Re: lexicon

John Cowan sikyal:

> I rather like elephant art, myself (but see below).
>
> > No such fundamental blueprints exist for art; art is by its very nature
> > the ultimate in free expression, refusing to obey set channels or rules.
>
> Actually it does, or we would be utterly unable to comprehend art from
> other cultures living and dead.  We recognize the cave paintings as
> art because we share a common humanity with the painters.
This reminds me of a description I read of experiments with signing apes
over representational painting. The researchers showed the apes various
objects and asked them to make pictures of them using their paints.
Unfortunately, the resulting pictures made no sense to anyone. They were,
however, self-consistent: the basketball was consistently drawn by the ape
as a horizontal line of arches, or something like that. The best guess by
the researchers was that it was a depiction of the motion of the ball.

I don't know if the apes could recognize each others' pictures, or if
different apes used the same representational schemes for the same
objects. 'Twould be an interesting study.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am?"

And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said, "What?"