About

The works for sale here have been created as part of an ambitious research project into the nature of mind and reality. The project integrates art, philosophy, and science to produce a radically new way of thinking about the world.

This new way of thinking has profound implications for many long-standing and difficult questions, including how brain activity produces consciousness, how living creatures emerge from organic processes, and why we find some things beautiful and others ugly.

An illustrated treatise called What Matter Feels is currently in preparation that summarises the ideas in a succinct and accessible way. For those interested in the scientific and philosophical background to the project there are several papers that can be freely accessed online.

Key to the project is a deep inquiry onto the nature of energy and its relationship to matter. As set out in What Matter Feels and in other publications, this energy-matter perspective suggests that whenever energy is added to matter the matter acquires a property called ‘Experience’ from its own intrinsic perspective. 

Biography of the artist

Robert Pepperell is a unique figure among contemporary artists and researchers. Having trained at the Slade School of Art, University College London, he left in the late 1980s to start the multimedia collective HEX with Matt Black and Jon More of Coldcut, the pioneering DJ producers. Working at the cutting edge of digital technology throughout the 1990s, he pioneered many creative applications of computers, including some early examples of automatically generated art and music.

His intimate association with digital technology led him to author a monograph The Post-Human Condition in 1995, which was later revised and republished as The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain in 2003. This influential book on consciousness and creativity, which remains in print, was instrumental in the emergence of the field of posthuman studies. His artworks have been shown at venues such as The Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Barbican, Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, and Ars Electronica.

Of central importance to Pepperell’s work has been the integration of knowledge from the arts, humanities, and sciences. This has led him to publish academic work in many fields, including art theory, art history, artificial intelligence, computer science, perceptual psychology, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, empirical aesthetics, and consciousness studies. He is also, with Alistair Burleigh, co-founder of Fovotec, a tech start-up that is developing new dynamic projection tools for 3D computer graphics.