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HUMAN MOVEMENTS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF COMPREHENSION OF THE WORLD // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2014. Issue 2 (2). P. 45-54

Man finds himself in the world not as pure mind or consciousness, but as embodied being. This embodiment is not a simple natural fact, man is not the product of his or her own body, on the contrary, people in history always have bodies as their own objects and representations. French anthropologist M. Moss believed that for construction unified concept of human being we must base on different sciences – sociology, psychology and physiology. In this article concept “techniques of the body” analyses through the theory of motions developed classic psychophysiology N. A. Bernstein. It is hypothesized that different types of movements can be generalized by notion “gesture”. Gesture – is a movement that is able to experiment with space and time, it is the way by which a person can transcend his own boundaries. In a gesture of material and intentional sides fused together. Gesture suggests The Another Man. The human body takes on the role of media. Understanding of environment can carried out through the body and senses, not only through logic and language.

Keywords: techniques of the body, M. Mouss, schemes of movements, N. A. Bernstein, symbolical coordination, gesture, media, image.

URBAN LANDSCAPE AS PALIMPSEST OF CULTURE // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2018. Issue 3 (17). P. 27-42

The concept of “landscape” initially develops in geography, it reflects the physical space. Geographical descriptions clearly distinguish mountain peaks, ridges, marshes and plains, but neither the space nor the time of the landscape can be understood separately from social practices. In Modern times, the idea of landscape is associated with the aesthetic experience of landscape painting. The wider poetic and dramatic meaning of the landscape is emphasized in romanticism. In environmental movements, ethical disputes about human responsibility are added to this topic. Globalization reveals the importance of landscape in shaping people’s identity. The effect of the landscape is compared with the influence of ideology. Artifacts are represented by things, surrounded by words and visual events, they form the thingness, symbolic and figurative layers of the landscape. Palimpsest is a phenomenon in the history of writing, when new layers were written on top of the former. The urban landscape is a space of practices in which various artifacts play the roles of media, they give the products of activity an objective form, set the canvas of public space.

Keywords: artifact, cultural geography, landscape, mediation, technologies of objectification, gesture, symbol, image, media

THE CONCEPT OF "REPRESENTATION" AND THE LIMITS OF ITS APPLICATION IN THE STUDY OF PHOTOGRAPHIC EXPERIENCE // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2020. Issue 2 (24). P. 56-73

Representation is the presentation of one thing in another and through another. The purpose of the article is to consider the applicability of the principle of representation to photographic experience, the article discusses the reasons why images appear in culture. Images are not just a cast or a duplicate of an object. It is not just reproducing the forms of the already visible world, but rather producing forms that are just becoming visible in the world. After a talented draftsman, as well as a photographer, the world grows in terms of the visible. The scope of a person's communicative competence includes the task of not only learning to speak. To get used to light is to learn to see and to learn to be visible, and to use light in this sense is just as important as to use the alphabet. The mirror in culture anticipated photography. The mirror helped make the image that others wanted to see real. In the experience of perception, various activities intersect: bodily, figurative, and symbolic. The symbols are what passes between the subject of communication, they define the horizontal vector of the connection of people. Images are not necessarily involved in exchange and tend to be integral and continuous, just like sacred objects. The visual turn is not that scientists have suddenly "discovered" images for themselves and for others, and are ready to "close" the language world. The turn is the refusal to recognize the "natural" dominance of symbols in the turnover of visual images. Human sensuality was not lucky in the modern era. A person of this era was primarily expected to be able to rationally represent reality for its interpretation. If any formations other than "intelligence" were found on the human side, they had to be reduced to "non-intelligence" with ritual regrets. Emotions, feelings, and affects were identified as natural, but not cultural, entity. The article presents arguments that refute the assumptions that photography is a representative system of a language type. It is shown that judgments about "reading photos" are only metaphors, which means that the function of photography in culture is not limited to the transmission of information. Being as a visual system, photography is primarily addressed to feelings and emotions. The article considers the arguments of proponents of non-representative theory which reject interpretative methodologies. In the non-representative approach, emotions are considered as thinking. Such thinking unfolds in the categories of body (gesture) and affect, this thinking is different from verbal thinking. Thought is placed in action, and action is placed in the world, the cognitive and affective in experience are not in conflict. Representative and non-representative theories come from different styles of thinking, and the choice of this style determines the boundary of the representation principle.

Keywords: image, technogenic media, the perception of photographs, representation, non-representative approach, cognitive, affective

HOMO PICTOR IN THE SPACE OF THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2022. Issue 4 (34). P. 123-141

Depicting and viewing images are closely related to imagination, a fundamental characteristic of human intelligence. Imagination relies on all the sensuality of a person, but the visual component plays a special role. The progress of digital technology today makes it possible to produce images, but it turns out that one still needs some experience of traditional drawing/painting and also a philosophical understanding of the circumstances leading to the figure of the Homo pictor. There is a double connection between landscape and drawing. A depicted landscape is often regarded as an aesthetic event; it becomes the subject of art studies. However, one can pay attention to the fact that drawing/painting unfolds inside the landscape, and the resulting image is already an artifact, an ontological event related to the level of being. Research of the Homo pictor is not a narrow field of aesthetic experience and artistic education, it is a problem of philosophical anthropology. The latter, relatively speaking, investigates the nature of human beings, their historical development in practice, cognition, communication. The common Latin expressions specify different projections of the species Homo – sapiens, faber, ludence, symbolicus, etc. Homo pictor in this series means a “person drawing/painting”. Under what circumstances and for what tasks did this ability develop? To clarify the general problem, consideration of a number of subordinate questions can help: What aspects of human bodily incarnation are the parameters of the landscape surrounding people associated with? How is Homo pictor (a drawing/painting person) and Homo loquens (a speaking person) related? What changes does drawing/painting make in the landscape space? Depicting continues the Homo faber line; however, the final product is not a material result, but new media, whose meaning is to be an intermediary between a person and his/her world. An image is not a goal, it is a medium. It is not enough to open one’s eyes to see an image, one needs to have a depicted image that will act as an eye-opening in a new way. The idea of intentionality is the most important for understanding imagination, hence the importance of the methods of phenomenology that reveal the dialectic of the connection between the experience of creating and viewing an image. The article discusses the ideas of the phenomenologist Hans Jonas, whose works are not well known in Russia. Homo pictor is driven by not only cognitive, but also affective motives, hence the importance of research on emotions and feelings. The work of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio shows the role of maps, neural network schemes, patterns underlying bodily movements and gestures that act as the basis of emotions and feelings. Schemes or patterns outside of an image remain at the level of the nervous tissue. But patterns can be objectified in movements, gestures, traces of lines and spots on some surface. An image is an externally rendered pattern of perception that can serve as a medium, a basis of emotions and feelings. The problem of drawing/painting in philosophy confronts both ancient problems of the relation of eidos and reality, and new problems concerning the connection of the cognitive and the affective in the experience of physicality, the connection of the presentative and the representational in the experience of vision. Homo pictor’s research concerns a number of positions that prompt questioning of the main dichotomies of modernity; these studies open up new horizons in understanding human creativity.

Keywords: body, vision, movement, gesture, image, media, representation, eidos and reality, emotions and feelings, Hans Jonas