Effects

Then beauty is nothing
But the start of a terror we’re still just able to bear
And the reason we love it so is that it blithely
Disdains to destroy us…
- Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First Elegy”
(as paraphrased by Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing)

What is beauty? What if our pre-conceived conceptions were proven to be false? Ex: a flower with a repulsive scent. Can we be conditioned to detest what was once thought to be beautiful? The first image illustrates “beauty”. The same flower is shown in the next image. If we were to touch this flower (with glass shards affixed to it) eventually such negative repercussions (pain, blood) would cause us to fear the flower. Therefore, conditioning one to despise what was once beautiful.


Identify an Effect within the church: scent of smoke.
Minor manipulations to our senses can instantly trigger memories, e.g. the scent of blown-out candles or lighting a match triggers the memory of “church”.

Side effects of everyday objects can affect our senses in many ways. For example, the buzzing from fluorescent ballasts and neon lights (pictured), flickering of lights, peculiar odors and whitenoise from the television or a fan may have effects of varying degrees.

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When sensorial information is disconnected from its source, i.e., isolating the sound made from an ordinary object and juxtaposing it with an unrelated image, how does the original sound register against its new environment? We tend to trust our sense of sight over the other senses; when what we see and what we hear has been misaligned, how does the mind compensate? Do we project our own beliefs onto the image and think we hear what we are seeing?