ABSTRACT
The concept of plasticity has an aesthetic dimension (sculpture, malleability), just as much as an ethical one (solicitude, treatment, help, repair, rescue) and a political one (responsibility in the double movement of the receiving and the giving of form). Aesthetically, it provides the work of art with the potential for creating an emerging understanding that 'emancipates' the spectator. Scientists are applying their growing knowledge of the brain and how it works to the aesthetic experience. Psychologist Rolf Reber takes a different tack by looking at the processing of perceptual experiences and theorising that the flow of experience or fluency is the source of aesthetic pleasure. His approach bears at least a resemblance to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow. Moments of ambiguity in the aesthetic experience create a disfluency that requires reflection and the construction of representations outside of normative expectations, allowing for the emergence of structures of meaning that attest to the relevance of the disruption.
