Creative Synthesis (Film)
Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar Wai (Chungking Express, 2046) thought of American pop music as “noise” or “sound”. Pop music really is not necessarily about lyrical content; It’s all about feel and the sound around the sound. He chose California Dreamin' in Chungking Express for one of the scenes because it reminded him of an orange juice commercial and the image that “orange” conveys. He wants his films to move like what the song sounds like. (The band Portishead had this effect on me, where I actually “felt” the “blackandwhiteness” of the sound.)
In general, the filmmaking process is almost a synesthetic experience--at least at the creative level. Thoughts or memories borrowed from other parts of the brain can inform the creation of the work. This is a phenomenon that naturally occurs in blind or deaf people, where the brain adapts by "borrowing" from neighboring regions, or "grows into" those areas.
What Do You Have a Taste For?
In Sartre's Psychology of the Imagination, he describes his experience of "Entoptic Lights", visual artifacts resulting from damage to the optic nerve from a flu virus he had in childhood. It is essentially a form of "acquired synesthesia." (All the more reason to be concerned about the after-effects of viruses).
We all have some acquired synesthesia that naturally occurs in the imagination. When we get a taste for something we re-imagine the experience and perhaps wrap it in metaphors. It's a "preview" that gets played in the mind, or "tour" as he describes it:
"We must learn objects, that is to say, multiply upon them the possible points of view. The object itself is the synthesis of all these appearances. The perception of an object is thus a phenomenon of an infinity of aspects. What does this mean for us? It means that we must make a tour of objects..." (p. 9)
All desire is created equal
All sensory experiences are figments of imagination and also a form of desire. Having ideas about making art, or actively making art are both consummations of desire. But "tastes" are typically short-durational impulses whereas art is more long-durational. Even looking at art is potentially a long-durational accounting for the time making it and the accumulated history: You might have glanced at it for 10 seconds, but there could be 500 years that you witnessed.
But the forms we ultimately create are usually not what we had a "taste for". When we are involved in a creative act, the “taste” emerges from the assemblage of raw ingredients, which is different from a manufactured experience of eating meals made for you. It's easy as a consumer to satiate one's tastes by eating at restaurants that make things that consistently satisfy. To make something for intrinsic reward can take months or years. But it all redounds to the same imagined desire, satisfied or not.
The challenge for both artists and viewers is to consummate similar desires. And yet, the analogy has perfect circularity: the feeling of sharing a good meal is the same as liking the same things together, making the possibility of cultivating taste more likely.
Takeaways:
Predominant.ly allows the listener to search by predominant colors in album covers. (Choose your album cover colors wisely because algorithms have olfactory capabilities).
The Digital Taste Simulator: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/269324
Perceiving color is typically not a belief, but has the capacity for it, based on contemporary worldviews. In the Middle Ages, for example, red would have had a completely different meaning, affecting how the brain was wired to perceive the semiotic effect of red. If you become blind at some point in your life, you still have that memory of red, just as you have the memory of the taste of an orange. If I ask, "what does orange taste like", you would have a memory for it, but no means to effectively express it with language alone. Ultimately consciousness is all synesthetic, whether or not you have synesthesia.