Art and Visual Perception TU TH 1:30-2:45 Fall 2007 Fulton 453 CS092 / PS392 / FA294 Stella X. Yu Computer Science Department Michael Mulhern Fine Arts Department Boston College Logistics Syllabus

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?

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.

Created on 14-May-2007.