https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4252-0736
The final two chapters of Gibson’s (Citation1979/2015) book on visual perception (and Blau (Citation2019) and Stoffregen’s (Citation2019) chapters in the Wagman & Blau (Citation2019) revisit) urged the field to consider aesthetic experience from an ecological standpoint. While those chapters focused on visual depictions, aesthetic experience can encompass far more varied and diverse experiences.
Gibson, of course, was not the first to study aesthetics in animal-environment systems. Darwin (Citation1989) argued that there were aesthetic experiences that shaped evolution. For better or worse, the vast majority of researchers following in his tradition focused on sexual selection activities (e.g., courtship displays and brightly coloured plumage, as well as mating calls, see Ryan, Citation2018). However, Darwin advocated for a non-human sense of beauty independent of utility to the organism or its progeny. For example, consider the elaborately decorated bowers of Amblyornis inornatus (bower birds, see Diamond, Citation1986), or the spoke-wheeled troughs dug by Torquigener albomaculosus (puffer fish, see Matsuura, Citation2015). While both of these aesthetics are associated with mating behaviours, these animals make choices that seem to indicate personal preference rather than inviting the attention of a mate (repeatedly choosing one colour of poker chip from among a varied selection to decorate the nest, for example).
While we cannot know the inner lives of other animals in the same way, aesthetic appreciation and judgments are a daily occurrence for many of us. We listen to music, appreciate the beauty of a sunset, revel in the taste of a meal. Echoing the researchers that followed Darwin, ecological researchers tend to focus on the more utilitarian actions inherent in those aesthetic events: viewing the radio as affording turning on, the ground as stand-and-watch-from-able, and the meal as edible. Those utilitarian actions are necessary and important, but they do not comprise the entire lived experience of the people engaged in those events. If we are to have a thoroughgoing ecological approach, we must understand both the ability to navigate an environment and the pleasure felt in observing a beautiful landscape.
Human history is also a history of art—the earliest evidence we have of our ancestors is of the art that they made. Modern humans are no different, and it is not just those engaged in deliberately making works of art (e.g., pottery, paintings, sculpture), or deliberately viewing art for the emotional or aesthetic experience. Aesthetics is part of the fabric of our lives. We make choices based on aesthetic judgements with little to no practical consequence (e.g., wall paint color, genre of music playing in the car, the way food is placed on a serving dish) and even choices that have the practical consequence of requiring additional physical labour (e.g., walking a longer distance so as to take the ‘pretty way’, arranging furniture in a more pleasing but less easy to navigate fashion). And in the same way that people attune to the information about affordances with increased experience, they attune to the beauty and emotional involvement inherent in art with increased experience (Leder et al., Citation2012).
These two issues of Ecological Psychology are an attempt to gather varied approaches to and insights into aesthetic experiences from an ecological perspective. From music to reading, from virtual reality to theatre, the gathered papers address a broad spectrum of aesthetic experiences. They take as their collective starting point that our perceptual systems continue to function as they ordinarily do, even when engaged in the valanced and possibly artificially created event of an aesthetic experience. From there, they explore a wide variety of issues in the field of Ecological Aesthetics.
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References
- Blau, J. J. C. (2019). Revisiting ecological film theory. In J. Wagman & J. J. C. Blau (Eds.), Perception as information detection: Reflections on Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception. Taylor & Francis Group.
- Darwin, C. (1989). The works of Charles Darwin: The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex (vol. 2). NYU Press.
- Diamond, J. (1986). Animal art: Variation in bower decorating style among male bowerbirds Amblyornis inornatus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 83(9), 3042–3046. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.83.9.3042
- Gibson, J. J. (1979/2015). The ecological approach to visual perception (Classic edition). Psychology Press.
- Leder, H., Gerger, G., Dressler, S. G., & Schabmann, A. (2012). How art is appreciated. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 6(1), 2–10. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026396
- Matsuura, K. (2015). A new pufferfish of the genus Torquigener that builds “mystery circles” on sandy bottoms in the Ryukyu Islands, Japan (Actinopterygii: Tetraodontiformes: Tetraodontidae). Ichthyological Research, 62(2), 207–212. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10228-014-0428-5
- Ryan, M. (2018). A taste for the beautiful: The evolution of attraction. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400889150
- Stoffregen, T. A. (2019). The use and uses of depiction. In J. Wagman & J. J. C. Blau (Eds.), Perception as information detection: Reflections on Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception. Taylor & Francis Group.
- Wagman, J., & Blau, J. J. C. (2019). Perception as information detection: Reflections on Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception. Taylor & Francis Group.