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Connecting Art and the Brain: An Artist's Perspective on Visual Indeterminacy

This paper represents a large body of interdisciplinary research carried out over several years and combining ideas from art, science and philosophy. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience is a world leading journal in the field of neuroscience, brain imaging, and brain studies. Pepperell was invited to submit a paper to this special issue on ‘Art and the Brain’ by the lead editor following the earlier inclusion of a paper on which he had collaborated with neuroscientists from the University of Zurich on the perception of Cubist paintings. The work is original in the way it combines art practice, theory and history with current research in brain science and the psychology of perception. Pepperell proposes a novel theory of object perception based on the indeterminate nature of perceptual stimuli prior to cognitive categorisation, and cite evidence from art historical and scientific sources to support this. The work is also novel in that it offers reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of interdisciplinary inquiry, particularly when conducted between artists and scientists. These reflections are based on several years worth of collaborative studies between Pepperell and various scientists. These studies are unique in the field. The rigour of the research was validated through extensive discussions with scientific colleagues and the stringent peer review process of the journal as well as having been presented at numerous international scientific conferences including Human Brain Mapping (San Francisco 2009), Cognitive Neuroscience Society (San Francisco 2009), Science and Non-Duality (San Francisco 2009), and Towards a Science of Consciousness (Arizona 2010).