In her newest two paintings from the Gaze Paintings 2.0 series, Vainionpää extended the invitation to others to take part in her generative cyborgian experiment. In the end she compiled the active gaze of over one hundred viewers into two paintings. Their collective acts of looking were analyzed as data points, and mapped into frenetic and dynamic compositions that become an interconnected tangle. Their titles, The Painter’s Studio and The Dream, reference specific paintings that the viewers looked at, but also suggest more ambiguous readings – perhaps it could have been an entire painter’s studio that viewers’ eyes darted around, rather than simply a painting of one.

In Vainionpää’s work, representation and abstraction are one and the same, her paintings are at once the representation of a physical encounter with works of art, and at the same time an abstraction of that encounter into a digital image. Uniting physical and digital processes, the Gaze Paintings circumvent the much more sinister vibe of tracking and surveillance associated with these algorithms and technologies and replaces them with colourful optimism and joyful kinetic energy rendered in paint.

Essay by Alex Feim