Continua (Ordering as a Cognitive Pattern)

 

As a Universal, art ideally should have decorative qualities. But the growing list of Universals 1 (derived from the book Human Universals 2) includes many alternates. The one that has most interested me is "Continua (Ordering as a Cognitive Pattern)". This is something that nicely applies to photography as an "Art Universal".

In the book Beyond Culture, anthropologist Edward Hall asserted that certain cultures are "high-context", meaning they operate on a set of rules and traditions tacitly implied. This is not synonymous with being globally "universal" as cultures are disparate and not necessarily global. We like to entertain the notion of "one world", but if place is a controller of cultural variety, it is simply not possible for everything to have global qualities. In the visual and sonic arts (respectively), there are ordering principles that are similarly defined and may cohere among a majority of cultures, e.g. all tools that involve gripping with bare hands will be rounded in shape, and dark sonorities (minor keys and minor seconds will be globally perceived as having a dark mood (non-arbitrary mapping between color and sound). Visual perception redounds to a pattern and order in the form of Continua, or things that form a natural progression or sequence. Donald Brown correlated them with language, specifically nouns. A "visual language" can also have its "noun", here in the form of photographs arranged in sequence in a book.