Clemena Antonova-Crombois
Research project
Applying Eye-tracking to Religious Art
Project summary
I propose to apply eye-tracking to visual behaviour in the case of religious art. I would like to compare the perception of religious art by 1) viewers who identify themselves as believers to that of 2) visitors to art galleries who approach religious art as an aesthetic object.The aim of these comparative experiments would be to assess the difference in kind between the visual behavior of 1) and 2). While the topic of the religious versus the aesthetic attitude has been much discussed in the theory of aesthetics, it has never, to my knowledge, been tested by eye-tracking techniques. What eye-tracking could do is bring evidence to the largely theoretical ideas we have at this stage. It could prove/ disprove/ modify/ further complicate out current assumptions about the visual behavior of viewers of religious art.
