Only the Envelope: artistic interpretations of eye-tracking imagery
(2018)
author(s): Vahri McKenzie, Neil K Ferguson
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Only the Envelope (OTE) combines several research methodologies to investigate the ways we share personal information in the public sphere. This exposition presents video and video stills as primary artefacts in a discussion about a live artwork that dramatises the act of looking. In a live art installation, a ‘scientist’ invited visitors to be involved in an ‘experiment’ — namely, viewing a film while wearing a wireless eye-tracking device. This surveillance technology generated data about viewing behaviour. However, of greater interest was investigating how engaging with OTE as creative arts research led to unanticipated findings. Also interesting were the new audiovisual documents created through a re-enactment of the visitor’s experience, in which the eye-tracking device was redeployed as a head-mounted camera. In the artistic research context of OTE, the re-enacted videos led to new data being collected and analysed, leading to novel insights. These show that OTE’s ironic performance of science, employing the coercive power of complex technologies, maintained rather than undermined the compliant behaviour of participants. At the same time, the artist’s re-enactment of the visitor’s experience makes it possible to imagine, represent, and discuss such an act of subversion by illuminating the complexity of viewing behaviour when considered within the politics of the gaze and representation. This complexity is a reflection both of the emergent nature of a process-driven creative arts research enquiry, and of the work’s investigation of data retention.
Rubberneckers
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Joana Dos Santos Almeida
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
BA Fine Arts
This Thesis is comprised of a series of chapters, which combine personal observations and analysis of existing theory and literature regarding the concept of trauma within the artistic context.
Throughout the text, I explore the choices and intuitive origins of the artistic practice with reference to my own experiences and connect them to my interest in the
traumatic.
Using Griselda Pollock’s writings on Trauma and art as a foundation, I explore the theoretical sides of trauma and how it operates, specifically that of psychoanalytical, scientific and philosophical texts. I aim to weave connections between the act of observation inherent to the artistic practice and the same spectacle associated with violent subject matter. This becomes the basis for the development of what I call, the ‘traumatic method’, which involves my ongoing research into this relationship.
Questions of affect and embodiment become key components of this thesis in regards to the function of using trauma as a conceptual starting point during the artistic process. Specifically the importance of re-enactment and treating the traumatic as a medium within itself rather than simply
subject matter.