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Golan Levin is interested in creating work that often involves new, highly aesthetic and conceptual computer interfaces and experiences, all based on “human-to-artifact” interaction. In his Creative Capital-supported project, Observation as Interaction: Eye Contact Systems, Levin focuses on eye-to-eye communication between the viewer and the viewed.

Levin began the technically ambitious project—a series of five installations—by asking, “Why can’t artwork look back? Why can’t a painting communicate back to the viewer? Could an artwork be created and destroyed simply by looking at it?” The overall concept of Levin’s project is for audiences to essentially create gestural strokes simply through the act of looking.

Levin began combining his interests in performance, writing software code, and designing sculptural hardware as a student at MIT—where, as an undergraduate, he minored in music theory and composition, and as a graduate student, studied at its renowned Media Lab. He’s continued to blend these interests in his work. An earlier piece called Messa di Voce (2003), for example, featured a voice performer on stage in front of a large projection screen. Digital images that visualized the sounds made by the performer were projected behind him. Levin and his collaborators created a software program and sophisticated motion-tracking system that enabled the performer’s actions and vocalizations to be translated into perfectly synchronized, cartoon-like visuals.

Levin isn’t the first artist to experiment with eye-tracking technology. But what sets his project apart from earlier work is the attempt to create an eye-tracking display that requires no cumbersome helmets or hardware. This concept is at the core of Eidola Panel, the largest component of his project, which he hopes to complete in 2008. Eidola Panel consists of a giant, high-resolution digital display screen, about the size of, say, a Jackson Pollock painting. (The title refers to the ancient Greek theory that a ray of light emanating from the eye makes the world visible.) When audiences look at Eidola Panel, they see everything and nothing. Thanks to hidden cameras, motion-tracking devices, and computer chips programmed with algorithms customized by Levin, Eidola Panel tracks each viewer’s eye movements as they walk past, recording the trajectories of these glances as lines on the screen. The collective shapes and forms are designed to build up and disappear at various intervals over time.

Levin envisions an installation in a public venue where a painting would normally hang. What will appear instead is a spontaneous group drawing, created by viewers’ own eyes as they look at the blank panel. In this sense, Eidola Panel is, as Levin sees it, “ocular graffiti. It’s basically a painting created accidentally from the glances of passers-by.”

The other installations in Levin’s project include three minimal sculptures that track the movements of viewers through the corresponding movements of motorized plastic eyeballs. (Each of the works will display shy, attentive, or curious eye movements, and is titled accordingly.) Recurse, the fifth piece in the project, is intended for a single viewer. Similar to Eidola Panel, but smaller and more intimate, the imagery it reveals is the visualization of one viewer’s eye movements over time: a history of his or her gazes.

The most relevant precursor to Levin’s project is Deviewer, an early 1990s installation by new media artists Joachim Sauter and Dirk Lüsebrink. This work featured eye-tracking equipment hidden behind a TV monitor, which displayed a 15th-century figurative painting by the Italian artist Francesco Carotto. Looking at the image, a viewer would notice that the picture had become blurred at the precise spot where she’d fixed her gaze. “In many ways, Eidola Panel is a response to Sauter’s and Lüsebrink’s earlier work,” Levin says. But what distinguishes Levin’s project is its self-contained nature—not to mention the complex thematic layers that the artwork possesses, beyond a simple “wow” factor. As Levin puts it, “the viewer’s gaze becomes form, content, and process all at once.”

Download the Weekend Workshop Agenda (.pdf)