META

TEXT

Nicolas J. Bullot
Sentinel Artists and the Concern with Truth
Our concern with truth, bullshit, and sentinel artists
In this essay, I argue that some artists’ concern with truth is expressed through their artistic work and practice. Following Frankfurt (2005), I will use the expression concern with truth to refer to a person’s interest in evaluating the truth-values of beliefs and utterances, and their consequent actions on the basis of these evaluations.1 Frankfurt opposes the concern with truth to the attitude of »bullshitting« (2005). Bullshitting in this sense is a discourse that obfuscates peoples’ access to truths. A person is bullshitting when »she is not concerned with the truth-value of what she says« (2005: p. 33). The utterer of bullshit »cannot be regarded as lying« because »she does not presume that she knows the truth, and therefore she cannot deliberately be promulgating a proposition that she presumes to be false« (p. 33).2
»Bullshitting,« in Frankfurt’s sense can be illustrated by communications about health that obfuscate medical truths. According to health care research,3 some strategies of communication developed by transnational companies producing tobacco, alcohol, and ultra-processed food have obfuscated truths about the unhealthy character of the commodities that such enterprises sell. For example, Rob Moodie and colleagues (2013: p. 672–675) argue that a number of these companies published biased research findings, co-opted policy makers and health professionals, lobbied public officials, and encouraged voters who oppose public health regulation. These communication strategies may not directly count as lies in the sense of intentional utterances of propositions that are believed to be false by the utterer. Yet, such strategies are obfuscating their audience members’ ability to access medical truths by hindering the public’s access to unbiased evidence and truths about the harmful effects of the marketed commodities.
As Frankfurt noted, a portion of the information transmitted through contemporary media amounts to »phony« communications »produced without concern with the truth« (Frankfurt, 2005: p. 47) — that is, »bullshit« in Frankfurt’s special sense. However, another part of that transmitted information is used by human agents to keep track of worldly states of affairs in a way that reflects their concern with truth. For example, a portion of the information might have been used by scientists to track natural and social facts relevant to policy-making or by government employees engaged in law enforcement and surveillance. At least some of that communicated information was therefore used by agents who had a concern with truth that was guided social and scientific enquiries. In the arts, although artists are sometimes viewed as uninterested in truth and science, I will argue that some works of art reflect a genuine concern with truth and engage with problems posed by the obfuscation of truth and bullshit in Frankfurt’s sense. I will call surveillance arts the works of art that connect to enquiries aimed at seeking truth and developing social surveillance. Further, I will use the expression sentinel artists to refer to artists engaged in surveillance arts.
My contention in this essay is that some works of surveillance art aim to decry the attitude that Frankfurt calls »bullshitting«. To justify this claim, I need to address questions about the relations between the search for truth in the arts and in the sciences. What are the functions that are distinctive of the arts of surveillance and sets these arts apart from the search for truth that characterises scientific enquiry? Are there opportunities for collaboration between the arts of surveillance and the sciences? To address these issues, I will analyse social effects that are representative of the functions performed by the arts of surveillance. These include: causal processes aimed at broadcasting environmental data and social states of affairs, influencing emotions, exemplifying the power in tracking and surveillance, and triggering reflection about bullshitting. Through these processes, the arts of surveillance provide a forum through which artists and audience members can keep track of, and learn about environmental and social crises. My aim is to sketch a defence of the view that artworks by sentinel artists and other »citizen scientists« can undercut the propensity to disregard truth and rational analysis, providing sentinel artists with the opportunity to act as agents of psychological, moral, and historical change.
Surveillance in the arts and the sciences
Our concern with truth is reflected in a variety of surveillance activities. Nature, in the sense of that which exists, has increasingly been placed under human surveillance. I use surveillance, or surveillance understood as tracking, to refer to anthropogenic activities aimed at keeping track of some phenomena over time in order to serve cognitive and control functions. The cognitive purposes of such tracking activities may include observation by means of unmediated perceptual systems or instruments, description by the meanings of statements that have truth values, representation by scientific models, explanation by naïve or scientific theories, and tracking a target for the causal control of that target.
The scope of my concept of surveillance as tracking is broader than the concept of social surveillance (Chesterman, 2011; Lyon, 2007). The latter usually refers to the monitoring of persons or groups by other social agents (e.g., governments, corporations). In the context of the Internet, social surveillance includes the tracking of people online or various commercial and political practices of »dataveillance«. Although both concepts of surveillance refer to cognitive enquiries that indicate a concern with truth, social surveillance is just one aspect of the practices denoted by the concept of surveillance as tracking.
