Visual enchantment and captivating styles

This chapter examines how other-than-human entities, such as materials, animals, plants, forces, spirits and deities, actively shape the technical and creative processes involved in artistic production. Building on Alfred Gell’s concept of artworks as both enchanting and enchanted technologies, it argues that these non-human participants leave perceptible traces of their encounters in the resulting objects, influencing how viewers experience them. These traces are seen to enhance the magical efficacy of the artwork according to the specific ontological strategies adopted by both artists and, more importantly, recipients or viewers. That is, when viewers are dazzled by an artwork, they may either recognise these other-than-human contributions or, conversely, obscure them by attributing the work’s effects solely to the artist’s virtuosity and skill. Using the operational concepts of visual enchantment and captivating styles, combined with methods from visual cognition research, this chapter renders these processes analytically visible for further investigation.