A duet for one

2024

A number of participants were asked to locate the mountain named Binn Idir on Dá Log on a section of Tim Robinson’s 1990 map of Connemara on a web page which recorded their eye movements during the search.

The image, above, resulted from performing the experiment on a smartphone. The resultant geometric effect introduces—or reinforces prior—questions and concerns about how digital devices mediate the experience of mapping and landscape.

A duet for one is the title of a 2015 paper by Karl Friston and Christopher Frith which “considers communication in terms of inference about the behaviour of others (and our own behaviour)”. Their work is predicated on an approach which proposes that “we model the causes of our sensorium – and adjust those models to maximise Bayesian model influence or, equivalently, minimise surprise”.

I chose to embed that thinking in the context of another of Friston’s papers, Perceptions as hypotheses: saccades as experiments, which proposes the concept of saccadic eye movements as “optimal experiments, in which data are gathered to test hypotheses or beliefs about how those data are caused”. What if, when looking for information—on a map, for example—we encounter the sort of infinite regress described in Friston and Frith’s paper? This became the starting point for a visual artwork which I also titled A duet for one.