Head of Art History, Dr Gregory Minissale is co-curating an upcoming exhibition at MOTAT with Associate Professor Tony Lambert of the School of Psychology.
Eyetrackers is an innovative exhibition exploring how we look at art, and is the result of an ongoing conversation between Greg and Tony.
The exhibition investigates the fascinating borderland between art and visual neuroscience. Artworks and state-of-the-art eye-tracking technologies are brought together to address a question that has intrigued scientists and artists alike: “How do we see the world?”
Greg explains that the project has been a long time in the works. He has always been eager for interdisciplinary approaches to research, and this project stems from a cross-faculty award with the School of Psychology in 2011. As a visual perception expert, Tony provided the scientific and technological expertise for the project.
The pair spent a few years utilising eye-tracking technology to look at how people view works of art. Greg was amazed at the idiosyncrasies in where people cast their eyes, despite how artworks guide the eye.
The pair have found a whole host of factors that influence how people view art, including gender, sexuality, age and culture.
To showcase their work, Greg and Tony curated the first Eyetrackers exhibition at the Gus Fisher Gallery in August and September last year. In this exhibition the latest eye-tracking technology was used to track the movements of people’s eyes while they were looking at artworks.
In addition to recording and replaying eye movement patterns, it also included a more ambitious type of exhibit, in which viewers were able to interact with images and artworks in a completely new way. In this case, information from the eyetracker was looped back directly to the software controlling the displayed image, which then changed in response to characteristics of the eye movements made by a viewer.
This exhibition proved very popular, and attracted a much wider audience than the usual art crowd — including a lot of students. It was also noticed by MOTAT, and it will be opening there in February.
MOTAT Education Manager, Julie Baddiley says that the Museum is delighted to be collaborating on this exhibition. “Educators, artists and scientists have come to recognise the importance of blending the arts and sciences for the enrichment of student learning. This supports MOTAT’s aim to incorporate elements of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Maths) into all the experiences we offer. The Eyetrackers exhibition fits this objective perfectly.”
Greg and Tony have been working with colleagues in the Department of Computer Science, Dr Christof Lutteroth and Dr Gerald Weber, to upgrade to the latest eye-tracking software for the second iteration of the exhibition.
Greg got to trial cutting edge eye-tracking technology just a couple of days ago, which allows users to navigate websites using just their eyes.
He explains that we often take vision for granted as a direct experience of ‘reality’ — ignoring our own construction of such reality — but work like this makes it starkly apparent how much prior knowledge and pre-existing habits and rhythms go into how we construct what we see.
Artists challenge these habits and rhythms by bringing the constructed nature of vision to the fore, and eye-tracking technology provides an additional opportunity to reflect on how we see. Eyetrackers gives visitors the rare opportunity to see how other people have viewed the artworks that they are engaging with.
Greg and Tony hope that this exhibition has the power to challenge assumptions about how we think we behave with artworks, and also about how we go about gathering information and pursuing interests that may even be unknown to us.
In addition there is a slightly sinister aspect to the exhibition ‒ and to the research ‒ since eye-tracking technology has been linked to surveillance culture and closed circuit television with important implications for privacy and autonomy. The next generation of smart technology (Google Glass, for example) will probably have eyetrackers built in.
Google, Apple and Microsoft will be looking at where we are looking and they will possibly be able to arrange the visual field of advertising around us accordingly, so that when we feel that ‘aha! moment’ where we feel something visual in the world coincides with our inner cogitations, in the future this may well be engineered and manipulated.
All the better, then, to have exhibitions of this kind that disseminate knowledge about what this technology, tied into our assumptions about vision, is capable of.
Eyetrackers opens at MOTAT on Saturday 20 February.
Find out more about Eyetrackers: Between Art and Neuroscience
