The art of seeing impartida por Robert Pepperell, Profesor de Bellas Artes en Cardiff (Cardiff School of Art & Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University), tendrá lugar el próximo 11 de junio de 2014 a las 11:30h en el aula A15 del Edificio Guillem Cifre de Colonya (Campus UIB).
Resumen proporcionado por el ponente:
In this talk I will present a body of research that combines artistic practice with scientific inquiry. The question of how to accurately depict visual space has fascinated artists, architects, scientists and philosophers for hundreds of years. Many scientists and mathematicians have argued that linear perspective, which is based on well-understood laws of optics and geometry, is the correct way to record visual space. Others, mainly artists, have argued that linear perspective projections fail to account for important features of visual experience, and have proposed various curvilinear, subjective, and hyperbolic forms of perspective instead. As an artist I aim to record the appearance of entire visual field in paintings and drawings. It turns out that what I record looks very different from the way reality is normally represented in photography, cinema, and computer graphics. It also turns out that other artists in history seem to have recorded these ’non-perspectival’ features of visual experience in similar ways. To test the validity of these observations a colleague and I compared three sets of artistic depictions of real-world scenes to linear perspective versions (photographs) of the same scenes. They include a series of my paintings, a selection of landscape paintings by Paul Cézanne, and a set of drawings made as part of a controlled experiment by people with art training. When comparing the artworks to linear perspective photographs depicting the same visual space we found consistent differences. In the artworks the part of the scene corresponding to the central visual field was enlarged compared to the photograph and the part corresponding to the peripheral field was compressed. I consider a number of factors that could explain these results and how they might help us understand the aesthetic properties of the artworks concerned.