In a recent paper, my collaborator Tom Rutten and I advanced a tentative theory of how contemporary visual artworks might interact with a predictive error minimization (or “predictive processing“) system in human viewers. The predictive processing model of cognition is a relatively recent figuration of the age-old problem of inference (how humans make predictions from patterns and pull patterns from data), originating in the work of computational neuroscientists like Friston, Rao, and Ballard in the 1990s but prefigured by Jeurgen Schmidhuber, whose theory of cognitive “compression” has been covered previously on this site and its neighbors.
I haven’t yet tried summarizing the paper’s ideas in an informal way, or arguing (beyond Twitter) for its usefulness as a theory. Here, I advance that argument both modestly and boldly. Continue reading “Wait, what? Sense-making & sense-breaking in modern art”
Carcinisation 