Trench Gothic: The Computer Visualisation of a Disturbing Great WarArtwork

Aesthetic theory has traditionally struggled to explain the interplay of hand, intellect, and emotion in the communicative exchanged between artist and audience. Nowhere is this problem more troublesome than with disturbing art, where the artist makes us think by firstly making us feel uncomfortable. War art is quintessentially intended to disturb, and yet for some reason has been less well studied than war poetry. As we approach the Centenary of the First World War this paper considers how the first-hand experience of the horrors of war becomes vicarious experience through the medium of distrubing art. Data is presented from a slow-motion computer visualisation of how affect (feeling) and cognition (knowing) interact in delivering an intended artistic message, and suggestions are made as to how a better theory of emotional cognition might be the computer artists of the future.