Portraits of Perception The Human Face
What makes Mona Lisa’s smile so intriguing? What makes Picasso’s portraits so compelling? Kurt Andersen hosts artists Chuck Close and Devorah Sperber, with neuroscientists Margaret Livingstone, Chris Tyler and Ken Nakayama, as they examine the power of brain imaging technology to illuminate how we perceive the most intimate yet public of features, the human face.
Moderator
-
Kurt Andersen
Kurt Andersen is the author of two novels, co-founded Spy magazine, and served as editor-in-chief of New York. He has also been a columnist for New York, The New Yorker and Time. More »
Participants
-
Chuck Close
Chuck Close is a visual artist noted for his highly inventive techniques used to paint the human face, and is best known for his large-scale, photo-based portrait paintings. More » -
Christopher W. Tyler
Christopher Tyler has spent his research career exploring how the eyes and brain work together to produce meaningful vision. More » -
Devorah Sperber
Interested in the links between art, science, and technology through the ages, New York artist Devorah Sperber's work addresses the way the brain processes visual information versus the way we think we see More » -
Ken Nakayama
Ken Nakayama received his B.A. in Psychology from the Haverford College in 1962 and his PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1967. For almost twenty years, he was at the Smith Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco. More » -
Margaret S. Livingstone
Margaret S. Livingstone is best known for her work on visual processing, which has led to a deeper understanding of how we see color, motion, and depth, and how these processes are involved in generating percepts of objects as distinct from their background. More »