Knowledge Viewed through the Lens of Painting and Photography. Both Navajo vision and scientific photography picture the project of knowledge as the progressive extension of visible order and pattern through the symbolic representation of primordial realities. Beauty plays a powerful and effective role in the extension of knowledge for both the Navajo and articulate scientists such as Nobel laureates Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Steven Weinberg who have written books on the topic. In the Navajo case, the sounds of primordial winds become the changing hues of the colored sands of the painting. In the case of scientific photography, the sounds of the ocean depths in bathymetry, or the subtle differences of temperature of the earth's surfaces in Landsat composite photography, or the barely perceptible movements of microwave background radiation from the earliest explosions in the cosmos as picked up in Berkeley's COBE project must all be recast into visual form to be understood as an interpretable pattern.
Synesthesia conjoins diverse sensory channels.
Senses do not work in isolation but in conjunction, to report contrasting impressions or signal a convergence of meanings. Todd Siler is a neurologist specializing in the self-conscious reflexivity engendered by perceptions of art. The capacity to reflect is enabled but also complicated by the propensity of diverse sensory channels to model, mime, and reflect one another's impressions in strikingly different media of expression. In all these cases, spectacles unfold within microcosmic environments completely artefacted through deliberately chosen sounds, sights, movements, and spatial arrangements. Moreover, each case tells, through explicit narrative testimony, how sense experiences deliberately engendered in spectacle serve as powerful vehicles for meaning, value, emotion, motives, and relations.