Skip to content

Peter FitzGerald: ‘Connemara Abstract 1c’; digital print based on lino cuts and photograph

Peter FitzGerald: ‘Connemara Abstract 1c’; digital print based on lino cuts and photograph

Connemara Abstract 1c; digital print based on lino cuts and photograph

Reproduction of Peter FitzGerald: ‘Connemara Abstract 1c’ on Scientific American website, 2023

Very pleased to have been included among the ‘Editor’s Picks’ on the Scientific American website, August 2022; more here.

Syndetic art

  • What happens when we look at a work of art? A great deal, obviously, but the processes, particularly the higher-level ones which make looking at art worthwhile and meaningful, are poorly understood. I want to use art itself to research at the interfaces of visual art, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience (and possibly also AI). This is an approach from the ‘wrong’ end, compared to the scientific method, but I believe that I can make new art that ‘binds’ components of the artwork to higher-level processes in the viewer.

  • From Galway. I have a D Phil in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford, specialising in memory and attention, and I have done research and published at both pre- and post-doc level. In a change of course, literally, I graduated from NCAD in 1995 with a first in Fine Art painting. I have exhibited widely but sporadically. From 1998 to 2011 I was editor of Circa Art Magazine. More recently I have worked on many web and print projects as editor, coder and / or designer, while continuing to make art.

  • Ultimately, the domains of art and science are about the same thing: what it means to be us. But when science attempts to decode the arts, the arts tend to respond with, in Eliot’s words, “That is not it, at all.” Science breaks a thing apart. The arts point out that the thing is now broken. The two tendencies aren’t entirely at odds; for example, Modernism’s trend towards minimalism sought to discard the inessential … until it too felt broken.[1]

    More
  • Pattern is of specific interest to me; it is something that I am very keen to study and experiment with. There are at least three reasons that it is so interesting:

    More
  • It’s is a great time to be in this research area. Synergies across cognitive psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and AI mean that, steadily, more credible models have emerged for how we understand the world. We can now theorise, with empirical back-up, about how our bodies and brains construct our cognitive processes (selves, minds), and how these processes give form to our non-conscious and conscious being in the world. [5]

    More
  • I believe (1) that we may be able to create a lingua franca of pictorial components that bind to perceptual and higher processes; and (2) that they may work equally as art and as a tractable approach for the cognitive sciences. It’s even possible to imagine (admittedly as a non-practitioner) analogues of ‘attention circles’ and the like in other artforms – music, poetry, etc. In the arts and sciences we’d no longer be talking past each other.

    More
  • Scientific American asked to place one of these three recent ‘syndetic’ pieces of mine onto their website.

    More
    1. Chatterjee (2014) gives a very good introduction to thinking and research at the arts-science crossover, though I find one or two of his explanatory mechanisms unlikely. There’s a useful overview of some recent arts-related neuroscience thinking in Carew and Ramaswami (2020).

    More
    • Barrett, L. F. (2017) How emotions are made. New York: Houghton Millin Harcourt.

    More

PhD: I am honoured to be entering my second year of a part-time doctorate in Dr Brendan Rooney’s Lab in University College Dublin. Artworks in progress centre around the paraphernalia of empirical psychology. The research question itself is still under discussion (!).