Subjective resonance occurs when a particular piece of art or song resonates greatly in accordance to one's perspectival understanding. This phenomenon, in its truest form, is exceedingly rare, but its lesser versions are universally experienced by everyone at some point in life. The factors leading up to resonance - perfect or otherwise - are complex, and almost entirely up to the subject's own frame. In short, the reasons for something feeling like it (the art in question) is speaking to me are as complex as people themselves.
There are a few key components to this resonance that can be discussed, however. Most prominently; nostalgia, personal temperament and cultural affect. Of these, I would argue, nostalgia is both the most prominent and best understood by general populace. It is also something that doesn't have much at all to do with a song or art-piece's actual depth or quality. To the contrary, in fact, as the more widespread something is (the larger an audience it can reach), the less complexity it tends to have, and baser the instincts it tends to target. Leaving that aside for now, the point of this post was to explore how subjective resonance between an observer <-> art piece, or between two observers of a singular art-piece (observer 1, <-> art-piece <-> observer 2) functions, and how the artist, the creator, when attempting to convey his or hers "inner world experience" is irrevocably distanced from the audience. We can begin with a simple example of music, where a group of people are listening to a particular piece. In this party - lets say of five - someone chooses an old song that someone else recognizes; perhaps they have shared similar thoughts and feelings when listening this song back in the day, decades ago, and by communicating these memories they notice they have a shared degree of subjective resonance with the song - and now, thanks to this new experience, each other. This brief moment of subjective resonance is one of the most widespread utilizing nostalgia, as many pop-songs tend to be tied to certain eras and periods of peoples' lives, and so, it is no wonder they can form these kinds of bonds, and are easy to resonate with, thus producing easy topics for conversation. All goes well as long as the people share a degree of similarity in temperamentality and overall psychological make-up, along with cultural background. No resonance can be achieved if the person choosing the song is not "fitted" to this social environment with his song-choice - in other words, if the song is too esoteric for others to recognize, or the person too obtuse in his demeanor of self-presentation. Proceeding with this simple example to a more complex one, let us consider a work of literature or visual art. For this one I'm writing through personal lenses, since I cannot probe into others' motivations in creating highly abstract arts. For me the reasons are twofold: 1. Authentic expression of the unconscious forces, and; 2. Creation of mirrors for the psyche. For the first I could say that the attempts at both literature and visual arts are simply a journalist reporting of mental phenomena and picturing said phenomena. Unfortunately one cannot simply bring a camera into the unconscious and take pictures, and so, it must be mediated through imperfect skills, and some (a lot) of information & accuracy is lost in the process. Now, granting for the sake of argument to the artist that his intentions are genuine, his efforts nevertheless are largely in vain due to aforementioned imperfections in technical skill. Even more alarmingly, even if the artist was to reach literal perfection in capturing these unconscious currents, no other observer can ever fully subjectively resonate with it due to the inherently impassable subject/object divide. They can empathize, subjectively resonate with a great amount of perspectival understanding, but they will never be able to truly see (for the lack of a better word) through the artist's eyes, of what he actually experienced and wanted to convey. Overall, there are so many obscuring filters in the way of art-mediation; the artist's imperfections, the audience's imperfections, the great chasm that divides us all - the subject and the outside world - and so, even the genius artists will always remain misunderstood and ultimately "unreachable". This is not the artist's, nor the audience's fault. It is simply the innate nature of things. This truth, I have realized, is one of the aspects of The Essence of Isolation. The imperfect version of this truth I already mediated - entirely unconsciously - in the early story of "Crawzinscky's Theory of Isolation" back in 2018, when being at the nadir of Dark night of the Soul, in the depths of shadow-work. I will perhaps expand on the other aspects of this truth in the future - or maybe explain this one in greater detail... but I think this shall suffice for now. For Sophia.
