Do you see what I see? From Dundee’s art studios to the science of perception

Most of us assume we see the world for ourselves. Lucas Battich has built a career out of testing that assumption. It's a career that began in the art studios and philosophy seminars of Dundee. 

Lucas studies how other people change what we see. Not by persuading us of something, but just by being there. Decades of research show that when someone else is looking at a scene, our brains automatically take account of their point of view, often without us noticing. If that happens without us realising, can you still trust what you see? These are old philosophical questions, but Lucas doesn't only argue about them. He runs experiments and works alongside neuroscientists to test them. 

Inside the lab

In one study, carried out in Paris, people stared at a screen and tried to spot faint patterns while a computer-generated figure stood nearby, turned either towards the pattern or away from it. Sometimes the figure was blindfolded. People got better at spotting the pattern whenever the figure faced the right way, blindfold or not. But something else changed only when the figure could see: people became better at knowing when they'd got it right. Sharing a view with someone, even a virtual someone, seems to sharpen how well we judge our own perception.

Not every experiment goes the way you expect. In another study, Lucas tested a well-known illusion: flash a light once while playing two beeps, and most people see two flashes. The theory said that looking together with a partner should make people less easily fooled. It didn't. People answered faster as a pair, but they fell for the illusion just as often. 

His current project asks a stranger question: what makes something feel real? When you see a chair, you don't just see its shape and colour; you feel that it's actually there, not imagined. Lucas wants to know where that feeling comes from, and whether other people help to hold it in place.

And the art hasn't gone away. He is now writing about what happens when two people stand in front of a painting together. If the beauty of a painting depends on how each person responds to it, how can two people ever enjoy the same thing?

It started in Dundee

Between 2010 and 2014, Lucas studied Art and Philosophy, a joint degree that splits your time between making work in the studios at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design and studying philosophy in the classroom. 

He didn't wait until graduation to start showing work. As a student he exhibited at the Cooper Gallery on campus and at Generator Projects, one of the city's artist-run spaces, and a 2013 show he took part in was reviewed in DURA, the University's own arts review. In his final year he won the Roche Continents Award, a Swiss prize for young artists and scientists, and he graduated with first-class honours and two University prizes.

He stayed on in the city for a solo show at Nomas Projects, and the same year his work was picked for RSA New Contemporaries at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. It went on to be shown at Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia, and the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam.

From Dundee to Tübingen 

After further study in Rotterdam, he took a research master’s in philosophy at Radboud University in the Netherlands, then a PhD in Philosophy and Neuroscience at LMU Munich. From there he moved to the École normale supérieure in Paris, one of France's most famous institutions, first as a Fyssen Postdoctoral Fellow and then on a fellowship funded by the French National Research Agency.

This autumn he starts a new role as Research Associate and Fritz Thyssen Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Tübingen.

That's four countries in twelve years. Art alone wouldn't have got him there. Nor would philosophy, or neuroscience. It took all three, and it started with a joint degree in Dundee.