Hands Full Of Arts

DRAWING IS A carefully choreographed dance between the brain, eyes, and hands. It requires the cooperation and coordination of the three to translate what's seen in the mind to what's drawn on paper. It doesn’t always quite work out. Things---namely, your hands---can get in the way of artistic vision. But what if they didn’t have to?

In the recent exhibition Drawing With My Eyes, artist Graham Fink drew portraits using only his eyes, some software and enviable amounts of concentration.

Fink worked with a programmer to develop software for an eye-tracker that would allow him to draw simply by looking at the screen. Much like the EyeWriter, a piece of open-source software that lets disabled graffiti artists draw with their eyes, Fink’s setup is based on two infrared lights that shine into each eye. The reflection of this movement is recorded with a camera and passed through algorithms that slow the natural oscillation of Fink’s eye, turning what otherwise would be a shaky line into something much smoother.