BARCELONA INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL (BISS) Interesantes cursos en Julio, convalidables por créditos optativos para los estudiantes del sistema universitario español. Perfecto Herrera, del departamento de Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación y yo damos un curso sobre cerebro y arte:

THE ARTISTIC BRAIN: BIOLOGY AND COMPUTATION BEHIND PAINTING AND MUSIC 

Science and art are rooted in our perception of the world. The course is aimed at exploring the biology perception and its implications on how we experience artwork. It is a discussion on beauty and the brain, a discussion on the history of breakthroughs in painting and on the nature of the irresistible attraction of music for humans.

The course starts with a general overview of how our senses build up a representation of the world, with particular reference to the visual and auditory systems. We shall discuss the biology underlying great painter’s achievement of the impossible: the conquest of space and movement on a canvas. Then we do a similar exercise with music, looking at the biological and evolutionary roots of musical perception. This will lead us to a general discussion on beauty and art: the notion of artists as intuitive neuroscientists, the perceptual grammar of art, aesthetic universals and computational aesthetics (can a machine be “creative”?, can an algorithm decide on aesthetic properties?)