Projects on the geometry of perception and cognition

Abstract

The projects presented in this thesis, which include performance, photography, and sculpture, investigate perception and cognition through the study and reconfiguration of content drawn from philosophy, cognitive science, and linguistics. I suspect that the language that we use to communicate about perception may be faulty. Within this critical perspective, the projects are propositions in response to the question: What is the form of perception/cognition? Underlying the projects is a fundamental philosophical question: Why do we have conscious experience? In philosophy these are referred to, respectively, as the hard and easy problems of consciousness. I investigate the linguistic structures of 'language' and 'parole' in a related attempt to understand the function of language, first independently, and then within a cognitive framework. The experiments begin with words such as 'definition', 'vision', 'perception' and represent systems defined by these signifies using objects, actions, and images. Reconfiguring the words into tangible experiments allows the nature of the phenomenon to be examined outside of the limitations of linguistic description. Ideally, the incongruity that might exist between the words and the experiences of perception and cognition can be uncovered through this process.