Viewing Art in Different Contexts

Abstract

While aesthetic experiences are not limited to any particular context, their sensorial, cognitive and behavioral properties can be profoundly affected by the circumstances in which they occur. Given the ubiquitous nature of contextual effects in nearly all aspects of behavior, investigations aimed at delineating the context-dependent and contextindependent aspects of aesthetic experience and engagement with aesthetic objects in a diverse range of settings are important in empirical aesthetics. Here, we analyze the viewing behavior of visitors (N = 19) freely viewing 15 paintings in the 20th-century Australian collection room at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In particular, we focus on how aspects of viewing behavior 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. In addition, the same artworks were viewed in the laboratory, either scaled to fit most of the screen (N = 22) or to preserve their relative size as in the museum condition (N = 17) to assess the robustness of these relationships across different presentation contexts. We find that the effects of presentation context are modulated by the artworks' physical characteristics.

Open Gallery for Arts Research (OGAR): An Open-Source Tool for Studying the Psychology of Virtual Art Museum Visits

“…We showed how a participant's movement trajectory through the gallery can be identified and visualized, which could be useful for researchers interested in how environmental and curatorial factors influence how people move through gallery spaces (Bourdeau & Chebat, 2001;Tröndle, 2014). In addition, we showed how viewing data can be used to obtain VIRTUAL GALLERY 35 measurements of viewing time and viewing distance, two outcomes of long-standing interest to researchers studying how people view art in museums (Carbon, 2017;Estrada-Gonzalez et al, 2020).…”

“…In the virtual gallery, viewing distance was strongly correlated with artwork area (r = .90 [.73, .96], p < .001). As Figure 6 depicts, people viewed larger artworks from farther away and smaller artworks from close up, just as visitors typically do in real-world galleries (Carbon, 2017;Estrada-Gonzalez et al, 2020). Navigation and movement trajectories.…”

“…As an example, Table 3 lists Viewing distance. Another common measure of interest to museum researchers is viewing distance: how far away, in meters, visitors stand from a work when viewing it (e.g., Clarke et al, 1984;Carbon, 2017;Estrada-Gonzalez et al, 2020). Perhaps unsurprisingly, research conducted in unconstrained field settings commonly finds that viewing distance increases as the artwork size increases.…”

The Image as Language: The Creation and the Use of the Visual Message by Young University Students in Their Communicative Social Activity

“…Due to the surge in these phenomena and the overflow in the use and creation of images, new studies and didactic proposals arise which try to give an answer to a subjectivity caused by a society that is completely mediatized, as can be seen in several papers such as those of Marcos-Dipaola (2019), Corrales (2018), Aguado andVillalba (2020), Ortega Caballero (2014), Estrada-Gonzalez et al (2020), or Ramón-Verdú et al (2022, where the creation of photographic images, in situations of sanitary confinement is studied in order to transmit visual messages about feelings and moods. This trend is in full progression, encouraged by communication of the masses, supported mainly by the use of the Internet and a la carte contents to be used, via platforms of audiovisual dissemination and those of videogames (Fanjul-Peyró et al, 2019), all of which exceed the individual's capacity of assimilation (Andrade-Vargas et al, 2021).…”

The role that composition plays in determining how a viewer looks at landscape art

“…Other studies on eye-tracking and art that do not explicitly look at composition have also been conducted. For example, gaze patterns differ based on the physical properties of the painting and whether they are viewed in realistic circumstances, such as in a museum, or on-screen (Estrada-Gonzalez, East, Garbutt and Spehar, 2020). Furthermore, the number of fixations and scanpath length increase while fixation duration decreases as the painting's level of abstraction increases (Pihko et al, 2011).…”