Double the Fun
What if we could live mint eye-tracking data in the museum?
Ok this is weird but I think I have the worst idea in the world for museums of the future.
I was reading this excellent article in Hyperallergic about how some researchers are trying to articulate the experience of viewing art using eye-tracking technology.
Eye-tracking studies in art capture “raw gaze data” in real-time using glasses. This data are things like coordinates of where your eyes go, duration of looking at different points, image or video files showing heatmaps and scan paths, pupil dilation, and blink rate. Here’s a video from this amazing lab, the Munich Interactive Intelligence Initiative, and their video about what it looks like.
So then I was thinking about live minting of generative art, a new-ish concept where a generative artwork is created/captured and minted as a non-fungible token (NFT) in real-time.
(Basically, a generative artwork is a piece of art created using an algorithm or set of rules, which means means there is an element of the artwork that is automated. This changes the role of the artist because the artist is designing the algorithm (and the rules for what it will output) rather than the specific output itself. So - instead of a painting, you have a digital image that evolves dynamically based on code, AI, or external inputs like data or user interaction.)
(There’s been a huge resurgence of interest in generative art in the web3 community. For those guys it means that you have an abstract pattern generated by code that never repeats and that looks super cool.)
Melissa Weiderrecht on Fxhash
But back to generative minting - it means that someone can mint a specific moment from within the endless stream of a generative artwork and publish it on the blockchain as an NFT. The data captured is the image of what it looked like at that moment, along with other things like exact time of creation and info about the algorithm used to generate the work. So it is a permanent and unique snapshot that belongs to someone - that they both “captured” and “created” at the moment of minting it.
So it’s kind of like the moment of looking at something becomes equivalent to the moment of capturing something.
And if you could live mint eye-tracking data? ie) capture data from a person while they look at a piece of art and then convert it into a visual or data output that can be stored on the blockchain.
Possible Outcomes (All Absolutely Terrible)
A cumbersome technology art project that could be super smart about surveillance culture but also just looks like a bunch of glitchy patches. (No offense to the glitchy patch community)
A next generation of artworks where the eye-tracking data of the audience feeds back into the model and affects some aspect of the work. Like, the sculpture gets bigger every time someone looks at it
As above, but that you can also live mint (so that you can capture an image of how big the sculpture was when you looked at it)
A museum trend where visitors can mint an NFT that captures how they uniquely engaged with an artwork and that becomes a “proof of experience”
A culture, or even worse, a celebrity culture, where people trade NFTs that capture a personal experience of art, so ie) what Kanye thinks of A Game of Hot Cockles
Jean Honoré Fragonard
A Game of Hot Cockles, c. 1775/1780
Terrible Outcomes (continued)
Interactive viewership analytics where artists start to produce work that keeps people looking at art longer, or that collectors use to guide purchasing decisions, or that the Global Orb uses to create personalized content suggestions for your internal eyelids
An Eye-Art NFT <> VR and Metaverse Integration, where the audience interacts with generative art in virtual museums and mints NFTs from their virtual gaze
But there are interesting things, one that Bahador Bahrami (from the lab mentioned at the beginning) brings up. Imagine if a museum was able to capture eye-movement over a vast period of time, like a 500 year old database. His example is a Jackson Pollock in 2123 - will we be able to see whether people “of different times are looking at the same artwork in different ways, whether different things became important for people, and what kind of new ways of looking arose.” He raises the idea that this kind of information could move the function of a museum from a repository of objects to a “collection of interactions between the public and works of art”.
The article connects this subject most closely to museum engagement but I think it’s interesting mainly for alternative visions of what kind of data a museum can/could produce. Could we redefine art history based on how audiences have engaged with works across centuries?
Can you imagine if we had access to data about where a medieval guy’s eyes went as he viewed Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus? Yah I thought so too
