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| Aesthetic Appreciation and Spanish Art: |
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| Insights from Eye-Tracking |
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| Claire Bailey-Ross claire.bailey-ross@port.ac.uk University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom |
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| Andrew Beresford a.m.beresford@durham.ac.uk Durham University, United Kingdom |
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| Daniel Smith daniel.smith2@durham.ac.uk Durham University, United Kingdom |
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| Claire Warwick c.l.h.warwick@durham.ac.uk Durham University, United Kingdom |
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| How do people look at and experience art? |
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| Which elements of specific artworks do they focus on? |
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| Do museum labels have an impact on how people look at artworks? |
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| The viewing experience of art is a complex one, involving issues of perception, attention, memory, decision-making, affect, and emotion. |
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| Thus, the time it takes and the ways of visually exploring an artwork can inform about its relevance, interestingness, and even its aesthetic appeal. |
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| This paper describes a collaborative pilot project focusing on a unique collection of 17th Century Zurbarán paintings. |
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| The Jacob cycle at Auckland Castle is the only UK example of a continental collection preserved in situ in purpose-built surroundings. |
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| While studies of the psychology of art have focused on individual works and distinctions between representative / non-representative topics, no work has been completed on the aesthetic appreciation of collections or of devotional themes. |
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| In this paper, we report upon the novel insights eye-tracking techniques have provided into the unconscious processes of viewing the unique collection of Zurbarán artworks. |
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| The purpose of this pilot study was to assess the effects of different written interpretation on the visual exploration of artworks. |
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| We will discuss the potential implications of these techniques and our understanding of visual behaviours on museum and gallery practice. |
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| The project brings together established research strengths in Spanish art history, experimental psychology, digital humanities, and museum studies to explore, using eye-tracking techniques, aesthetic reactions to digital representations of the individual Zurbarán artworks as well as the significance of the collection as a whole. |
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| Our experience of art develops from the interaction of several cognitive and affective processes; the beginning of which is a visual scan of the artwork. |
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| When regarding an artwork, a viewer gathers information through a series fixations, interspersed by rapid movements of the eye called saccades. |
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| The direction of saccades is determined by an interaction between the goals of the observer and the physical properties of the different elements of the scene (e.g. colour, texture, brightness etc). |
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| Importantly, studying eye movements offers an insight that does not depend on the participants’ beliefs, memories or subjective impressions of the artwork. |
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| Previous eye tracking research has highlighted the potential to transform the ways we understand visual processing in the arts (see for example Brieber 2014; Binderman et al., 2005) and at the same time offers a direct way of studying several important factors of a museum visit (Filippini Fantoni et al., 2013; Heidenreich & Turano 2011; Milekic 2010). |
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| Zurbarán’s cycle of Jacob and his Sons has been on display in the Long Room at Auckland Castle for over 250 years. |
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| It is the only cycle to be preserved in purpose-built surroundings in the UK, and one of very few of its kind in the world. |
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| It has a long history in scholarship (Baron & Beresford 2014), but many key aspects of its production and significance have not yet been fully understood. |
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| In this study we used eye-tracking in the first stage of exploring audience experience of the extensive Spanish art collections of County Durham, of which the 13 Zurbarán artworks (there are actually only 12 Zurbarán artworks, the 13th Benjamin, is a copy by Arthur Pond) are a key part of, to investigate the ways in which audiences look at Spanish art, how aesthetic experience is evaluated and whether audiences can be encouraged to approach art in different ways. |
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| This pilot project primarily investigated how participants visually explore artworks and provides new insights into the potential eye-tracking has to transform the ways we understand visual processing in arts and culture and at the same time offer a direct way of studying several important factors of a museum visit, namely to assess the effects of label characteristics on visitor visual behaviour. |