Instructor Spotlight: Lucie March and Lena Warnke

Tell us about your background and what inspired you to teach this course

Lucie March: I am an artist and educator who works with the still and moving image and I spend a lot of time thinking about perception as it relates to photography and lens-based media. I’m interested in how we approach the impossible task of communicating our subjective experiences through art. Talking with Lena about her cognitive neuroscience work, we found a lot of overlap in the kinds of questions we were asking, and started to imagine a course we could teach that would give form to those conversations and questions.

Lena Warnke: My research looks at the cognitive mechanisms underlying language comprehension, specifically how people understand each other in social settings like everyday conversation. It turns out that we are able to understand each other beyond just the literal level – we infer what someone is saying based on the broader context. The same utterance can mean very different things in different conversational contexts. I’ve always been curious about how this phenomenon applies to perception, and have noticed many parallels regarding how important context is in how we experience the world. The same color can look very different in different contexts, and the same sound is heard very differently in different contexts too. Lucie and I have spent many evenings discussing perception, art, photography, and learning from each other, and we realized the many overlapping questions across these different fields. We thought that a course surrounding these questions would be interesting, and bridge disciplines in new ways.

What would you say to someone who thinks art and science are completely separate?

Both: You’re wrong! Art and science have a lot of overlap, especially in their methodology. Artists and scientists are usually starting from a point of curiosity; exploration and experimentation are common artistic and scientific methods. Artists are often, whether consciously or not, applying scientific principles in their artmaking – for example: in his paintings, Claude Monet painted far away objects blue to create the visual illusion of Rayleigh scattering, a phenomenon where shorter wavelengths of light, especially blue, scatter in the atmosphere more than longer wavelengths (which is why we see a distant skyline or distant mountains as blue). Scientists often use creative tools in their research – for example, the moral psychologist Dr. Kathryn B. Francis used VR to test human decision-making in the Footbridge Moral Dilemma.

Would you consider yourselves artists, scientists, or both?

LM: I would consider myself an artist and a beginner scientist. Actually – in a way, I would also consider myself a beginner artist. Perhaps part of what artists and scientists have in common is something known as “Beginner’s Mind” – a way of being in the world where you constantly renew your status as “beginner” because it allows you to see things in a new way.

LW: I think I’m an artist and a scientist. Historically I’ve always kept my art practice and my research quite separate – they have taken place in relative isolation and disconnection from each other. This course at the ExCollege has provided a rare and rewarding opportunity to discuss in community some of the overlapping questions and phenomena bridging perception across art and science.

What is something coming up in your course that you are excited about?

LM: We are about to have our final project presentations where each student will present an illusion they’ve created and explain how it works. I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone has come up with!

LW: On the first day of the course, students built their own pinhole cameras, and then created a 12-week long exposure.  This week, our students will bring in their cameras and we will all reveal our images together. Hopefully we’ll be able to see the changing path of the sun across the past few months!