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There are three important aspects of (art) mediation of the unconscious; authenticity, accuracy, and originality. I have exhaustively investigated the first two in the past, but the third has been left unexplored since I feel like it hasn't been much of an issue thus far. I'm not sure if it is "an issue", per se, but I cannot deny the fact that this topic continues to bother me, as I've been furthering the methods for mediation of unconscious. Before going into the question of originality (of what I precisely mean by it), I should perhaps first lay out the duality of this whole paradigm. There are two "sides" for the artistic endeavour: subjective and objective. I have mentioned this before in this blog, but it bears repeating and clarification. With the subjective side, I mean in this instance the fully personal aspect - that is, what it means for the subject (artist himself) to convey things, and what he or she may gain from it. In this "subjective regard" the outside world is wholly meaningless. In other words, if the subject was to be fully confined into this subjective realm, this whole topic of "objective (side's) originality" would not be an issue, since there would be no-one around to care for it. Sadly, we do not live in a fully solipsistic subjective world, but are coupled with an objective existense with other observers, and this has its own implications and repercussions, such that it cannot be ignored - at least if wanting to convey something for others to see, which this very blog post has already done by existing in an accessable online space. Thus, we come into the objective side, where the issue lies. Before going into it though, this duality could be put into a handy column for clarity's sake; 1.Subjective (The author's perspective) 1.1 Authenticity (Does the story / work of art follow inner authenticity?) 1.2 Accuracy (How accurately the unconscious / inner authenticity has been followed?) 1.3 Originality (Has the work truly stemmed from the unconscious?) 2.Objective (The audience's perspective) 2.1 Authenticity (Does the work seem authentic for the outside observer?) 2.2 Accuracy (How accurately does the work seem to represent the author's intention?) 2.3 Originality (Has the viewer seen/read similar works somewhere before?) Wherein we can reference the appropriate thing accordingly, and at least attempt not making this any more complex than it needs to be. So, if we go in order with the aforementioned terminology, it can be stated that, so far I feel like having established the subjective ground "enough" such that the Authenticity (1.1), Accuracy (1.2), and Originality (1.3) are not an issue insofar as to make them unbearable hinderances when attempting new methods and avenues in either visual arts or literature. Authenticity (1.1) and Accuracy (1.2) I have explored quite a lot in the past few years, beginning from the very first blog-posts. Subjective Originality (1.3) is a rather interesting issue, but not overly pertinent for this post, as I feel it is something more theoretical, and perhaps better left to be explored in the future. Now, moving on to the objective side where the more - shall we say - real-life issues lie. Not much affecting the process of creation itself, but it has the potentiality to hinder distribution for the outside audience. Starting from Authenticity (2.1), we can already see some fluctuation. The earliest stories - from the literature side - are no doubt authentic, stemming from a very honest place within the depths of shadow work... barring the later stylistical influences from Thomas Ligotti. On the visual arts side it is difficult to say whether I "borrowed" anything either knowingly or unknowingly up to this point. It is highly doubtful, since I have no learned background on technique or style, nor do I know any teachers or influencers - it is all very authentic, in other words, and any possible "links" to something pre-existing has been selected by the unconscious projection. However, when considering the very latest works, I have stumbled upon this dilemma, which is to do with Subjective Accuracy (1.2) and Objective Originality (2.3)... as seemingly, by following inner authenticity (1.1), I increase Subjective Accuracy (1.2) but forsake Objective Originality (2.3). So, starting from beginning of this process: when I begun noticing that technical skill with simple pen & paper was simply insufficient for conveying the intented effect, I took looking into "enhancing methods". This I have already explained in previous posts, where I mention the move into digital editing. I consider this a successful iteration, a natural progress (even though there were some initial doubts). Then, after having some success with it, I still considered the combined "power" of pen & paper + digital editing to be insufficient. Something more was clearly needed. Thus I took into AI alteration, which added a layer of both authenticity and accuracy (1.1, 2.1, 1.2, 2.2) and aided in bringing the vision into fruition, and all was well for a while.
However, even after this, it was all still maddeningly inadequate, and I was finally forced to move into taking something directly from the world and altering it... and so we finally come into the true topic of this post, which is: for the outside observer, does it matter how the art is created? Is it simply the end result that anyone cares of, if the intention is honest and the end result is both subjectively and objectively better by all observable metrics - even if some of "true originality" is sacrificed by using already existing material? In short, is this new method more accurate and authentic, even if it sacrifices some of "true" originality? Does the overall "experience" for both unconscious mediation and objective quality increase by using this new method? Does it allow for creation of better mirrors for the psyche? I do not know. All I can do is to continue experimenting and see what comes up. For Sophia. |
A.K
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