The Posthuman Condition

The view of the self as part of the world , iPad painting, 2011 (After Ernst Mach)

Studio Painting 1 (White Series) , 2011, Oil and sand on shaped panel (see more)

View of bedroom , Lavagna, Italy, 2011 (see more)

Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XVII Burlingame, California Session 8: Art Theory, Perception, and Rendering Date: Thursday 26 January ...

Talk to be given at: Psycho-Ontology The Shalem Center, Jerusalem December 11-15, 2011 "Do the operations of the human mind have someth...

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience , 2010 To the naïve observer, cubist paintings contain geometrical forms in which familiar objects are hardl...

Tagungsband Realismus nach den europäischen Avantgarden, Verlag für Kommunikation, Kultur and Soziale Praxis, Bielefeld, (in press). This p...

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience , 2011 In this article I will discuss the intersection between art and neuroscience from the perspective of ...

J ournal of Consciousness Studies (in press) How have artists understood the relationship between the mind and the world? This paper presen...

Co-authored with Riccardo Manzotti, AI & Society (in press) Throughout much of the modern period the human mind has been regarded as a ...

The forefront of human endeavour is extraordinarily diverse. At one time we have physicists building the CERN particle accelerator to search...

‘Recall a simple and ancient truth: the subject of knowledge cannot exist independently from the object of knowledge. To see is to see somet...

In this paper I will address two moments in cinematic history: a shot that occurs in Robert Wiene's avant-garde production of The Cabine...

http://perceptual-technologies.com/

In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science Edited by Bruce Clarke, Manuela Rossini "We live in a time when dialogue between t...

In this chapter I will consider some of the consequences of externalism for art. I will argue that some artists have intuitively understood ...

One of the functions of the brain and perceptual system is to categorize data from the world into discrete meaningful chunks and so impose d...

While new forms of bio-art seem to signal a change in direction for contemporary art and ideas, they in fact merely extend a tradition that ...

There have been enormous shifts in the intellectual landscape since the first edition of The Posthuman Condition was published in 1995. The ...

I will argue one reason the nature of consciousness is so deeply mysterious is because there is much more at stake than the relatively local...

The idea that there is a world full of real objects existing whether or not we are there to see them is taken for granted by most of us. It ...

I'm currently working on a new book about art and consciousness, so posts to this blog will be few and far between for a while.

Gober Untitled 1990 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The conceptual surprise in this piece comes from the co-presence in one place of two ...

Warhol National Velvet 1963 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art This Warhol poses a dilemma: in one respect, we have a series of dispassionat...

Matisse Femme au Chapeau 1905, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art This is clearly a provocation. The hat is vague and incoherent and topple...

Much of our experience of an artwork is unconscious or semi-conscious. We are aware of aspects of its form or meaning that are not necessari...

Lichtenstein Rouen Cathedral Set V [center] 1969 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The Ben Day dots simultaneously sustain and interfere w...

Giacometti, 1957, Bust of Diego , San Francisco Museum of Modern Art There is no reality aside from that perceived — a perception that is in...

Miro Peinture (Painting) [formerly Dark Brown and White Oval] 1926 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The soft brown space is misty and s...

It doesn't seem right to say we are beings 'in' the world, as if the world were a container within which we exist as a component...

If a claim is made that the nature of truth consists in having attribute y , then that claim must itself have the same attribute y (if it is...

28 September - 9 October 2009 St John the Baptist Crypt, Nelson Street, Bristol, BS1 2EZ Other Dimensions includes a selection of paintin...

Various paintings (2009. Various media, various sizes) A selection of smaller paintings that study the interplay between the image, its...

Fixing (2009. Oil on canvas, 123 x 123 cm) We sometimes talk about ‘fixing the eye’ on something in an effort to be more certain about wh...

Triangles in red, black and mauve (2009, Triptych. Oil on constructed panels, 123 x 246 cm) Viewing the painting from a distance of about th...

Still life with flowers and paintings (2009, Triptych. Oil on constructed panels, 130 x 173 cm) The paintings depict everyday objects arrang...

The Deposition (2009, Triptych. Oil on constructed panels, 180 x 360 cm) The design of this triptych is loosely based on a classical ...

Just the right sort of wrongness is needed.

Sometimes the colour is the subject

Cezanne, Portrait of Gustave Geffroy , 1895 "He stated that he wanted to make of impressionism "something solid like the art in th...

Bacon, Three studies for a crucifixion , 1962 Bacon: I want a very ordered image, but I want it to have come about by chance. Sylvester: It...

Odilon Redon, Roger and Angelica, Pastel, 1910 "The title that occasionally identifies my drawings can be superfluous. It is justified...

I increasingly find the act of writing is merely a process of skirting around my own ignorance.

Pencil and crayon on paper

Pencil on paper

1. We experience the external world outside the head. 2. The head contains all experience, including that of the external world. 3. We exper...

1. We can distinguish between internal subjective experience and external objective reality. 2. The distinction between internal experience ...

Ink and oil pastel on paper, 2009

If we separate the object (the 'thing in itself') from its appearance ('in our senses') then we have created the problem of ...

We could say that objects in the world do exist; they have objective properties like colours, shapes, sounds, tastes, etc. that (by any reas...

Nature (or reality) is is neither continuous nor discontinuous. When we are analysing natural phenomena it's fine to decide that a dist...

Any version of realism that assumes the world as it appears to humans is equivalent to the world 'as it is' must be dubious. Because...

When did people start smiling in photographs?

Patrick Caulfield, Interior with a picture, 1986 Art training consists in large part in cultivating perceptual awareness, particularly visu...

For every idea or opinion held exists the potential for another that opposes it, however delusional, irrational or trivial the contradiction...

Philip Nicol, Sun Shower , oil on canvas This painting depicts a scene that I have never seen in actuality. It may be something the artist n...

The world generated by perception is not the world 'as it is'. The world 'as it is' is infinite, the world as perceived is f...

"In science, you must not talk before you know. In art, you must not talk before you do. In literature, you must not talk before you th...

The function of the brain is not to represent reality but to generate it.

Studies of animal vision suggest that different species have very different visual experiences of the world. Cats and dogs, for example, ar...

Clare Chapman , Dusk #2 , 2008, oil on canvas, 100×140cm

"We assume that the 'Indeterminate Dyad' is a straight line or distance, not to be interpreted as a unit distance, or as having...

Writing is really re-writing.

"Thereby also some light may be thrown upon the problem toward which all our enquiries converge, that of the union of body and soul. Th...

"Whenever anything looks like what it is not, the resemblance being so great as nearly to deceive, we feel a kind of pleasurable surpr...

"To gaze upon the clouds of autumn, a soaring exaltation in the soul; to feel the spring breeze stirring wild exultant thoughts; — w...

"But I say that the art is greatest, which conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of the gr...

Tegn , Christian Dotremont, 1971 "The forms which appear to us today as the most valuable, as much through their formal arrangement as ...