2020

Whatever Goethe may have said, the analogy of music with architecture, which I refer to its sole ground, namely, the analogy of rhythm with symmetry, accordingly extends only to the outer form, and by no means to the inner nature of the two arts, which is vastly different.

Arthur Schopenhauer, "On the Metaphysics of Music" (1888)

Unlike the prescription of a time signature in a musical work or the poetic meter of syllabic verse, the perception of an image is not conditioned by a prescribed rhythm. Eye-tracking provides an opportunity to capture the visual performance of seeing art, while spatial density analysis provides methods of finding recurrences of gaze point data. In this research, rhythm is construed as a dynamic field of possibility, manifested as a confrontation between image and viewer, rather than through a singularity prescribed the author of a work.