Drawing my eye with the eye-tracker from the technology’s live-feed of my eye, 2020-ongoing
The selected drawings below represent eye-tracking drawings performed with the live-feed image of my eye. The exercise concerns a feedback loop of seeing and co-drawing. The drawing exercise also carries commentary of how I am seeing/drawing what the technology sees of me, while intersecting notions of machine vision, technological interpretation, self-imagery, data, machine surveillance, and contemporary drawing.
Eye-tracking drawing of my eye (10528 recorded points 101.55 seconds), November 2020
Digital drawing with eye-tracking
Pupil Core monocular eye-tracker, Pupil Player, Rhino 3D
Eye-tracking drawing of my eye (12966 recorded points 129.93 seconds), November 2020
Digital drawing with eye-tracking
Pupil Core monocular eye-tracker, Pupil Player, Rhino 3D
Eye-tracking drawing of my eye (18628 recorded points 188.08 seconds), November 2020
Digital drawing with eye-tracking
Pupil Core monocular eye-tracker, Pupil Player, Rhino 3D
Eye-tracking drawing of my eye (24879.59 recorded points 251.51 seconds), November 2020
Digital drawing with eye-tracking
Pupil Core monocular eye-tracker, Pupil Player, Rhino 3D
Eye-tracking drawing of my eye (13636 recorded points 138.2 seconds), January 2021
Digital video loop with eye-tracking
Pupil Core monocular eye-tracker, Pupil Player, Rhino 3D
Eye-tracking drawing of my eye (16119 recorded points 161.89 seconds), January 2021
Digital video loop with eye-tracking
Pupil Core monocular eye-tracker, Pupil Player, Rhino 3D
Eye-tracking drawing of my eye, February 2020
Digital drawing with eye-tracking
Pupil Core monocular eye-tracker, Pupil Player, Rhino 3D
Eye-tracking drawing of my eye, March 2021
Digital video loop with eye-tracking
Pupil Core monocular eye-tracker, Pupil Player, Rhino 3D
Documentation of 03:46 minutes of the captured footage and gaze interpretation of the eye-tracker while I drew my eye with my eyes from the technology’s live-feed
Pupil Core monocular eye-tracker, Pupil Player
03:46 minutes of drawing my eye with my eyes from the eye-tracker’s live-feed of my eye. This footage was captured by the Pupil Core monocular eye-tracking device, and was downloaded from Pupil Player during post-processing. The white cross and red polyline are representative of the gaze path estimated by the eye-tracking device as I attempted to draw my eye with my eyes from the eye-tracker’s live-feed on the 27″ LED monitor.
This exercise was done on November 17th 2020, and post-processed on September 12th 2022.
An illustration portraying the techno-human hybrid setup of the drawing exercise where I explored ways of drawing my eye with my eyes with the technology via the eye-tracker’s live-feed of my eye’s movements. This drawing exercise became a recurring practice throughout the course of this artistic research.
Illustration is my own.
Anecdote:
This drawing exercise started by accident. On November 17th, 2020, roughly at around 2.30pm, I connected a second monitor to my laptop. Drawing-with the eye-tracker was becoming ever more computer-oriented and I thought that a second screen could be helpful for the practice’s data development and visualisation. Moreover, we were at the time working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic regulations, meaning that my room had to be transformed into some sort of working studio. While calibrating the device, the window view of the eye camera was being projected as a live-feed on the second monitor.
I paused.
“This is how the technology sees me”, I thought. I had seen this live-feed window several times before, but it was never on a monitor different to that of my laptop’s. The much-larger-than-life live-feed on the 27” LED screen immediately intrigued me in the way it seemed to caricaturise the representation of my eye; it almost verged on something uncanny. Particular qualities such as the monochrome properties of the grey-scale footage and the live mirroring of my eye’s movements became overt. The live-feed window’s function was thus repurposed through this experience and it stopped being merely used for calibration. The technology had somehow unveiled itself to me and exerted the intimacy with which it saw me.
I therefore forgot about what my initial intentions were and started to repeatedly draw my eye with my eyes from the live-feed.
Eye-tracking drawings of my eye, January 2022
Digital animation
Pupil Core monocular eye-tracker, Pupil Player, Rhino 3D, Grasshopper
Eye-tracking drawing of my eye, May/June 2021
Pupil Core monocular eye-tracker, Pupil Player, Rhino 3D, Pen-plotter,
BIC ball-point pen
Superimposed pen-plotted eye-tracking drawings of my eye on an A3 paper. Each different eye-tracking drawing is represented in a different colour.
A selected number of eye-tracking drawings of my eye where exhibited during the solo exhibition rajt ma rajtx… naf li rajt that opened at Valletta Contemporary during the month of September 2021. The three images above are installation shots from the exhibition. The drawings were pen-plotted on sheets of plexiglass and installed at the entrance of the exhibition.