Art & Visual Perception

“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.”—John Berger

Psychologists have long been interested in measuring and explaining the phenomena of visual perception. In this course, we will study and reproduce some of the experimental investigations of seeing and the theoretical positions that they support. Our journey will begin with the myriad of visual illusions that have intrigued psychologists and physiologists since the late 19th century. We will engage in a hands-on exploration of these visual illusions and create our own versions of eye-and-brain tricking images. We will also identify their use in works of visual art from a range of periods. The next stop on our psychological travels will be the apparent motion effects that captured the attention of Gestalt psychologists. We will explore the connections between the distinctive theoretical approach of Gestalt psychology and the contemporaneous Bauhaus movement in art, design, and architecture. We will then move on to a consideration of the representation of visual space: In the company of contemporary psychologist Michael Morgan, we will ask how the three-dimensional world is represented in “the space between our ears.” In this section of the course, we will explore the artistic uses of three-dimensional stereoscopic and kinetic images. The spatial exploration section will give us the opportunity to study the artistic development and use of perspective in two-dimensional images. Throughout our visual journey, we will seek connections between perceptual phenomena and what is known about the brain processing of visual information. This is a course for people who enjoy reflecting on why we see things as we do. It should hold particular interest for students of film and the visual arts who are curious about scientific explanations of the phenomena that they explore in their art.