Empathy beyond the question of deception. From Jagannath images to Dall-e’s paintings

The observer of a drawing unconsciously reconstructs in their mind the gestures that led to its creation; they are also capable of activating mirror neurons relevant to the execution of the drawing they are looking at. Recent uses of cognitive psychology and neuroscience by the philosophy of art emphasize the importance of considering the artist's intentions in the reception of a work. The aesthetic spectator engages in an act of abduction: they treat the artwork as an indice of a person (whom they try to relate to by putting themselves in their place) and sometimes even interact directly with the artwork as if it were a person. Treating the artwork as a person or as an element of a "distributed person" is the viewpoint proposed by anthropologist Alfred Gell as the most likely to decolonize our theoretical understanding of the reception of artworks. Far from reducing the concept of the artwork as a distributed person to a primitive dimension, Gell suggests thinking of it as transcultural. Building on this work, I would like to discuss the opportunity to draw connections between approaches considered primitive in art and those prompted by recent cases of digitally generated artworks created by algorithmic intelligences. An unexpected structural analogy emerges between so-called primitive productions (such as the "images" of the Jagannath temple in Puri) and the results of cutting-edge technology (Dall-e paintings for example): they both require a complex form of aesthetic reception that I would like to analyze in my presentation. In Jagannath, as in virtual reality, a doubling occurs: it is indeed a matter of treating the object as a person and therefore with empathy without, however, being deceived about its origin (in both cases, the erasure of the artistic intentionality behind the artwork is lucidly taken into account). Undoubtedly, though, the phenomenon of empathy at play becomes more complex.