SPOT Operations & Salon
...making sense of the senses...
SPOT
The SPOT System
In our day-to-day lives, we typically think very little about seeing. We simply use our visual facility until it is interrupted or diminished. Or until we try to devise a machine that can use or provide visual processing meaningful to humans. Then we begin to appreciate the enormous complexity of "making sense of the senses".
Evolution of the Pragmatic Paradigm: The Agency of Graphic Media in Cognitive Development
by Howard Jones
Originally published as Evolution of the Pragmatic Paradigm:
The Agency of Graphic Media in Cognitive Development [LEONARDO. vol.26, No.2, 1993, pp. 109-116.]
ABSTRACT
The author speculates that both cultures and individuals mature in relation to a still-evolving cognitive ground of ordinary reality that he terms the pragmatic paradigm. Various modes of the paradigm are available in cognition, expressed through a hierarchic, dialectic repertoire of attentional states. Paying attention to events construes them in a presumed spatial sense of context, some of which are invested through graphic media in common-sense models of social transactions. In terms of the pragmatic paradigm, Cartesian dualism is rendered as a consequence of attentional behaviors tutored in a cultural milieu dominated by print graphics. Electronic and photonic technologies radically revise familiar attentional modes, inducing a new and more complex pragmatic of imaginal being. In a telecommunications environment, art is less about making valuable objects and more a matter of attentional curiosity. Read More