Research and other interests:
Cognitive
Science, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Mind. My primary research
interests
are in the philosophy of art and neuroscience and concern attempts
to
understand and explain art and aesthetic experience in terms of the
operation
of perceptual systems. Current research includes developing a
model
for exploring questions at the intersection of philosophy and the
neuroscience
of art derived from a diagnostic
recognition framework for
perception
and a biased competition model for
selctive attention, studies of
a potential role for motor simulation in picture perception,
the relationship
between
expert knowledge, attention, and perception in our engagement with artworks
in a range of media including painting, sculpture, music, dance, film, and
literature, crossmodal perception in the arts, and the ongoing general project of smoothing the
way for interdisciplinary collaboration between neuroscience and philosophy
in aesthetics and the philosophy of art.
I am also a sculptor
and have collaborated with colleagues in dance, choreography, and computer
science to develop an automatic scoring technique for multi-media
performances. My sculpture has been exhibited in New York City, Tokyo, The
Addison Gallery of American Art, and Yale University. More recently I have
been experimenting and collaborating with my philosophy of art students,
exploring automatic and chance procedures in drawing and dance.
Once upon a time I
was an avid wilderness canoeist. I had hitched a ride75 kilometers down Lac
Mistassini with Tommy to the Cree village of Baie du Poste to check on the
location of a forest fire blocking the way in the picture above. We were
five weeks from James Bay and looking for a route around the conflagration.
There
are some stories that I once played guitars with some folks in New York
City. None of the muddy porch players have been booked for a garage band
hoedown in a while (CBGB's, Brownies, and The Lakeside Lounge are closed -
only Arlene Grocery survives). I do, however, currently have aspirations to
remember how to play my mandolin and learn how zydeco goes on an accordian.
