CHArt TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Seeing…Vision and Perception in a Digital Culture |
Catherine Baker, Norwich University College of the Arts, UK.; Iain Gilchrist, University of Bristol, UK
SCANPATH
At its most conventional, drawing is the making of marks on paper. However such a narrow conception of drawing belies the complexity of the processes involved. Our scientific understanding of the drawing processes and particularly the active way we interact with visual material suggests that drawing itself is occurring as our eyes move over the scene. Over the last five years we have been developing ways to represent this active visual process as drawing. This work involves recording eye movements and using these eye movements to create a drawing that bypasses the hand. In effect we create drawings directly with the eye. The drawings created are further developed in order to question what constitutes drawing within contemporary fine art practice and to explain the biological processes that underpin drawing and looking.
Modern technology has made it possible to measure eye movements very accurately and describe the types of movements generated. For example, whilst looking at a picture, the eyes make fast ballistic movements, called saccades. Saccades are followed by fixations when the eyes are stationary. Fixations stay at one location for only a short time, somewhere between 1/10 and 1/2 of a second, before another saccade is generated to a new location. The eyes gather little useful visual information during a saccade, so patterns of fixation over time indicate from where, and for how long, information is being gathered from the visual environment. Saccades are required to sample the visual world because our visual ability is not the same across the visual field. Vision is better in the centre than out in the peripheral part of the visual field. A sequence of saccades and fixations is known as a scanpath. The scanpath indicates the shape of our interaction with the visual environment. The last 10 years have seen a detailed development of our understanding of the neural basis of this behaviour and our scientific understanding of it impacts on diverse parts of all our lives from car design and learning to read, to the understanding of behaviour following brain injury.However the ways the eyes move and how that effects how we see is both counterintuitive and initially confusing. If we think of the eye as like a camera then it’s a camera that is jumping around the whole time and is quite unstable. How then can it be that our visual experience is of a static stable world? In addition we have the sense that we can see everything in front of us all at once but instead the science tells us that we can only really see what we are looking at. The work we have created so far and future work will help us grapple with these questions and ultimately understand the processes of seeing.