Robert Pepperell (born London, 1963) is an artist and writer. An early pioneer of VJing and interactive art, he is a leading theorist of posthumanism and the postdigital.
He studied Fine Art at Newport School of Art with Roy Ascott and then at the Slade School of Art with Susan Hiller and Stuart Brisley. In the1980s he collaborated on a number of early internet and telematic artworks, including ‘’Aspects of Gaia’’ at Ars Electronica in 1989. In the 1990s he formed a partnership with the DJs Coldcut to develop experimental audiovisual systems. Under the banner Hex (now Hexstatic), they produced numerous records, nightclub and festival installations, art exhibits and events which explored the creative applications of new media.
In 1995 he published The Posthuman Condition, a monograph that addressed the impact of new technology on art, science, philosophy and human nature. The book argued that the consequence of an increasingly pervasive technological culture is to force a revaluation of some basic assumptions about human existence, such as the assumption that humans and technologies are distinct. To quote from the contemporaneous Posthuman Manifesto:
“Humanists saw themselves as distinct beings in an antagonistic relationship with their surroundings. Posthumans, on the other hand, regard their own being as embodied in an extended technological world.”
In 2000 he co-authored The Postdigital Membrane with Michael Punt. It was a concerted attempt to counteract what they regarded as misplaced optimism about our technological future and to reveal the limits of the digital paradigm. The authors argued instead for a more complex and subtle model of human culture that avoided binarism by employing the metaphor of a permeable membrane “that both separates and connects competing and contradictory forces”.
In 2003 The Posthuman Condition was revised, with the added subtitle Consciousness Beyond the Brain, which reflected Pepperell’s continuing interest in human consciousness and in particular the view that the mind extends beyond the brain into the body and the world, a view sometimes termed externalism.
He currently lives in the UK, and is the Head of Art at University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. Pepperell current research primarily investigates the perceptual effects of art through practical and theoretical research. He is a member of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, The British Psychological Society, and Associate Editor for Leonardo Reviews (the journal of the International Society for Arts, Sciences and Technology).