Both the arts and the sciences have engaged in surveillance understood as tracking, and in particular in the tracking of states of affairs for supporting statements that express propositional content (that is, content that can be assessed as either true or false). The surveillance of nature in the sciences and technology encompasses processes as varied as the act of following the spoors of a target animal in hunting (Liebenberg, 1990), the charting and mapping of new territories, the epidemiological tracking of outbreaks of disease, the recording of movement in environments (seismology), the geological monitoring of sediments (e.g., movement of sands, ocean fronts), the satellite surveillance of states of affairs on Earth (e.g., tracking glacier decline and other environmental issues), the use of non-human animals to perform reconnaissance tasks and monitor environmental phenomena (Haggerty & Trottier, 2015), the tagging of organisms with radio-emitting devices for studying their behaviour (e.g., Block, Costa, Boehlert, & Kochevar, 2003), and the demographical and sociological monitoring of human populations.
Artistic activities that perform surveillance understood in this way have been conducted through the representation of animals and other worldly things in rock art (Clottes, 2005), the depiction of landscapes and environment providing adaptive resources (Kaplan, 1992; Mitchell, 2002), the artistic photography of environments, the audio recording of soundscapes (Schafer, 1977), the filming of documentaries, the arts of sousveillance understood as recording of surveillance activity by portable personal technology (Mann, Nolan, & Wellman, 2002), and a variety of works in environmental art4 (Bullot, 2014).
In a number of historical contexts, the scientific means for the surveillance of nature are used for the artistic surveillance of nature, and vice versa (Bullot, Seeley, & Davies 2017). Photography and audio-visual recording, for example, have served both artistic and scientific surveillance. Artistic works have benefited from and inspired the growth of human science and technology, and this growth has expanded the descriptive and explanatory power of the resources deployed by scientific surveillance.
Explanation for control, risks, and the surveillance of mechanisms
Based on cognitive activities such as observation and explanation, the scientific surveillance of nature can help human enquirers discover truths. First, in making the representation of natural phenomena possible, scientific surveillance has permitted the development of mechanistic explanations of natural phenomena (Bechtel & Abrahamsen, 2005; Craver, 2007; Simon, 1969/1996). Second, in combination with relevant explanatory and technical capacities, the scientific surveillance of natural phenomena is a condition of the human capability to causally intervene in natural mechanisms. Because scientific surveillance can fail to perform these roles adequately or perform them in problematic ways, human interventions into natural mechanisms have led to errors, risks, and disasters (e.g., nuclear accidents, climate change, environmental pollution with toxic industrial wastes).
The appeal to mechanistic explanations is not adequate to account for the functions of surveillance in the arts of surveillance. In contrast to scientific theories, works of surveillance art do not have as primary aims the measurement of phenomena or the explanation of causal mechanisms. For example, although works of surveillance art may depict and manipulate natural phenomena and mechanisms, such works do not have to represent the environment in ways that comply with scientific methods. What, then, are the functions of works in the arts of surveillance?
Functions in the arts of surveillance
Works of surveillance art exhibit characteristic types of functions,5 or effects, which are replicated over time because they meet the need of artists, curators, and audience members. As noted below, these effects might encompass actions aimed at generating representations of environments (e.g., landscapes or soundscapes), giving audience members the experience of remarkable environments, inducing reflective thinking about surveillance issues, or providing individuals with motivation for engaging in political action in relation to surveillance. Bullot and Reber (2013a, 2013b) have proposed a psycho-historical account of art functions that can be applied to the description of the arts of surveillance. To illustrate how this works, consider artworks that have used surveillance tools to document the poisoning crisis in Minamata (Japan), such as Eugene Smith’s series of photographs on Minamata (Smith & Smith, 1975) and the documentary film Minamata: The Victims and their World (1971) by Noriaki Tsuchimoto (henceforth »Minamata«).
