Drawing with Eye Tracking Technology – Matthew Attard

As part of the MoA Design Research Studio »Embodied Architectural Objects: Designing through materiality, craft, movement and technology«, taught by Elaine Bonavia and Charlett Wenig, this hybrid talk took place on May 14th, 2024 at 3.00 pm. Matthew Attard presented his recent work and practice-based PhD research on the same topic.

The session was be moderated by Elaine Bonavia.

Abstract

In his practice-based research, ways of adopting and adapting eye-tracking technology were speculatively explored as a contemporary artistic drawing practice, beginning to fill in the gap of the lack of a comprehensive artistic study investigating the potential of eye-tracking technology as a critical tool or 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.

In his critically engaged practice research Matthew Attard 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.