it does. This essay proposes that what makes the Library vital to today's networked epistemology is the insights that its volumes provide to the varieties of human ordering, organization, formatting, and categorization—visibly exhibited in the spatial arrangement of its holdings. As its users have long felt, the Warburg is more than a library: it is a complex physical space demonstrating the formal evolution or framing of human thought. The Warburg should thus be reconceived as a “house museum” along these lines. (shrink)

In her article, Barbara M. Staff ord argues for the conception of literacy that would encompass visual skills besides the traditional emphasis on verbal competence. Image itself is important, not merely the information it may convey. Moreover, a more extens ive notion of education is necessitated by the process of radical perceptual and conceptual changes that have been occurring since the Enlightenment and are all-pervasive in Postmodernism. The new-found power and ubiquity of images needs to be recogn ized in order (...) to surpass the limitative, yet enduring Platonic distrust in visual culture. Medical, environmental, physical, legal, and other practices have nonetheless profoundly benefited from the technologies of visualization. Examples from the 18th century visual endeavors such as preserving fragmented cultures, exhibit ion of diversity, and the externalization of somatic experience show, how images challenge the restrictions of human compreh ension. With the advent of visual and electronically generated culture, the time is ripe to edify images from their low status. Visual cognition as the crucial element of knowledge should be reflected in a hybrid art-science, public policy, as well as pedagogy. (shrink)