Minamata is the first film in a series of documentaries that Tsuchimoto made about the mercury-poisoning incident in Minamata, Japan. This documentary focuses on the residents of Minamata and nearby communities who suffered damage to their nervous systems, or who were born deformed, because they ingested seafood containing abnormal amounts of methylmercury released into the sea by a factory owned by the company Chisso. The film documents the conditions of victims, the discrimination these victims suffered from other Minamata residents, the insufficient response by Chisso, the slowness of government action, and the problems faced by victims who had not been officially designated as suffering from »Minamata disease.«
The psycho-historical theory of art outlines a historical model of the production of a work of art with a psychological model of art appreciation. According to the historical model, the making of a work of art is the product of a particular historical context, or artworld. The historical context of a work is the network of agents, institutions, marketplaces, and historical processes that are causally involved in the production of this work of art. For example, the historical context of Minamata by Tsuchimoto is the artworld and context of Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, that of a growing economic and industrial power. The actions and social processes taking place in the historical context generate moral and social norms, including artistic norms that constrain what is possible and permissible in that context. For example, in depicting and broadcasting the effects of poisoning in Minamata, it is likely that Smith and Tsuchimoto’s artistic actions aimed to contest existing (but unexposed) moral values and political practices, such as those leading to the unjust treatment of victims of the poisoning. In this account, their artworks are political devices aimed at denouncing the corporate search for profit that triggered both the poisoning of inhabitants of Minamata and the covering up of their suffering. Like Minamata, a number of environmental artworks have social and political functions. Of course, through the social process of its making and transmission, a work of art can gain and lose selected effects. For instance, Minamata may have lost some of its original functions since 1971, because the societal and political landscape has changed. Nonetheless, understanding the functions of artwork that are no longer contemporary are still valuable to understanding the historical context of the artwork.
According to Bullot and Reber’s (2013a, 2013b) model, there are three fundamental responses to the functions performed by an artwork. The first, basic exposure, roughly occurs when appreciators are exposed to effects generated and information carried by the work in the course of its perception, but do not have or seek knowledge about the history and art-historical context of the work. For example, basic exposure to Minamata would occur when an appreciator is exposed to an isolated segment of the documentary without possessing any knowledge about the historical context of the documentary. In the second type of response, appreciators adopt an attitude of enquiry into the causal history of the work, a ‘design stance’ (Dennett, 1987; Kelemen & Carey, 2007). The artistic design stance is an attitude whereby appreciators infer from observable information carried by the work of art non-observable information relevant to its appreciation and related to its causal history and art-historical context. For example, it occurs when truth-seeking appreciators of Minamata begin to seek knowledge about the historical context of that documentary, pursuing an understanding of the relationships between implicated agents in the context of production of the work (e.g., the victims, the artists, the perpetrators, the audiences, and the bystanders).
The third type, referred to as artistic understanding, is an understanding of the context-dependent art status and functions of the work, which results from knowing key aspects of relevant historical contexts as a consequence of using the design stance or other attitudes that manifest a concern for the historical truth. For example, an appreciator of Minamata gains an artistic understanding of Minamata if the appreciator can explain the significance and selected effects of the work and feelings that relate to the art-historical context and causal history of Minamata.
The three fundamental modes of appreciation are three different ways for audience members to become sensitive to historical effects and functions. Although basic exposure to a work could provide the appreciator with sensitivity to certain functions (for example, the representational function of a landscape painting), it cannot provide the causal explanation and understanding necessary to the ability to identify the genealogy of complex context-specific functions. The latter understanding demands that truth-seeking audience members engage in an explanatory stance, such as the design stance, and forms a model of the context by means of artistic understanding.
Truth and functions in the arts of surveillance
The arts of surveillance encompass a wide range of genres, styles, and media. Surveillance arts have a plurality of effects on their makers, commissioners, audience members, and contexts. For example, the production and appreciation of environmental documentaries entail causal interactions between artists, institutions, and audiences that differ from those associated with the production and appreciation of environmental poetry or photography. Not all these effects are functions in the sense specified above — that is, types of effects that are reproduced over history because of these effects fulfil the needs of people and societies. But, some effects correspond to social functions, and the performance of some of these social functions demand that artists and audience members alike engage in truth-seeking activities and the critique of bullshitting in Frankfurt’s (2005) sense.
Broadcasting and tracking functions
A core function in the works of surveillance art is to broadcast information in order to foster truth-seeking attitudes and knowledge of an environmental or social situation. Broadcasting presupposes surveillance understood as tracking. So, many communicative works developed by sentinel artists perform broadcasting and tracking functions. Although broadcasting effects are present in domains other than the arts (e.g., scientific, journalistic, and pedagogical communication), makers of surveillance art use broadcasting practices that are distinctive. For example, broadcasted material may be categorised by means of artistic categories (e.g., »documentary« [as a recent genre of artistic filmmaking], »installation«, »music performance«, »interactive and multimedia art«, or »digital arts«).
