Cookies or sea shells? How do you know?

Psychology Professor Flip Phillips will speak about studying human perception of three-dimensional forms when he gives the second of four lectures in conjunction with the upcoming Schick Art Gallery exhibition titled A Resolution of the Arts and Sciences. Free and open to the public, the talk by Phillips will begin at 5 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 4, in Davis Auditorium of Palamountain Hall. 

He will discuss experiments done in his laboratory to study human visual perception of three-dimensional shapes. These experiments make use of a 3-D scanner and a 3-D printer to construct three-dimensional shapes. The shapes created, in turn, sometimes become aesthetic objects in their own right. In his talk, Phillips will consider both sides of the relationship: the contributions of art to his scientific inquiry, and the reciprocal contribution of science to the arts.

Phillips explained what he called the "infinite number of trajectories through the arts and sciences" when he gave 2010 Jon Ramsey Honors Forum Lecture, in which he discussed the value - and exhilaration - of bridging the divide between the sciences and the humanities.

He attended the school of architecture at Ohio State University in the early 1980s, when, he said, "it was a birthplace of computer graphics." Attracted to architecture for its cross-disciplinary combination of art, engineering, and science, Phillips was dazzled by computer graphics when the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill gave a campus demonstration of a computer fly-through of Chicago. Inspired, he created his own self-designed major in computer art and earned a B.F.A. degree in 1986. "Back then, the artists were taking inspiration from the scientists and vice versa," explained Phillips. "Since then, computer graphics has become a trade, but in the 1980s, to work in computer graphics you had to be an artist who knew science or a scientist who understood art."

After earning his bachelor's degree, Phillips taught and researched computer-graphic applications to medicine before finding work as an animator and technical director at the new animation studio Pixar?at the time, another hotbed of interdisciplinary inspiration. When the studio began to become both more successful and more specialized, Phillips returned to Ohio State University for M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in psychology. There his early interest in architecture led him to specialize in aesthetics, vision, and perception, seeking empirical evidence to underpin the human perception of beauty.

Phillips is a past editor of The Mathematica Journal, which focuses on computer mathematics across the spectrum of science, art, and social and economic modeling. He has written and edited books, journal articles, and reviews on subjects ranging from vision science ("The effects of three-dimensional complexity on the perception of two-dimensional depictions of objects") to an iPhone app designed to help organize scholarly desktop files. A member of the Skidmore faculty since 1998, he teaches such courses as quantitative and experimental psychology, perception, and computational neuroscience. Currently, his research centers on the perception of solid shape, perception of texture, and the psychology of aesthetics.

A student curatorial team is working with the Schick to present the exhibition, which runs from Oct. 28 to Dec. 4, and the series of talks preceding the show, which feature work by Skidmore students, faculty, and alumni that explore connections among art, science, and technology. Upcoming lectures in the series include the following:

-Tuesday, Oct. 11, 7 p.m., SUNY Potsdam Art Professor and 1992 Skidmore alumnus Doug Schatz, a double major in art and geology, discusses his artwork.

-Tuesday, Oct. 18, 5 p.m., Skidmore Art Professor John Galt speaks about iron casting and melting iron in Skidmore's cupola furnace.

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