Matthew Attard was invited to dialogue with Antonio Sciortino’s large unrealised project of the Monument to the Unknown Soldier. Articulating one of the exhibition’s concepts, that of the ‘line of sight’, Attard’s process constituted of drawing with an eye-tracker. The eye-tracking device, attached to his computer, tracked and captured his gaze trajectory, tracing along Sciortino’s lines with his eye movements, whilst the technology digitally encoded this data. Subsequently, Attard then drew with this data by pen-plotting his eye-drawing. A line was computed through thousands of points, representative of his eyes’ tracing trajectory of the sketch. Essentially, this transformed the data-points into a virtual drawing. This drawing process is the manifestation of a techno-human hybrid, making visible what was previously invisible—the line of the eye. This piece emerged from a multitude of processes and influences that transformed eye movements into data, data into ‘virtual’ lines, and ‘virtual’ lines into redrawn lines in dialogue with Antonio Sciortino.
