Event overview
Departmental Seminar Series: Dr Matthew Pelowski (University of Vienna)
Abstract: Humans appear naturally inclined to both broadcasting and to perceiving each other’s emotional experiences. Especially in the area of empathy or emotion contagion, studies have routinely documented our ability to understand, respond to, and actually mirror others’ affective states, often via faces or bodies. However, while well-documented in basic interactions between people, if and how this occurs via aesthetic media is under-examined. With art or music, certainly a longstanding argument involves such potential for these media to act as a ‘proxy’ for the artist, providing an interface whereby one can “feel in” to share an emotional connection. Yet, especially for visual art, this process has almost never been empirically recorded. Even more, art of course involves a two-way interaction between sender and perceiver, yet research very rarely if ever considered the actual artist’s perspective. In this talk, I discuss several recent research projects in which we work with both artists when producing artworks (installation art, drawings, dances) as well as eventual viewers, tracing the potential for emotional sharing, understanding, and even brain synchronization across these media modalities.
Bio: Dr Pelowski is Senior Postdoc at the Empirical Visual Aesthethics Lab at the University of Vienna. Before this he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie International Fellow in Vienna, a PhD student and postdoc at the University of Nagoya, and earned undergraduate degrees in Fine Art and Advertising from the University of Nebraska.
In 2016, Dr Pelowski received the Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten Award for Outstanding Contributions of Young Scientists from the International Association of Empirical Aesthethics (IAEA). From 2020, he will be consortium leader for the EU Horizon 2020 RIA Project "Societal challenges and the arts".
This talk is part of the seminar series at the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths. All are welcome to attend and no tickets are required.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 12 Dec 2019 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm |
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