Neuroscience and Art Collide!
Meet Jess Herrington, an artist who consolidates art and science through digital experiences.
Photo: Courtesy of Jess Herrington
Have you ever thought about how art and science interconnect? When we talk about art, it might seem as if science doesn´t have a role in it, but actually, it turns out science can shape art. Jess Herrington creates surreal worlds in augmented and virtual reality combining neuroscience, psychology, creativity, and new technologies to design digital experiences. She explores how we represent ourselves in the age of the internet. In her creative work, she seeks for her audience to rethink the way of living and perceiving beauty, and emotional connection while existing in an artificial environment. Herrington uses her social media platforms to disrupt the way people are using them, and to see if her work can instigate and mobilise people.
Her work has been presented at international vision science conferences, art galleries, and festivals. Moreover, Jess has developed apps that have been used for scientific, creative, and educational purposes and has collaborated with software giant Adobe. Jess has worked closely with the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) and writes about art, science and technology for mainstream publications such as Sci Art in America, Runway Experimental Art, and Medium.
Karen: You are getting a PhD in visual neuroscience at the Australian National University. How has this influenced your art?
Jess: I started off my training as an artist first. I was living in London for a while and working at a design studio. I wanted to experience new things and see if my other interests could influence my art in some way. I’ve always been drawn to the art-science connection, so I got a degrees in philosophy and psychology, and then I ended up focusing a lot on visual perception because I was interested in how we visually perceive things in our world. I’m interested in how people’s brains work and how this affects our perception of the world. So I moved back to Australia, I did a master in visual neuroscience and now I’m doing my PhD in visual neuroscience.
K: For some years now, digital art has changed artistic practices. In a COVID-19 world, what advantages do you think that digital art has gotten in relation with other artistic disciplines?
J: I was in the a more “traditional” art world for a long time, and I moved to digital (art) because I wanted my work to be more accessible to people. I think that since before COVID-19, there was already a big push for digital art worldwide because of this accessibility. With online art, you don’t necessarily have to go to a gallery or visit a studio to create your work. I think digital art breaks down a lot of barriers for everyone, but especially for people who have disabilities or who live remotely or who, for any reason, cannot visit the arts in a traditional gallery setting. I think digital art is so essential in times of the pandemic in terms of bringing people together and having that creative social experiences together.
K: It’s super nice to see Digital Arts from that point of view. On the other hand, social media has been criticised for distancing us from experiences in real life, but since the pandemic started they have become the only channel, for most of us, to keep us connected and aware of what was happening in real life. What do you think about this?
J: I think that in the pre-COVID world there was a lot of criticism about social media, about people using their phones at art events and mocking certain forms of creativity as ‘Instagram art’. But since COVID-19 that attitude has rapidly changed. I think that it’s important to create digital experiences that help people connect, come together and express themselves. In the future, So more attention is going to be paid to digital spaces and to improve the way that we use them. Digital experiences will mirror our real life interactions as they develop.
K: This year you opened an Instagram account about Digital Food where Augmented reality (AR) provides a unique way to experience it. Can you explain what it is about?
J: I began thinking about digital food while exploring different trends in Augmented Reality. I saw that there was huge potential for digital fashion allowing people to wear digital clothes. I began to think about what other luxury, social experiences people would want to have in the digital world. I began working with digital food because generally, the food that we buy and share is a fun, playful, luxurious experience.
Photo: Courtesy of Jess Herrington
K: Today is easier than ever to transform our faces on Instagram through filters and other editing apps, which, unconsciously, has had a negative impact in our mental health. However, you make these filters with your art, altering the perception of ourselves but not in the same way as a beauty filter does. Your filters allow you to experiment in a surreal way, to play, to draw, to interact with the landscape. What inspires you to make them and what do you want people to experience?
J: A big thing for me is that I’m not really interested in helping people become more beautiful, in a traditional sense at least. But, I’m really interested in the idea of a sensory internet. At the moment, when we experience something online, we can only experience visuals or sounds. We usually can’t experience touch or taste or anything like that. That’s why I’m working on bringing all different sorts of interactive elements together, and also, using my background in neuroscience to explore cross-modal perception (perception that involves interactions between two or more different sensory modalities) allowing us to feel what it might be like to enjoy an online experience that appeals to all our senses.
Photo: Courtesy of Jess Herrington
K: What do you find most exciting about Augmented Reality?
J: I think that augmented reality is becoming a lot more interactive. I look forward to AR developing to a point where it becomes something like a mini cinematic experience where people spend more time with it. I also look forward to it becoming more collaborative so you might be able to have multiplayers at the same AR experience at once and developing new spaces to socialise and exist in AR. For instance, Augmented Reality architecture could allow people to go into an augmented reality building in and create their own spaces which are added to, or changed by others over time.
K: What memorable responses or interactions have you had or witnessed as a result of your work?
J: The most interesting response to me came from the Augmented Reality restaurant I developed: Fresh, Hot, Delicious. I didn’t realize how passionate people would feel about the digital food that they might be consuming. People’s reactions were so strong towards this work because people identify with certain types of food. If someone posts a picture of the food that they are eating, for example, you can see if they are a healthy person or if they consume a lot of junk food. Most interesting of all, was when I started posting augmented reality food filters I started getting requests for certain things. People wanted food that mirrored their everyday reality, commenting things like “I’m a Celiac can I please get something that it’s gluten free?” I’m so excited to see how the ways that we exist digitally change in the future, and how we share what we consume, online.