University of Pittsburgh
Underfoot, by the hand, the body moving around. The stone-built environment, Roman floor mosaics, marble sculpture are not intended for a static viewing subject. The perception of crafted stone and marble is distributed across multiple modalities, multiple registers, and as part of an ambulatory body, a pedestrian haptics. There are precedents in phenomenology, for example John Sallis or F. David Martin. Or the once-fashionable field of Samir Zeki’s ‘neuroaesthetics’ (1999). Meanwhile, there are some interesting neuroscientific developments in the past few decades concerning ‘slow’ or ‘affective’ forms of touch with C-Tactile (CT) fibers, and the profound implications for social behaviors are still being worked out. What does it mean for our perceptions of architectural objects and the plastic arts by a moving, sensing body? This talk builds on my previously developed account of oculomotor and ambulatory perception in How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation (2021), with its investigation of the history of the psychology of the haptic perception of art from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and updates it with some recent research on the neuroscience of CT afferents, thermoreception, and multisensory material cognition. Marble, it turns out, emerges as a peculiarly productive case: even visually it presents a numinous surface that invites affective touch while thermally withholding its full reward; its properties of translucency are proximate to skin perception; and its perceived weight and thermal properties have been central to the aesthetic effects of its crafted form.