Seeing is a constructive process. Your perception of a scene is weaved together from successive snapshots taken as you move your eyes from one part of the scene to another. This installation aims to make it possible to visualize the act of seeing by capturing the viewer's eye movements and displaying them.
In this experience, viewers will look at representations of artworks they have just seen through the glasses at the monitor in front of them. The movements of their eyes as they focus on one point or another of the images is presented on the monitor. An earlier incarnation of this installation was exhibited at the Krannert Art Museum.
Although we may feel that we "take in" whole surfaces at once with a continuous sweep of visual attention, close observation tells us that this is not so. The eye does not simply record a full image of the visual field, as a camera might, but instead jumps around, examining a detail here, a detail there, while the mind fills out the remainder of the image based on expectations, memories, and conventions. One of the most thought provoking insights about perception is the discovery that significant parts of the process of selection and construction happen before the brain has actually had time to identify the objects represented in the pictures.