What Your Eyes Draw? Pt. 1 (2022)

Data Visualisation Project. Observational Drawing Experiment. 

Creative Coding / Data Visualisation
Processing / Eye Tracking Technology / Axidraw / Fineliner Pen, Pencil, Ink on Paper

The aim of this project was to explore how technology could be used for data collection and then displayed in the more expressive way than usual pie charts. With the dynamic development of Artificial Intelligence and frequent discussions about it eventually replacing artist labour with my Eye Tracker experiment I am speculating and comparing computer vision to human one.

Human is a complex being, whenever we are looking at the world around us we are having full consciousness about our surroundings. Ability to connect points in our minds to define objects in the environment instantly, acknowledging them, creating associations and emotional sentimental attachments are points what are distinguishing us from machines the vision of which is binary and the base for it’s function is an available data set.

Outcomes I am presenting are set of drawings, which are mostly coming in pairs: 

1. Data from Eye Tracker during the process of me doing observational drawings in different time periods (starting with 60 seconds finishing with 10 seconds) plotted with AxiDraw. 
2. My actual blind drawing produced by hand as in order to get more accurate data from Eye Tracker I had to look at the computer screen consistently. 
   

Common associations with plotter art are very precise technical fineliner pen drawings as the whole point of using AxiDraw medium is to achieve machinery inhuman precision. I, however, am always excited to see computers failing. For this reason I decided to use hardly controllable media, such as ink and brush on a wet paper to plot “Spider Plant Study Nr. 2” twice and ended up with 2 different looking artworks from the same data set. Outcomes are quite striking as the organic quality of the ink is creating an impression that these drawings were, actually, done by human, but incredibly straight lines done in non-human high speed with AxiDraw are breaking this illusion.

As I thought that one of the data sets for spider plant turned out to be a success in terms of getting distinctive enough drawing, I wanted to find out how well Eye Tracker could be doing with portraiture. It is not like original blind drawings were very controlled, however, there are still similarities between computer vision and hand drawings even though machinery outcome is much more abstract.