prosthetic knowledge
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Augenzeichnungen (Eye Drawings)
Created by German artist Jochem Hendricks, a project started in 1992, where the artist would wear a helmet with eye-tracking technology, recording the eye movements and printing the results - from Media Art Net:
Eye-drawings, «Augenzeichnungen», are drawings done directly with the eyes, without the slightest interference of the hands - the organ of perception being turned into the organ of expression. By means of technical aids (infrared-, video-, and computer- techniques) human eye movements are traced and digitized during the visual process of looking at something, so as to be able to do an ink-jet print out of these movements eventually. The body of works called Eye-drawings not only investigates the process of looking at everyday objects in the form of photographs or real three dimensional items, but primarily circles around issues of research and the visualization of abstract motives and processes e.g., time, reading, writing, drawing, light, and afterimage, culminating in the denial of the gaze: nothingness - the invisible is made visible by means of a trace.
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Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: nOdalisque
From the archive, a brief look at a classic Fine Art archetype in today’s world, from glitchy machinima, 3D animation, Kinect pornography, and the concept of the “opsieme” with the aid of eye-tracking.
Read the whole piece at Rhizome here
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Eye-tracking Fine Art: Odalisque a la culotte grise (Matisse), and the proposal of the “opsieme”
a - the original
b - areas of interest
c - foveal and perifoveal visionsJean Paul Courchia proposes the idea of the “opsieme”, a visual unit equivalent to the ‘phoneme’ and ‘graphemes’ used to deconstruct sounds and text:
According to cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, recognizing letters and their combinations — called graphemes — and then creating an interface between what’s written and what’s articulated (phonological awareness) is the way to gain access to the lexicon that we use to communicate. If we indeed pay attention to the basic elements that compose the written sentence, we find letters, syllables and words. However, the smallest significant element of the sentence is probably the grapheme, since the whole understanding process derives from it. The grapheme is the written equivalent of the oral phoneme. It is comprised of the smallest group of letters making a phoneme. For example, in French, the phoneme [o] has several graphemes : o, au, and eau. Unlike a letter, a grapheme represents better the phonology of a language, or what a language sounds like. The French language counts 130 graphemes.
Does this same concept apply to a painting or an image ? Just like in the reading process, the image undergoes several mutations between the retina and the sensory areas of the cerebral cortex, whereby the basic components of the image (forms, colors, orientation of the lines) are dissected first and then transmitted to the visual areas. It is only then that the image is reconstructed, and that it will be confronted against other known representations that are stored in our memory for an identification of the present image. Dismantling, reassembly and identification are the three steps in the process of the visual representation, whether artistic or natural …
… Fixation can be equated with the time necessary to identify the smallest significant visual unit in an image. Just as a phoneme is the smallest articulated unit, and a grapheme is the smallest written unit, we suggest opsieme as a designation for the smallest significant visual unit : « opsie » – from the Greek ops, opsis, which means eye, vision and « eme », suffix which signifies basic unit.
You can read the whole piece here
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Actroid-F Robot Gets A Brother And An Eye Implant (via DigInfo)
The Uncanny Valley got a tiny bit more smaller …
AIST has developed a male version of its android robot Actroid-F, which was first shown to the public last year. These human-like robots imitate the movements of the people they are watching, and are currently being placed as observers in hospitals, to see how patients feel in their presence.
… Actroid is a series of robots developed by Kokoro. These robots have a very human-like appearance and range of motions, yet they have only 12 degrees of freedom, mostly in the face. This feature makes the Actroid system much smaller and lighter than ordinary robot systems. Now, by placing cameras in the retinas of the robots, AIST has enabled the robot to direct its line of sight toward a subject.
