Appreciation of afterimages in contemporary art: an eye movement study R van Lier1, U Guclu, A Koning1 |
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1Donders Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands
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| The artworks of the Dutch contemporary painter Roland Schimmel appeal to various low-level visual processes like Troxler fading and afterimage formation. At exhibitions the paintings have been described with expressions like “a hallucinogenic experience” or a “dreamworld”. The paintings are relatively large and comprise vague, near-isoluminant colors, with additional high-contrast black disks. When the eye fixates on a disk, the colors in the periphery tend to disappear (due to troxler fading), whereas the immediate surrounding of the disk is perceived with a glowing afterimage-halo (due to microsaccades). After a saccade, the faded colors reappear, whereas the afterimage of the black disk suppresses the weakly colored background. We performed an eye-tracking study and asked observers to either fixate or to look freely at the paintings. The participants also rated their appreciation of the paintings. While free-viewing, all observers alternated fixations at the black disks with fixations at the colored areas. Paintings were appreciated more in the free-viewing condition than in the fixation condition, and visual exploration (in terms of eye movements) appeared more pronounced for highly appreciated paintings. Appreciation seems to depend on the perceptually confusing interplay between the black disks’ afterimage and the colored background. |
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