automatism

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Related to automatist: automatistic behavior

Automatism

An involuntary act such as sleepwalking that is performed in a state of unconsciousness. The subject does not act voluntarily and is not fully aware of his or her actions while in a state of automatism. Automatism has been used as a defense to show that a defendant lacked the requisite mental state for the commission of a crime. A defense based on automatism asserts that there was no act in the legal sense because at the time of the alleged crime, the defendant had no psychic awareness or volition. Some American jurisdictions have recognized automatism as a complete, Affirmative Defense to most criminal charges. An Insanity Defense, by comparison, asserts that the accused possessed psychic awareness or volition, but at the time of the offense, the accused possessed a mental disorder or defect that caused them to commit the offense or prevented them from understanding the wrongness of the offense.

automatism

see INSANITY.

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References in periodicals archive ?

During this period, he became acquainted with their automatist techniques which, both in poetry and painting, are based on the free association of images and ideas.

A turning point in modernism. (Latin American artists Diego Rivera, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Wifredo Lam and Roberto Matta

Finally, Untitled (1954) features the interplay of latticework with automatist dripping, as Krasner again contrasted variations of light and dark, line and color, structure and improvisation.

Collage and the nature of order Lee Krasner's Pastoral Vision

Beyond immediate sensation or the phenomenology of everyday life, Lawrence's syntax and style express an automatist energy in the blood-consciousness with which the Brangwen men are surcharged.

Lawrence and the creative process

Each of the periods of Borduas's work is well-represented in "Borduas and the Automatist Epic" but the most impressive part of the show is its assemblage of his late, generously scaled black and white abstractions, painted after he moved to Paris in 1955.

An anniversary in Montreal: "Refus global" at 50

Although Jamie has long insisted that his "drawings have always been rendered automatically," his reliance on procedures of layering and erasure marks his distance from the automatist legacy of Surrealism, a movement toward which he expresses a certain aversion, although that has not stopped critics from interpreting his latest work through this lens.

Minor threat

While Myers thought that the medium could produce veridical information unknown to her, he did not think it possible for a medium to produce "mathematical formulae or Chinese sentences, if the automatist is ignorant of mathematics or of Chinese" (Vol.

On the centenary of Frederic W.H. Myers's Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death

This part of the show concluded with a concise selection of automatist works by Surrealists Robert Desnos, Andre Masson, Yves Tanguy, and Breton's paramour and muse Nadia.