Studying the Aesthetics of Images and Advertising Films: Combining Systemic-Functional Grammar and Audience Physiology

The notion, that aesthetic objects are not only things but also does something to those who engage with them, is consistent among various researchers in the arts and humanities; and also that this is not primarily a matter of interpretative symbolic meaning in the fields of semiotics and hermeneutics, but may rather be associated with sense perception, such as arousal, vigilance, fascination and appraisal (Marković 2012). In this position paper, we sketch out a conceptual approach for the study of art by combining, on the one hand, the systemic-functional and social-semiotic approach to textual analysis of grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006, van Leeuwen 1999), and on the other hand, attentional and affective-computing techniques for measuring audience response.