DIT PhD/MPhil Project
Supervisor name & contact details:
Name: Tim Stott/Noel Fitzpatrick
Tel : 01 4024129/4151
Email: tim.stott@dit.ie/noel.fitzpatrick@dit.ie
Weblink (if available)
Research Centre Name and Website (if
applicable)
Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media
Funding Agency
If no funding is available, please leave blank
Scholarship Details
Please give details of student stipend and
research fees covered by the funding
Subject Area
Neuroarthistory/Neuroaesthetics
Title of the Project
The Neuro-Science of Contemporary Art
Project Description (max 300 words)
In the past twenty years, the emerging field of neuroscience has provided the basis for numerous
analyses of the cognitive and perceptual characteristics of visual art, historical and contemporary.
Such analyses have begun to displace previous interpretative methodologies based upon linguistic
and symbolic systems, and promise an approach to art grounded in biology and global in its
scope. Hence, the recent emergence of a World Art History that studies art as a function of our
biological inheritance, essential to human evolution, beyond the confines of a Western tradition.
That said, for the most part the examples from neuroaesthetics and neuroarthistory have been,
with the former, reductive, and with the latter, concerned with historical varieties of picturing.
The field of contemporary arts practice offers a diversity of experimental investigations into
perception and cognition on a 1:1 scale with social forms, but these latter have yet to be
subjected to systematic analysis in view of their contribution to knowledge of the correlation
between perception, consciousness, and brain function.
Carsten Höller’s works are exemplary of such investigations. He constructs works as social
experiments to investigate altered, extraordinary, or ambiguous perceptual experiences and
behaviours, which he calls his “raw materials.” Recent attempts have been made to capture
artistic investigations such as this, including the exhibition, Fundamentally Human: Contemporary Art
and Neuroscience, at the Pera Museum, Istanbul, in April 2011. Also, the ongoing research of the
Humanities and Neuroscience Project at the Italian Academy at Columbia University.
The proposed doctoral project will build upon the emergence of a neuroaesthetics and
neuroarthistory with a view to analyse the specific contributions offered by contemporary art to
knowledge of the biology of perception and cognition. This will be, necessarily, an
interdisciplinary project, requiring the candidate to have competence in diverse fields of
knowledge.
Please indicate the student requirements for this project
BA, MA in the area of Art History, Art Theory, or Philosophy of Art.
Deadline to submit applications (only for
funded projects)
Please choose College as appropriate
College of Art and Tourism
Open-ended call