The whole is “other” than the sum of its parts : An investigation of synesthesia and perception through a patchwork

Some people experience music as colourful patterns or feel it as a physical touch, they have synesthesia. A neurological condition in which a stimulus of one sense automatically and involuntarily triggers a sensation in another sense. This shows that perception is not normative. The aim of this work is to try to develop an understanding of this phenomenon by using textile dyeing and patchwork as a tool for my investigation of it. Another aim is to raise awareness and try to see if it is possible for a non synesthete to experience something similar to the complex intersensory connections as those with synesthesia have. The sum of all perceptions of a human, after it has been processed by their own mind, can result in something that is not just the sum of each individual perception, but something that can at the end be quite different from what might be expected. This motivated the title, and furthermore leads naturally into the Gestalt theory of perception, which is used as the major theoretical framework for this paper.