Works by sentinel artists based on (photographic, sonic, filmic, video) recordings and interactive electronic media can provide audience members with robust means to track indicators of facts and crises that would otherwise remain unperceivable or unconceivable. For example, the documentary Minamata provides its audience with recorded testimonies about the life of victims of mercury poisoning in the city of Minamata. Without the documentary, such testimonies might have been silenced and consigned to oblivion by the perpetrators of the poisoning.
To take other examples of environmental works, the documentary films Into Eternity (2010, directed by Michael Madsen) and Containment (directed by Peter Gallison and Robb Moss), the installation Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nuclear Nations (2013) by Julia and Ken Yonetani, and the video and photographic work Brighter Than A Thousand Suns (2016) by Susanna Hertrich invite us to reflect on complex challenges posed by nuclear technology. Many aspects of these works focus on the problem of making accessible and perceptive the invisible toxicity and duration of radioactive contamination.
In Ecosystem of Excess (2014), Pinar Yoldas exemplifies plastic pollution by imagining plastic-based organs and organisms that might evolve in response the pervasive plastic pollution generated human activities. In Malamp: Reliquaries (ongoing), Brandon Ballengee uses the chemical »clearing and staining« of terminally deformed frogs found in nature to exemplify the declines and potential causes of deformities among amphibian populations. These works by sentinel artists provide resources for learning and imagining truths about environmental and social crises and for retracing the causal history of processes and agents that fostered these crises, therefore making imperceptible facts more cognitively accessible.
Broadcasting functions are therefore at the core of a wide range of works in surveillance arts, including those based on recorded and electronic media. Why do these media seem distinctive of surveillance arts, and especially in works addressing the topics of social and environmental crises? I surmise that the causal processes that surveillance artworks depict tend to be unobserved or unobservable effects, or even side-effects and downstream causal ramifications that were only detectable long after their chief cause had been generated. What is characteristic of such unobservable effects or side-effects is that a human enquirer cannot perceive them directly. This is clear in the example of the surveillance of environmental variables in environmental arts (Bullot, 2014). Many hazardous chemicals released in the environment, such as pesticides (Wargo, 1998) and toxic nuclear radiations, cannot be readily detected by unaided human sensory abilities (Wargo, 2009). For example, methylmercury was not directly perceivable in marine life collected and consumed near the shores of Minamata. Similarly, no one could directly perceive the degree of toxicity of the dust generated by the collapse of the World Trade Centre (Lioy, 2010). Furthermore, a number of important ecological facts are left undocumented. For example, there is evidence that key events that have caused species extinction and loss of biodiversity are poorly documented (Wilson, 1992). Similarly, important ecological concepts such as global warming or imbalance in an ecological system refer to states of affairs that cannot be directly sensed by a perceptual system like vision or audition. Some of these unobservable states of affairs are indicators of environmental and social crises that are tracked and broadcasted by works of surveillance art (presumably, along with scientific forms of surveillance).
Our psychological responses to the previous works of environmental surveillance contribute to developing our sensitivity to such environmental and social states of affairs. The psycho-historical model described above (Bullot & Reber, 2013a) suggests the hypothesis that these works might achieve that result by inciting us to adopt truth-seeking attitudes such as the artistic design stance and other forms of causal and historical cognition. In taking the design stance, appreciators engage in causal reasoning about the historical context and causal history of the work. In contrast to mental processes performed in the mode of basic exposure to an artwork (that is, without any truth-seeking enquiry into the causal history of the work), causal reasoning based on the design stance provides appreciators with a means to assess the sources and reliability of the information conveyed by the work.
Emotional-manipulation functions
Reference to the broadcasting of information is not sufficient to explain the significance of artworks of surveillance. We need to acknowledge the role of emotions. This is because the prescription of acts that audience members ought to perform (that is, the normative effects of works of surveillance art) depends on the manipulation of motivation mechanisms like emotions. But it is clear that the broadcast of controversial contents by a work of surveillance art is bound to induce strong emotional responses and feelings in audience members. Such emotional response, in turn, has the propensity to motivate audience members into avowing and abiding by the moral or political norms addressed by the work (e.g., Gibbard, 1990). For example, environmental artworks often broadcast indicators of an environmental crisis (e.g., poisoning in Minamata) that elicit emotions such as fear or anger in some audience members and motivate them to abide by norms aimed at mitigating these crises.
