Re-drawing ex-voto graffiti of ships with the eye-tracker, 2021 – ongoing project
The series Id-Dgħajjes tal-Fidili, which translates The Boats of the Faithful/Fools in English, finds its origins in the interest of re-tracing a number of distinctly etched ship graffiti—dating back to as far as the late 1500s. These historical graffiti are located on the facades of several wayside chapels on the island of Malta. The title of the artworks plays with the meaning of the words in the Maltese language, interweaving cultural, historical, critical and current contemporary notions of belief and independent thinking.
The term “fidil” directly descends from the Latin word “fidelis”, meaning of faith or faithful. However, in the typically spoken Maltese language, “fidil” came to also refer to someone who is foolishly (naively) trusting of everyone, or everything. There is thus a provocation about the subjects we become in our contemporary techno-human relations:
Is co-drawing with technology an act of faith towards techno-deterministic tendencies, or an act of foolishness and naive trust in data and technology?
Documentation while eye-tracking drawing some selected ship graffiti found on the wayside chapels in the village of Ħaż-Żebbuġ, Malta, June – August 2021
Documentation while eye-tracking drawing a ship graffiti found on the facade of the chapel at Wied Qirda in Ħaż-Żebbuġ, Malta
The footage on Top was captured by curator Elyse Tonna, while the video on the Bottom is the captured footage that was downloaded from the Pupil Core binocular eye-tracking device during post-processing – the white cross and scanpath are representative of my gaze, July 2021
Two different viewpoints of an eye-tracking drawing of a ship graffiti, July 2021
Digital drawing with eye-tracking
Pupil Core binocular eye-tracker, Pupil Player, Rhino 3D
Eye-tracking drawing of an ex-voto ship graffiti, July 2021
Digital video loop with eye-tracking
Pupil Core binocular eye-tracker, Pupil Player, Rhino 3D
Exhibiting the eye-tracking drawings:
Installation shots from the exhibition rajt ma rajtx… naf li rajt
The intersected plexiglass prints proved to be an effective snapshot of representing the three-dimensional properties of the digital eye-tracking drawings in a physical space. I digitally exported three different viewpoints of the resulting eye-tracking drawing: a frontal viewpoint, a side viewpoint as seen from the left and a side viewpoint as seen from the right. These ‘flattened’ perspectives of the eye-tracking drawing were exported as digital images, and each viewpoint was then printed onto two sheets of transparent plexiglass (resulting in six sheets in total) measuring 2.20mx1.20m. Each plexiglass sheet was installed following a circular arrangement, resulting in an intersection of the multiple viewpoints of the eye-tracking drawing of the ship graffiti. The multiple viewpoints could be experienced through the different perspectival viewpoints above, below and alongside offered by the architecture of the exhibition space itself during the exhibition rajt ma rajtx… naf li rajt.
A rendering showing the intersecting of different viewpoints through the circular set-up of the six plexiglass sheets
Documentation while pen-plotting the eye-tracking drawings of the ship graffiti
The second mode of re-presentation consisted in a series of drawings that were pen- plotted onto twelve slabs of globigerina limestone – reminiscent of the original type of stone onto which the historical ex-voto graffiti had been originally etched. The nature of these works was highly experimental as a stone slab is an unconventional surface to pen-plot on. However, since pen-plotting had the capacity of redrawing the eye-tracking drawings by following the eye-tracking datasets in very high definition, by essentially moving according to the dataset as XY coordinates, I wanted to explore the idea of re-presenting the eye-tracking drawings of the ship graffiti as ‘new’ contemporary graffiti on stone.
A selection of pen-potted eye-tracking drawings of the ex-voto ship graffiti, August 2021 – ongoing
Digital drawing with eye-tracking and pen-plotting
56x24x3cm (each)
Pupil Core binocular eye-tracker, Pupil Player, Rhino 3D, Globigerina Limestone, Pen-plotter