Ornamental Mind: Optical Illusions and Design
Project by Prof. Dr Omar W. Nasim
This project aims to uncover and clarify a set of historical, cultural and epistemic conditions that overlapped between an early nineteenth-century discourse on the ornamental arts and the late nineteenth-century use of visual, paper-based tools in the human and mental sciences. Throughout its history, psychology has employed various methods to investigate its subject matter. In the 16th century, the soul was studied through the medium of anatomy. In the 18th century, philological and hermeneutical methods were used to gain insight into the mind through text. By the end of the 19th century, many psychological and human sciences had begun to use visual images to access and assess the workings of the human mind. Broadly accepted and widely disseminated, many of these visual, paper-based tools (e.g., Mach bands, Hermann grids, Necker cubes, the Zoellner illusion, etc.) continue to be used and remain persuasive today. This interdisciplinary project provides a historical, cultural and conceptual framework through which to understand the shift from text to image in the mental and human sciences. To properly understand this shift, the project examines theories relating to the ornamental and decorative arts. After all, when we look elsewhere for well-developed and operational overlaps between mind and image, we inevitably find them in the extensive discourse on ornament that dominated the long nineteenth century. This novel interaction will reconfigure the historical, cultural, intellectual and epistemological landscapes between these disparate fields, and has the potential to transform our understanding of this formative period in the history of several sciences.
Presentations:
“Ornament and the Mind Sciences: A History of Lines, Flatness, and Race,” Kunsthistorische Objektwissenschaft, LMU (Munich), 20 November 2017
“The Ornamental Mind,” at the Advanced Seminar on Perspectives in the History of Science, LMU (Munich), 6 July 2017
“The Ornamental Mind: Ornament and the Mind Sciences” at the Chair for the History of Science, University of Regensburg, 18 May 2016
Seminar on the Ornamental Mind, Visual Studies Programme, University of Pennsylvania, 16 April 2015