A prediction made by the psycho-historical model is that emotions elicited in the mode of basic exposure differ from those elicited in the mode of artistic understanding. In the mode of basic exposure, responses to art are led by implicit learning and basic emotions, which are processes that directly respond to the observable content and form of the work.6 For instance, audience members who would view the documentary Minamata in the mode of basic exposure (to the exclusion of any other mode) might experience primary fear and empathy for the victims elicited by the depiction of deformed bodies or convulsions. However, they would not subsequently pursue deliberate inquiries into the making of the documentary and its historical context. Consequently, their appreciation would remain deprived of the sources of information provided by an historical analysis. This would in turn impair their ability to reliably infer the contents that the filmmaker might have intended to communicate. Similarly, basic exposure would hinder their understanding of the societal and political mechanisms leading to this kind of environmental crisis. Finally, they would be deprived of a justification for deciding whether their experience of basic emotions is fitting or adequate.
In contrast to appreciations limited to basic exposure, audience members who develop artistic understanding on the basis of the design stance might derive emotions and feelings from enquiries into the contextual functions of Minamata. For instance, they may articulate explanations of the work based on the premise that Tsuchimoto’s intention was to elicit empathetic understanding of the victims’ world and of the silencing of their narratives (Fricker, 2007). In so doing, audience members can deploy a refined sensitivity to the norms upheld or disparaged by Tsuchimoto’s work (e.g., moral norms versus norms dictated by the predatory greed of the perpetrators). On the basis of this contextual sensitivity, they can develop a range of historical emotions and practical responses to the societal mechanisms investigated by Tsuchimoto.
Reflection and truth-seeking explanatory stances
Works of surveillance broadcast information to motivate the search for environmental and social knowledge. Such works may also manipulate emotions and feelings in order to promote action and norm-abidance. Thus, these works have reflection-triggering, truth-seeking, and action-eliciting effects. The reader might object that according to my account, no clear boundaries separate surveillance artworks from works of propaganda. The objector’s concern could be that sentinel artists might sometimes be faced with the difficult task of having to address in their work a crisis without having sufficient knowledge to adjudicate the social debate about that crisis. In such a situation, using art to support a partisan view might amount to propaganda (Tuttle Ross, 2002; Welch, 1999), and such propaganda could be biased in a variety of ways (Hertwig & Hoffrage, 2013; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).
Let me concede to the objector that biases are unavoidable risks of an artist’s engagement in the arts of surveillance. Notwithstanding this concession, however, the objection from biased propaganda can be rebutted by astute strategies ensuring that contributions in the arts of surveillance are not overly biased. For example, one of such strategies is from sentinel artists to solicit reflective and critical attitudes about the contents depicted or addressed by their works rather than dogmatic adjudications of a complex problem in social decision making. From the standpoints of both epistemological rigour and ethical care, the elicitation of the responder’s reflective thinking is preferable to approaches based on indoctrination and propagandist partisanship. Thus, because there are unavoidable risks that surveillance arts turn into propaganda, a contribution of significant works of surveillance art has been to guide audiences into adopting reflective forms of questioning and enquiring.
A related issue is that this artistic reflection on facts and crises is hard to conceive if it is deployed in complete absence of an understanding of the causal mechanisms determining the facts under consideration. Thus, at least in principle, reflective artistic thinking on environmental and social facts can benefit from insights provided by the natural and social sciences of such mechanisms. Hence, surveillance artworks are unlikely to succeed in their moral and political functions if they completely lack reliability in the performance of their tracking, broadcasting, and reflective functions.
Using surveillance art to track and intervene in crises
A number of works addressing the topic of environmental crises can provide evidence to support our outline of the core functions of surveillance arts. Many of these works document environmental changes or crises. Several schools of documentaries and sonic or photographic works addressing the topic of environmental crises provide a remarkably rich set of examples.
In making traces of environmental crises publicly available by means of media of the age of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin, 1936/2008), works such as Minamata, Koaanisqatsi (1982, directed by Godfrey Reggio), The Cove (2009, directed by Louie Psihoyos), and Into Eternity broadcast information about a variety of environmental crises. Although these works might misrepresent historical evidence or present biased assessments of historical controversies, such works have a realistic significance that derives from the fact that they assemble recordings that are, to greater or lesser extent, traces of past state of affairs (Bullot & Reber, 2013a; Currie, 1999, 2000). In the documentary Minamata, the film assembles traces such as portraits by relatives of deceased and living victims and depictions of pipes pouring industrial waste into the ocean. The realistic significance of these works may also derive from the direct use of surveillance methods and technologies (e.g., the use of undercover equipment in The Cove or the use of methods of enquiry analogous to forensic, historiographical, and journalistic enquiries in many other documentaries).
