Embodied mind and mental contents in graffiti art experience

Abstract

Graffiti can evoke different thoughts, emotions, motivations and behaviors in different individuals. According to a cognitive scientific view, when experiencing graffiti an individual consciously experiences representational mental information contents. They are constructs of knowledge structures of perceivable and non-perceivable information about the world and things, combinations of perceptions and learned contents. Information can be embodied in gestures and speech and embedded in external artefacts such as graffiti. Verbally denoted experience of graffiti can inform about graffiti spectator’s conscious and unconscious mental contents and processes. However, research that studies mental contents in spectators’ graffiti experience has been missing. Research is needed to investigate graffiti evoked experienced mental contents and their differences between individuals with varying levels of graffiti knowledge. In this thesis mental contents of conscious experience of graffiti are studied by analyzing verbal protocols of laypeople and graffiti experts. Heterophenomenological approach is used to combine subjects’ first-person and researcher’s third-person perspectives with a theoretical framework about consciousness and its representational contents. The results suggest that when individuals interact with graffiti, they experience them as something that have meaning and make sense. The experienced contents can have a certain feeling, they can be about movements, positionings and relations, facts or images and imaginations, reflecting individuals’ pre-existing knowledge and assumptions about graffiti. Understanding is gained in subjective, embodied and inferencing interpretation processes. Meaningful contents are constructed through emotional appraisal and apperception processes. In interpreting ambiguous graffiti existing mental representations are reconstructed into new representations. This content-based approach is not limited to research experience of graffiti, but it can also be applied to study thinking, contents of mental representations, the consciousness, and the human mind as embodied, predictive and narrative mind.