Art and Visual Perception

TU TH 1:30-2:45	Fall 2006
Fulton 415	CS392 / PS392 / FA294
Stella X. Yu	Computer Science Department
Michael Mulhern	Fine Arts Department
	Boston College

Natural science begins with and depends upon perception, but perception itself has not aroused the universal curiosity that other subjects of science have. Scientific exploration began with things most distant from us - the stars - and only much later moved inward, toward man himself. It required a sophisticated self-consciousness to appreciate that perception itself constitutes one of the greatest and most difficult scientific problems of all. (Irvin Rock, 1995)

The way the world looks to us is a remarkable achievement that calls for explanation. Few people have gone beyond the knowledge that the eye functions like a camera and yields a picture on the retina. Our perception of a world of objects and events, however, cannot be explained adequately by simply referring to processes within the eye or to the transmission of information into the brain about the retinal image. The usefulness of the analogy of the eye to a camera ends with the formation of that image; the problem of perception then begins: How do we manage to transcend the inadequate, distortion-prone, ambiguous and two-dimensional images on the retina and achieve the rich, constant, usually correct, three-dimensional representation of the world as we do?

Scientists approach this problem by probing the visual system with various visual patterns. The only difference among them is that psychologists focus on the resulting perception, neuroscientists look at neurons' responses, while computer scientists develop and test computational vision algorithms on a machine. Artists are not much different from vision scientists: every piece of artwork is an experiment on expressing light, color, form and rhythm on a given media, through many trials and errors, until desired perceptual effects are achieved.

While perception only became a subject of study a few hundred years ago, art has been around ever since the dawn of civilization. There is a wealth of information and lessons scientists can learn from artists, whereas artists can be better equipped with the knowledge scientists have gained about our visual mechanisms. After all, the ability to draw or paint is to a large extent the ability to see.

In this course, we will bring neuroscience, psychology, computer science and visual art together to examine how we perceive light, color, motion, shape, material, depth and distance. This is not a course on computer arts or art appreciation, but a course on the contribution of visual perception to the generation and viewing of pictorial art, as well as the contribution of artistic rendering to the understanding of inner workings of visual sense. This course is open to anyone who is curious about visual perception.

Last updated on 27-Sep-2006 18:40:51.