EVENTS
Perceiving Art: Physics Principles & Research Challenges
A workshop funded by NSF
16-18 October, 2023, Institut Henri Poincaré, Paris
Organizers:
Beata Bajno, artist, architect
Sylvie Benzoni, Director, Institut Henri Poincaré, Paris
Andrzej Herczyński, Boston College
Joanna Dreszer, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń
Jacek Rogala, University of Warsaw (Principal Organizer)
The workshop held on October 16-18, 2023, at the Institut Henri Poincaré (IHP) in Paris. It is a part of a wider program funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) on Exploring the Intersection of Science and Art and is supported by the NSF and the Institut Henri Poincaré.
Founded in 1928, the Institut Henri Poincaré is an international research center for mathematical sciences and their applications and a part of Sorbonne Université and the CNRS. The primary mission of the Institute is to promote and host scientific exchanges and to organize international research programs in mathematics, physics, and related fields. For more information please see: https://www.ihp.fr/en .
The aim of the workshop is to explore how viewers experience visual art by integrating a variety of different research approaches and techniques, such as EEG, fMRI, eye tracking, psychological and behavioral studies, and explainable neural networks. While a number of researchers work on these subjects individually, the workshop will hopefully help start a more cohesive community. The interest, from the scientific point of view, is to identify general principles of the perception of art and promising new approaches. We anticipate that a multidisciplinary character of the workshop, bringing together physicists, mathematicians, biologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and psychiatrists—as well as practicing artists—will prove conducive to a productive exchange of ideas, and will stimulate new research directions.
Art and Science as Ways of Knowing and Experiencing the World: Creativity, Abstraction and Learning
11th Peripatetic Conference, Zakopane, October 27-30, 2022
Keynotes:
Yanna Popova (Centre Q)
Daniel Sobota (IFiS PAN)
Ilona Iłowiecka-Tańska (Copernicus Science Center)
Wiesna Mond-Kozłowska (Researcher in the field of Comparative Aesthetics, Choreographer, Polskie Stowarzyszenie Antropologii Tańca)
Jacek Rogala (Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology)
Beata Bajno (Artist)
The aim of the conference is to look at the experiences and practices of artists and scientists in their respective fields, in order to establish whether they reflect similar or dissimilar processes. Over the years there have been attempts (mainly in the literature devoted to creativity research) to argue that they are largely similar courses of action in a creative process of discovery, while many have also claimed that they are essentially distinct ways of epistemic relating to the world that cannot communicate with each other. On the one hand, in both art and science, there is a clear process of cultivation of skills and proficiencies: authors, musicians, painters create but also reflect on and revise their reflections, a procedure that resembles the honing of scientific hypotheses. On the other hand, there exists a strong consensus that art is somehow an expression of emotion and sensory experience (aesthesis), while scientific research is assumed to aim at truth and express some kind of objective description of the world.
