E-Int: “The Work of Art as a Cognitive Trail”

The Work of Art as a Cognitive Trail

Alexandros Zographakis
4:30 p.m. 14 June 2007
Pevensey I 1A1

Have you ever felt puzzled because the person looking at you had a ‘Mona Lisa smile’ on his/her face?

Did you ever catch yourself staring at a woman with a ‘Rubenesque figure’?

Are things very rough lately and maybe you think you’re living a ‘Kafkaesque nightmare’? or do you simply feel the urge to escape the ‘Twilight Zone’? But, then again maybe not. Now that the weather is getting hotter maybe you simply feel like humming the tune of Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’?

If you understand what I’m talking about, then maybe you are a non-conceptualist but you don’t know it. I will try to show that the work-of-art-cum-aesthetic-object, construed as a ‘cognitive trail’, provides the means to recast perceptual experience by guiding us to realize that we enact content, through a pre-reflective bodily process, which in turn typifies an incessant move, between alternative conceptualizations.