Drawing-with eye-tracking technology: an exploratory art-based research investigating the adaptation of eye-tracking methodology as a contemporary artistic drawing practice

Abstract

In this practice-based research, ways of adopting and adapting eye-tracking technology were speculatively explored as a contemporary artistic drawing practice (CADP) to begin to fill in the gap of the lack of a comprehensive artistic study investigating the potential of eye-tracking technology as a critical tool/medium for contemporary drawing. Eye-tracking historically emerged as a scientific methodology and can today capture eye movements in the form of digital data. The application of eye-tracking has extended across a variety of fields such as marketing and user experience design that benefit from the presumed objectivity of our visual attention. Similarly, studies within the field of drawing practice have generally applied eye-tracking technology as a way to investigate eye movements during the act of observational drawing. The critically engaged practice research presented here, probes such methods and looks at the subjective, relational, and transformative qualities of eye-tracking when posited as a CADP, positioning the technological interpretation of the researcher’s gaze as an experimental contemporary drawing method.

To achieve this, the research was informed by posthuman scholarship to challenge the tendency, especially prevalent in technology and general public’s discourses, that assumes a vertical hierarchy between the human and the nonhuman. In this way, the technology’s capacity for agency as co-constituent in the drawing projects was examined. The practice research includes both a written component in the form of a dissertation and a portfolio of practice that distils a selection of drawing experiments undertaken during the course of the artistic research. These adopted the notion of a more-than-human-centred way of drawing, and by reflecting on the techno-human hybridity of the experimental drawing projects, a conceptual methodological framework of drawing-with eye-tracking technology was developed.

Different writing techniques were adapted, drawing from posthuman scholarship suggestions, to reflect on aspects of the digital technology via the exploration of the drawing projects. The written and practical components intertwine throughout the research and expand the intersection of multi-modal methods of drawing and seeing, which respond to different contexts, and evolve into a critical creative mode of enquiry.