14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists at the University of Manchester seem to have their own personal way of answering the question “Is beauty in the eyes of the beholder?” They have recently announced their intentions to turn one of London's largest art galleries into a scientific laboratory, in which they will try to determine whether people experience art in the same way. Basically, they are seeking to learn if viewers of paintings or sculptures perceive at least the objective traits of each work in the same way, or if these elements are seen through a different “lens.”
One of the main things researchers are certain of is the fact that they are unable to tell if two persons looking at a painting see the same elements first, or if they refer to different things when talking of the same work of art, for example. With the help of some state-of-the-art equipment, the Manchester team hopes to find the answers to these questions, by installing infrared technology around a dozen or so paintings in the gallery. The role of these devices will be to investigate which are the main points of interest in the paintings, as far as viewers' interests go.
The technology is also able to analyze in what order individuals look at the features in the work of art, as well as the amount of time they spend gazing at certain points in the pictures. Experts from UM's School of Computer Science are working together with the Manchester Art Gallery for this project, which will hopefully yield new data about how people perceive the beauty that can be found in all art forms, at the end.
“This is exploratory work in which we are looking for patterns in the way people look at different visual elements. We can't yet say if there's a definitive order that people look at things. But this may help us to understand how and why people focus on particular areas in sequence, what attracts them and what is the deciding factor for this sequencing. It may be that with portraits people are drawn to the eyes, for example, but we don't know. And with abstracts we don't know whether there will be any similarity between the eye tracks at all,” Dr Caroline Jay, one of the researchers involved with the new project, explained.
“The findings will help us decide the order in which we present things. If people do experience these in similar ways, then there is a design message. This may inform the design of websites,” she added, saying that the results of this research would most likely be used in the future to determine the layout of successful websites.