EYE DRAWING

Jochem Hendricks puts marks on paper by simply moving his eyes. He calls this Eye Drawing.

He constructed a headset which tracks the movement of his eyes. As his eyes move as he looks at a newspaper, or at an object, digital lines are input. He uses infrared sensors for the eye tracking.

Given that his eye movement is continuous, then we would assume that the output is a continuous line. This is what we call contour drawing. Or at least a form of contour drawing. That is, if a digital line can be continuous at all, given that is is merely synthesized. And because this is digital, then this is not a drawing, but a draughter. But I digress.

This quote, from the site Cabinet Magazine. “The location of any point on which the eye rests for at least a hundredth of a second is recorded sequentially as a coordinate on the X and Y axes. These points are then connected by straight lines, each eye yielding a drawing.”

And there is a sense of transparency to the output. You can start to see the possibilities of holistic forms. The output looks like it was done with two of the Transparent Drawing modes, Lines Without Tones. and Transparent Contour.

In my drawing at the top of the page, I used Hendricks’ basic draughter to establish an overall geometry. Then I proceeded, in a more or less Automatic Form mode, to generate at least the beginnings of form. Or one can say that I was Drawing At The Boundary Of Form.

Question 1. I assume Hendricks did not move around when producing a draughter. However, I can imagine that if he wanted to knowledge a form with Eye Drawing, that he could move around an object while recording. And if he did this, I would assume that the draughter would have sufficient data to knowledge a holistic form?

Question 2. Eye Drawing also calls into question the specious hand eye coordination trope. Eye Drawing eliminates the hand. But the eye still moves over the object, just as it would if you were making a contour drawing by hand. So the net effect of this is that the physicality / analogue is reduced. What is the net human knowledge loss?