Event 2 | Dr. Daniel Jay's Talk

 

Jay, Daniel. “Cryoart.” Dan Jay Art, http://danjayart.com/.

Dr. Daniel Jay gave an interesting talk touching on various subjects including art, neuroscience of visual perception, and the interaction between art and science. With much experience in both science and art, and having produced art using elements of science, Dr. Jay bridges the gap between art and science and contributes to the Third Culture as described by Professor Vesna. Contrary to my unjustified expectation that works of art heavily featuring scientific elements would be abstract and esoteric rather than emotional, I was struck by poignance of the piece shown below which was made using ingredients of gunpowder on the theme of gun violence.

Jay, Daniel. “Gunpowder.” Dan Jay Art, http://danjayart.com/.

Dr. Jay's brief exposition of the neuroscience of visual perception in relation to art was very fascinating as well. How layers of neurons perceive different aspects of the visual field, lower layers processing simpler elements such as lines and shadow while the higher layers combine those to process shapes and eventually faces, for example. But to wildly complicate things, my mind started asking questions about the nature of reality and our relation to it via perception. Are we actually seeing objects with well-defined boundaries and properties existing in real world (Hoffman 2021)? Or are seeing something entirely different from what it actually is in reality, assuming we can tell the difference should there be an alternate below-the-surface reality (Chalmers 2021)? Or is the previous question entirely nonsensical, not relying on the sense organ that gives us all the meaningful information in the first place? What I value most about art and science is that together they inspire and investigate these fascinating questions.

Chalmers, David J. Reality+ : Virtual Worlds and the Problem of Philosophy. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.

Hoffman, Donald. Case against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.

Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being in Between.” Leonardo, vol. 34, no. 2, The MIT Press, 2001, pp. 121–25, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577014.