What dancers are good at and swaggering drunk people lack.

Just as a painting can be beautiful, a movement (of a dancer) can be beautiful to watch.

“One can deem a certain movement beautiful based on one's proprioceptive experience of the movement. In a certain sense an observer can proprioceive the beauty of another's movement. Recent discoveries about the function of mirror neurons “neurons that are activated both when one performs a task and when one sees that task performed” as well as other empirical studies illustrating that when seeing others move we kinesthetically represent their motion, support the case and potentially pave the way toward a third-person proprioceptive aesthetics.”

I think you can clearly see this in the audience at boxing matches, when audience members mimic the punches thrown in the match. Also I think this extends to animal movement; when we see a funny walking monkey or a diving dolphin or birds hovering on some air currents. That makes you sort of feel the way they feel. So vision and proprioception work together.

This effect even works with photographs of movement:

“it has been shown that subjects perceiving static photographs of an individual in motion are more likely to mistake the position of the individual as being further along in the action than as being in a position that is prior to that in the photograph, indicating that even in perceiving static images, we can represent dynamic information.”

Even something as simple as a line can carry a sense of movement (Nike swoosh):

“Subjects tend to perceive geometrical figures in a way that is consistent with how that figure is naturally drawn: if they see a circle being traced by a point of light that speeds up along the top and bottom of the circle and slows down along the sides, subjects tend to perceive an ellipse rather than a circle, which is consistent with the fact that we slow down while drawing sharp curves.”

In my own view we use proprioception not just for movement but also for size, for instance to feel the size of a room. You know.. in the way giant cave can be overwhelming to enter. And you think, bloody hell that's big! Probably it also works for looking at art-objects, particularly the ones that move or suggest movement. I think we can extend this sense also to assimilate objects to become part of the body. For instance cars, tennis rackets, cycles, knives and forks (for Dutch farmers it's only forks).

some interesting words related to this in VreemdeWoordenboek .

— Libarynth > Libarynth Web > TheunKarelse > PlanB > AestheticSense r4 - 16 Apr 2007 - 08:19