The work Judith Schaechter does grapples with questions that bridge art and science. Why can the same image be beautiful to one person and ugly to another? How does our sense of aesthetics influence our other cognitive functions, like emotions or reasoning?
“There’s a difference between art that pleases people and art that pleases people in a way they don't know they need yet,” she says. “I’m not making stuff people already find beautiful, I’m trying to persuade them of new ways to see beauty.”
Schaechter is the artist-in-residence at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics. The center—the first such scientific hub in the U.S.—allows researchers to explore what exactly our brains are doing when we experience art, and what we’re doing when we create art out of our experiences.
Aesthetic phenomena are an historically neglected subject for science. Humans universally experience pleasure in sensations: we savor certain tastes, swoon at certain sights, move to certain sounds. It's also a common human trait to seek out, curate, and create such experiences, attaching cultural contexts, values, and meanings to them. But even though these behaviors are as unique and universal in humans as language, somehow neuroscience had overlooked them—until recently.
That’s part of why the center exists, says Neurology professor Anjan K. Chatterjee, the center's founder and director. “I felt that if I was going to study human cognitive neuroscience, here was a fundamental experience people have, something people value, and it didn’t seem as though people had studied it very much from a biological perspective,” he said.
In 2018, Penn launched the Center for Neuroaesthetics, with Chatterjee at the helm, who secured funding for an artist in residence: someone to provide an expert aesthetic point of view.
The position is a free-form one. “I know what I do not want: I do not want an artist who will make pretty pictures of brains. I do not want an artist who will create sophisticated data visualizations,” Chatterjee says. “I want someone who is curious and open.” There are no requirements beyond attending all-hands meetings and creating an art project that in some way is inspired by the lab’s work.
One of the first works Schaechter made after starting her residency depicts people with facial scars and birth differences, framed in glass like medieval saints.
Now, she’s building a structure inspired by the center’s work on how the design of physical spaces can affect brain function in neurotypical and neurodiverse people. The small, enclosed dome made of brilliantly colored glass panels will be a work of art that surrounds the viewer: both a visual experience and an architectural one.
Meanwhile, the center continues to explore the science behind just that type of subjective experience. If you ask Chatterjee why we experience beauty, he demurs—even though he wrote a book about this. It’s a tremendously complex question to answer in a brief statement, even with years of research providing some pieces of the puzzle.
Read more at Penn Medicine Magazine.
