From Art to Communication
It struck me, and many others, that, if this is true of a work of art, it is also true of other forms of communication, Our reading of a book, for example, is a combination of what the writer presents us with and our own expectations. The same is true of a movie, a poster, a timetable, a map, indeed any form of communication. Thus Gombrich’s insight following on from Kant is relevant at the most general level of our description of communication. Indeed Kant was referring to all types of experience, not just communication, People each bring their own expectations—their share—to experience in general.
But there is something distinctive about communication as an experience that separates it out from other forms of experience. To tease out what this might be, my colleagues and I looked at a number of cases that hovered at the boundary between communication activity and naturally occurring phenomena. The most famous of these was the discovery of pulsars (Hewish; Sless 1981). Because the pulses generated by the astronomical phenomena are so regular, the researchers who first discovered them speculated that the pulses might be a signal from a distant civilization. However, once they accepted that there was a satisfactory physical explanation, they abandoned the idea of a signal.
Tags: Art