SENTIMENT HOVERS

I kept asking about who I really was to myself during the previous art work project <Welcome to my Pitch-Grey Area>. Who am I? Why do I feel like this when meet this certain situation? What am I composed of? These questions do bother me all the time and I am still finding answers to them. But now at least I have figured out the fundamental idea before all the questions are answered; all answers are based on experience, and more importantly on sentiment.

I insist that experience and sentiment together define each one of us. Lauren Slater introduced B. F. Skinner’s theory of behaviorism based on reward and penalty in Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century, written by Lauren herself. Skinner tried to explain reasons about addiction beyond Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s theory, explaining about conditioned reflex through a dog dripping his saliva after hearing footsteps of his owner, expecting his food. When Pavlov did the experiment showing about conditioned response – when there is a ringing bell, there must be food – Skinner, instead, showed why we do the same thing addictively and repeatedly although the repeated behaviour isn’t really helpful or beneficial and more likely it is really noxious. Skinner did an experiment with rats. He set up an interesting device – it was an device that gave food when rats push its lever. It wasn’t a simple device giving food for one push, but it needed random numbers of push. Rats might need only one push to gain food, or might need to push levels even for 30-40 times. As a result, rats didn’t respond to the sound of food dropping; they knew that they should push levels instead to be fed. It was pretty hard to remove that behaviour like before the experiment.

For mice, they showed their addiction by pushing levels for their rewards – this case their food. Let us substitute this fact to humans. Addictive behaviour like losing all money at a casino, drugs intake and alcohol, and other habits are done by people. I mean other habits as breathing in the air on an early morning, after feeling so good by doing at it. Athletes do a thing as a jinx before their matches to prevent defeat. All these actions can be explained by Skinner’s experiment. Skinner concluded that people had no free will. Skinner seemed to see the rewards as reinforcer; he believed people are dominated by the reinforcer. This reinforcer can be feelings like love and the rewards that give happiness. Lauren Slater introduced his experiment with a subtitle, ‘Humans are made as being kneaded.’

Sentiments are really complicated, and yet many psychologists cannot gather their opinions to one point they all can agree. Not so long ago I watched a movie called “Inside Out” which showed how feelings grew mature. The movie shows that babies have their own feelings even the feelings are really simple. I wonder how the babies feels according to each situation they are in. They have not yet learned how to feel or react. Besides, the movie shows the feeling can be combined together with two or more feelings, as if we already know this feeling although we have not yet taught by someone else. When this happen, I do not know how to explain or say, it makes me really confused.

These emotions are explained to be made based on errors, information and other collected data from the past we have gone through by Lisa Feldman Barrett. According to a book called “How Emotions are made,” Emotions become present by the combination of the nurture circumstance and the culture that you are in, and your limber brain, which makes its own development, relating with your body conditions and environments you are in. Emotions do exist not like neurons that has objective meaning but like currency; they are the fruits of the agreements between people. People make meanings to current sentiments they have based on their experiences from their pasts, books, photos, or movies. She also mentions that our brains use fragments of our memories that are organized with concepts to guide our behaviors and give meanings to our emotions; if related concepts are emotional concepts, then our brains make sequence of emotions

Lisa Feldman Barrett insists that the word ‘sentiment’ is not an emotional fact like fixed files saved in a brain, but reflect numerous emotional meanings that are composed of fragments of how personal emotion knowledge reacts to simple signals from the world. So, the sentiments are not simply responses to the world, but partial fractions of each one of our own worlds, Barrett says.

My questions are now answered roughly. My brain predicts, makes errors, experiences and helps me to feel gathered information sensually and remember all these so that I can have coherent feelings to any situation I have. Therefore, I should conclude that sentiments are part of my world and of mine.

These memories and emotions can be overlapped a lot so these parts can be cropped and can vanish like they have not existed before, like we do the same when videos are being edited before being uploaded or sent to be viewed. Then those which are cropped to be vanished, where do they go?

The movie <Inside out> describes dim recollections and feelings are put to “Memory Dump” and are forgotten. Then, they may be able to be named as potential scraps with destiny to be erased forever.

According to these facts, I may give an opinion that sentiments are like stones. The stones and the sentiments have a same point that both of them have environment effect a lot. The characters of stones are made based on where and how the stones are made. Emotions are same. Stones can be split and vanish as well like emotions become dimmed and vanished. I decided to visualize the emotions as stones. Hands are thought as one of easiest parts of our body to see our feelings like temper, sadness and happiness. The hands’ gestures are different according to each emotion. I use my hands to hand-rub clays to visualize the emotions, using their pressure depending on what I feel.

From the start of my work, I use colours less and less and now I use only black and white for the current series of works about sentiments. I guess this means being lack of my emotions more and more.