How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation by Mark Paterson

Author:Mark Paterson [Paterson, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, SOC052000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies, SCI034000 Science / History, Media Studies, History, Medical, Science, MED039000 Medical / History
ISBN: 9781452964386
Google: H3xIEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Published: 2021-10-26T20:46:00+00:00

Figure 11. Labyrinth Mosaic from Thuburbo Maius, Tunisia. License: Creative Commons.

Figure 12. Theseus Mosaic, discovered in the floor of a Roman villa at the Loigerfelder near Salzburg in 1815, fourth century AD, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Austria. Photograph: Carole Raddato from Frankfurt, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Initially, Roman floor mosaics would seem to confirm Le Corbusier’s explanation of the static retinal properties of shapes and volumes, as their flatness is a requisite property for their architectural setting. The aspect of physicality for the bather, the use of these rooms as exercise spaces prior to bathing, is further enriched through the variation of floor temperatures and water temperatures around the various rooms and baths. Like gymnasiums, unsurprisingly, bathing spaces were also designed for a heightened physicality. Given their place within the larger physical context, with sculptures, masonry decorations, and architectural features such as porticos, floor mosaics are designed to be encountered differently from wall paintings. Figures depicted in the floor’s center were to be viewed from the side, having some rudimentary three dimensionality from this orientation. It is the ambulatory viewer, the oculomotor subject of heightened physicality, who responds in a transitive way, moves, and then becomes absorbed into the familiar mythic narratives depicted. Given the areal expanse of the mosaic, the labyrinthine designs draw the eye separately from the entirety of the ambulatory body, and, on first encounter at least, this may be halting, arresting, might temporarily inhibit or disturb movement. The difficulty lies in following any one pathway with the eyes and so, at particular junctures, a rift between opticality and hapticality may open up as the eyes become drawn away from the feet: “The spectator is optically lost, even though [s]he is standing on an open floor,” imagines Molholt (2011, 290). This does not negate the idea that motility is already present or implied in the composition of the mosaic, a motility that entwines the eye of the viewer with the inherently spatial narrative that even a schematic labyrinth offers. Especially after walking past, or on, mosaic depictions of athleticism and heightened physicality, therefore, “the beholder has stepped into the role of the hero since his own movement, both visual and physical, implicates him in the myth underfoot,” thinks Molholt (295). This is indeed a different haptic sensibility, a texture felt through the foot and halted, drawn, jolted by the eye. It is not simply due to different forms of texture underfoot, those piecemeal fragmentary obtrusions that constitute mosaic. Instead, there is a different attentional filter in terms of pedestrian perception.

Earlier, Gibson’s definition of the “haptic system” involved a multimodal sensory apparatus, the means by which animals and men are “literally in touch with the environment” he said (1968, 98, emphasis in original). It is this literality of contact that motivates anthropologist Tim Ingold, in his article on perceiving the world through the feet, to consider a “more literally grounded approach to perception” (emphasis in original), revaluating the place of touch in the balance of the senses: “For it is

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