In 1995 I published a book called The Posthuman Condition. This was an early, and in parts naive, attempt to deal with impact of digital technology on art, science, philosophy and what it is to be human. At the core of the book was the idea that in order to make progress with some the most challenging scientific and intellectual problems, such as understanding the nature of consciousness and designing artificially creative technologies, we need to integrate knowledge from many diverse disciplines.

Over the last 25 years I have used art, science, technology and philosophy as vehicles to probe deep questions about human nature and our relationship to the world. I will talk about some of work that has resulted, including an exploration of the phenomenon of visual indeterminacy in art and neuroscience, mapping the structure of human vision with painting and psychophysics, and developing a new form of 3D graphics rendering based on the way humans see. I will suggest that while diverse interdisciplinary research is very difficult it can also be highly productive and may be the only viable approach for certain deep problems.

Presenter Bio

Robert Pepperell, Professor of Fine Art in Cardiff

Robert Pepperell PhD is Professor of Fine Art in Cardiff, UK and a co-founder of Fovotec, a UK-based startup. A practising artist, he has published many scientific and philosophical works on the nature of consciousness, visual perception, neuroscience, art history and theory, and technology. Fovotec have developed a new form of ‘natural perspective’ based on the structure of human vision and implemented it as a novel rendering process for real-time 3D graphics.