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(2023)ThesisArtworks are increasingly experienced in non-traditional platforms, from digital collections on museum websites to virtual gallery tours, making it important to investigate the context-dependent and context-independent aspects of aesthetic experience. While some studies have shown that artworks in the museum elicit a higher visual engagement than when presented on a screen, others reported divergent findings. This thesis suggests that such discrepancies may be due to the interaction between the artwork's physical and contextual characteristics and investigates how diverse aspects of viewing behaviour change between the museum, on-screen laboratory, and virtual gallery laboratory contexts. Fifteen paintings by different Australian artists from the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) were included as stimuli for the studies in this thesis. Mobile and screen-based eye movement recordings were used to index visual engagement (number of fixations, total and average fixation duration) with artworks across the three different contexts. Our first study (Chapter 2) compared the visual engagement of museum visitors in the AGNSW to that of participants looking at their digital reproductions in laboratory. We focused on how aspects of viewing behaviour, including viewing distance in the gallery condition and eye gaze measures such as fixation count, total fixation duration and average fixation duration are affected by the artworks’ physical characteristics, including size and image statistics properties such as Fourier amplitude spectrum, fractal dimension and entropy. The effects of these factors on visual engagement were then explored in a virtual gallery replica of the exhibition (Chapter 3). In a virtual gallery context, we also tested the impact of two additional context-dependent factors: the curatorial arrangement and further manipulations of the relative size of the paintings. Overall, the results show significant differences in viewing behaviour across different contexts, but also that the effects of presentation contexts are modulated by the artworks’ physical characteristics. In the final two studies, the thesis explores the effect of mere exposure on viewing behaviour in different contexts (Chapter 4) and the spatial and temporal image statistics of fixated compared to non-fixated regions of artworks in both the museum and on- screen viewing contexts (Chapter 5). The results show that visual engagement in the museum, but not on-screen, is enhanced by previous exposure to digital reproductions of artworks. Finally, Chapter 5 demonstrates that fixated and randomly selected regions differed in both spatial and temporal image statistics with more pronounced differences in the on-screen viewing condition. In sum, the thesis demonstrates that a combination of context-dependent variables (e.g., navigation, curatorial setting and relative size) and the low-level properties (e.g., fractal dimension, amplitude spectrum, entropy) of artworks influence visual engagement.
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(2023)ThesisThis research begins with debates at the intersection of race, colonialism, and language. As an artist and a woman of colour, I recognise my implication in the complexities of settler colonialism in Vietnam and Australia. The ‘conceptions of encounter’ outlined by Raewyn Connell (2013) are productive in my experimental research contexts. According to Connell, conceptions of encounter qualities include capacities for encounters, reciprocity, mutual respect and trust building. This practice-based research aims to performatively practise encounters through art using these conceptions of encounter as a guide. In positioning my creative research within the domain of socially engaged art, I examine the history of participatory art with a close look at Helguera’s framework of socially engaged art. Key examples from Vietnamese artists, Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai and Thinh Nguyen are analysed in relation to the ‘conceptions of encounter’ of Connell to review socially engaged art from the region. A/r/tography and various approaches inspired by Deleuze’s becomings provide a methodological lens to envision my acts of performative visualisations. I propose a series of criteria for practice-based encounters drawing on the work of Connell’s conceptions of encounter (2013), performative encounters by Anja Kanngieser (2012) and my own artistic experiments. Central to the criteria is a reflexive lens to enable iterative reflection on my practice. My practice-based works visualise transversal relationships, which I argue is the collective encounter with difference while sustaining individual understanding, respect, and autonomy. My work, therefore, explores intercultural communication, identity formation, and the dynamics of power and privilege when different groups interact. My body of work proposes practice-based encounters using various artistic devices, such as iterating voice, interpretations of colours, and situational renderings, to explore nuances of meanings and alternatives to knowledge-making in different artistic and learning contexts. In conclusion, an emergent theme is ‘voice’ used as a metaphor for enunciation, identity and positioning as well as the artistic tool to explore these concepts. I argue that ‘voice’ is subtle and ambiguous, and the diverse properties of voice are generative for contemporary audiences. Thus, the transversal relationship of voice has important implications for considering future questions of context, community, and participation in socially engaged practices.