Guest lecture at Hatfield

22 05 2023

Our colleague Dr. Jacek Rogala was invited by researchers from the University of Hertfordshire in England to present the results of research conducted as part of CBRS activities. The lecture took place on May 17 as part of the Computer Science Research Colloquium.

In the lecture, entitled Receiving artistic message, Dr. Rogala presented the results of an experiment and analysis conducted at CBRS as part of Project 5: Dynamics of Social and Biological Complex Systems.

Lecture abstract

Psychological investigations indicate that the experience evoked by an artwork may evolve during the decoding of the encrypted artist’s message. This decoding may occur in the same way that information is passed from sender to receiver via an information channel, here the art piece, as described in the information theory proposed by Shannon. In our opinion, the transfer of information from the author to the audience is critical for the reception of artistic intent, and for the understanding of the experience of art. The information embedded in art, along with its reception,
is often implicit therefore it is not obvious whether the transfer occurred. To test for possible transfer and reception by the audience of the intent and information encoded by the artist we designed an experiment where the audience was exposed to either artistic or artificial (produced by neural networks) images. Both types of images were presented in the art gallery in a form of regular exhibition and in the laboratory on a computer screen. Information collected during the experiment included a flow questionnaire, eye tracking and EEG data. Here we present preliminary results of the questionnaire and eye tracking analyses.