Prolegomena to a Structural Aesthetics: Attention Gradients, Bodily Topology, and the Design of Absence

This paper proposes a reconsideration of aesthetic experience not as a property of objects or as a matter of surface-level representational accuracy, but as a dynamic structure formed among cognition, body, space, time, and meaning. Recent AI-generated images have made visible the fact that precision of depiction or photographic realism does not by itself guarantee aesthetic success. However, the aim of this paper is not to offer a critique of AI images as such. Rather, AI images are treated as a contemporary case through which the underlying structure of aesthetic experience can be examined alongside photography, painting, games, person perception, bodily expression, VTubers, and the design of absence. This paper defines aesthetic reality not as correspondence to external reality, but as fit with the structure of human cognition. Human beings do not perceive the world uniformly. We experience the world through differences in attention, omission, supplementation, bodily orientation, traces of relationships, and predictions of future action. Aesthetic expression, therefore, does not consist in reproducing reality as it is. It consists in compressing, cutting, and arranging the structural necessities dispersed within reality into aesthetically experienceable gradients. The attention gradient discussed in this paper is also connected to the concept of Ratio developed in my other works. Ratio is a basic concept for understanding objects not as isolated sets of attributes, but as relations, proportions, and distributions among multiple elements. In aesthetic experience as well, what matters is not the absolute precision of individual elements, but the relational distribution of what is foregrounded, what is backgrounded, what is omitted, and what is supplemented. Photography does not simply capture reality. Through focus, aperture, composition, and the cutting of time, it reconstructs as aesthetic objects moments that the naked eye cannot stably contemplate. Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa is an extreme case in which, without photographic machinery, prolonged observation and embodied line extract the necessary intermediate forms inherent in wave motion and compress them into a single image. In games, effects such as sparks, blur, particles, and hit-stop are lies that do not exist in physical reality, yet function as cognitive designs that provide operable gradients within saturated information spaces. In person perception, makeup and ornamentation operate as attention devices that draw focus to specific body parts and generate predictions of unrealized actions, gazes, touches, and bodily states. In VTubers, the asymmetry between the non-photorealistic avatar and the reality of bodily motion invites the viewer's supplementation and generates a sense of being. Through these cases, this paper argues that beauty is not a property residing in the object itself, but a dynamic Ratio structure arising among attention, body, time, meaning, absence, and prediction.