Under the centuries-old wooden beams of the Arsenale at this year’s Venice Biennale, a technological installation titled I Will Follow The Ship looks to the future to make us understand the past. Forming Malta’s entry to the Biennale, the artist Matthew Attard recently completed a PhD in the possibilities of using eye-tracking technology to create art. The centrepiece of the Pavilion is a large wall made of blocks upon which abstract line drawings of ships have been replicated. They seem simple enough until you find out that Attard drew them with his eyes.

“I was intrigued by how the historical walls are showing this human expression of drawing itself”

“I would wear commercially available eye trackers that would record my eye movements,” Attard tells me as we tour the Pavilion. “I would go on-site and try to trace what’s left of the historical traces with my eyes.” The “historical traces” he’s referring to are ancient ship graffiti, something found throughout Malta and the Mediterranean. Images of ships used to be incised onto the stone walls of wayside chapels, a sort of early progenitor of modern graffiti. Many of Malta’s best exemplars of ship graffiti date from the 1500s to the late 1800s.

“I was intrigued by how the historical walls are showing this human expression of drawing itself,” Attard continues. “All of the drawings are very aloof, some of them are really small, and others extend onto several stones. But also they portray this act of blind faith, which is then portrayed via drawing. I wanted to draw a parallel between these historical happenings with our current blind faith in technology.”

This brings us back to Attard visiting the sites of these historical etchings with his eye-trackers. Wearing the eye trackers, he would follow the lines of the etchings with his eye, tracing them in thin air. “I do not have a live feed of what the eye tracker is recording and it is not a tool for drawing, but it creates data. Once I go back to my studio, I download the data set and each data set I develop into a digital drawing.”

“I wanted to draw a parallel between these historical happenings with our current blind faith in technology.” 

Other areas of the Pavilion take us through Attard’s creation process. There’s a recording of his eye looking at the graffiti, darting around as if it were a pencil in an artist’s hand. This is paired with an artificial eye, seeing what the computer sees, and a visual of the eye tracking algorithm itself. Oftentimes, technology and data feels as if it is the polar opposite of what art is but Attard totally disproves this. This data is art.

The Malta Pavilion presents I WILL FOLLOW THE SHIP by Matthew Attard at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale de Venezia, commissioned by Arts Council Malta. 20 April – 24 November 2024