Art as a meaningful environment: an integrative model of aesthetic engagement and interpretation

This paper proposes a novel framework for aesthetic experience by conceptualizing artworks as proto-environments-structured, dynamic spaces where meaning emerges through the synthesis of perception, cognition, and embodied interaction. This reframes art from a representational object to a bounded, communicative environment that actively invites engagement. While the model is developed through visual art, it generalizes across material, temporal, and conceptual forms. The framework rests on two integrated mechanisms. First, the distal-proximal continuum of aesthetic engagement differentiates modes of structural engagement along a fluid, non-categorical spectrum: distal engagement emphasizes imaginal projection, whereas proximal engagement involves direct sensorimotor interaction. Artworks typically activate both, producing a blended structural profile. Second, the functional-to-aesthetic stance serves as the interpretive filter that directs how the structural profile is understood. Drawing from the container schema, ecological affordance theory, and the cooperative principle, the stance determines whether embodied inputs are treated primarily as objective structure (external locus) or as non-utilitarian, communicative meaning (internal locus). Once the aesthetic stance is adopted, the artwork's internal locus functions as a meaning-directed environment organized by the same fundamental dimensions as the physical world-space, time, and materiality. Aesthetic meaning emerges through the viewer's embodied negotiation of this structured environment across the distal-proximal range. This perspective reframes artworks not as static messages to decode, but as dynamic fields of engagement whose aesthetic status is determined by how the stance prioritizes embodied inputs as metaphorical content, shaping how bodies move, feel, and think within both physical and imaginal space.