The content broadcast by these works can be aligned with moral or political norms, and organised by rhetorical strategies. Political strategies understood as strategies aimed at intervening in agreement with certain moral, legal, or political norms are revealed by a variety of historical or allegorical clues. For example, the work might depict the filmmaker’s political aim to perform the broadcast function as a moral duty enacted against hostile agents attempting to conceal the traces that the documentary attempts to broadcast (for example, corporate executives trying to cover the facts; surveillance police in Taiji in The Cove). Through the use of recorded traces of facts, these works provide audience members with means and incentive to enquire about the depicted historical crises ( Minamata), social unrests caused by pollution crises ( Minamata), intimacy with the anguish of victims of environmental crises ( Minamata), or the slaughtering of dolphins in Taiji ( The Cove), and so forth.
A coda on META
In this essay, I have sought to describe and explain how and why sentinel artists engaged in the arts of surveillance and citizen science can operate as agents of psychological, moral, and political change. To contribute to moral and political change, sentinel artists can support awareness of environmental and social crises by the public, channel emotional sensitivity to the consequences of such crises, and offer means to develop critical thinking about such crises. If combined with suitable scientific understanding, reflective thinking in the arts of surveillance might even develop our awareness of biases in the human cognitive and emotional assessments of environmental and social challenges.
In introducing the collective artwork META, the collective of artists and thinkers who imagined META have acted as sentinel artists. They provide us »a platform to analyze and discuss methodologies of power, control and the manufacturing of ignorance and doubt in techno-scientific developments by zooming out and looking at various contexts, relations and entanglements.« They are creating an ingenious device for eliciting the cognitive processes of critical thinking and reflection that provide a foundation for our concerns for values associated with truth and practical ethics. I do not claim that the chief function of works of surveillance art like META is to deliver empirical knowledge in the way science does. This is in part because emotions in the arts and the sciences do not have to work the same way. However, I would contend that works like META can be cooperatively integrated with scientific surveillance to elicit broadcasting procedures that elicit emotions in relation to truth-seeking activities, motivate critical thinking, and contribute to justify reasonable political action about environmental and social crises.

FOOTNOTES
1 Frankfurt assumes a conception of truth based on the idea that what we believe or say is true if it corresponds to the facts denoted by our belief or utterance. The concern with truth can be accounted for by other theories of truth, including a pragmatist model of truth as the end of an enquiry (Misak, 1991).
2 Frankfurt’s (2005) concept of bullshit refers to a »lack of connection to a concern with truth« and »an indifference to how things really are« (2005: p. 33–4). Thus, bullshitting is akin to bluffing (p. 45–6) and fakery (p. 47). While the liar needs to take into account truths to produce an efficacious lie (p. 51–2), the bullshitter »does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly« (p. 56) and »is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are« (p. 61).
3 See, for example, Moodie et al. (2013).
4 In this article, the term environmental art refers to works of art that address environmental themes or problems regardless the medium of expression, style, and advocacy chosen by the artist.
5 I assume that works of art have social functions. To establish this claim as a substantive hypothesis, a theoretical account of artefact functions is needed. Among the numerous theories of functions (Ariew, Cummins, & Perlman, 2002; Wouters, 2005), historical theories offer a promising explanation (Bullot & Reber, 2013a; Parsons & Carlson, 2008; Preston, 1998). Roughly, according to such accounts, the functions of an artefact are intended or unintended effects reproduced over history because these effects meet some need or value.
5 Emotional response in the appreciation of environmental art restricted to the mode of basic exposure is limited in a variety of ways. In the first place, the inferences that can be drawn from knowledge of the art-historical context of Tsuchimoto’s work cannot be made. (For instance, the knowledge of the artist’s intentions or biographical context is limited or absent.) Furthermore, in this mode, the appreciators cannot assess whether the emotions that they experience in the course of exposure is appropriate or fitting because they lack information about the context-specific norms that make these experiences appropriate or inappropriate.
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THE AUTHOR
Nicolas J. Bullot has a PhD in Cognitive Science from the EHESS in Paris, France and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. He is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Charles Darwin University, Australia. He has edited three volumes and published more than 30 peer-reviewed publications on the science of art, identification, reference, and social cognition. His approach to research aims to integrate explanations developed in cognitive science with contextualist models proposed in philosophy and the historical social sciences. Along with his research, he is a field recordist and develops sound-art projects for exploring environmental and philosophical issues.