technology and contemplation of art

Journal of Visual Art Practice Volume 3 Number 3 © 2004 Intellect Ltd

Article. English Language. doi: 10.1386/jvap.3.3.179/0

Technology and the contemplation of artContemplating the work of art using theHIPS technology

Shilpa Venkatachalam University of Nottingham

AbstractThis paper studies the role of the spectator viewing a work of art in a museum,using a technology called Hyper Interaction within Physical Space (HIPS). Itwill give a brief overview of how the technology works and what it can mean forthe role of the viewer of an artwork.HIPS as an information system is as yet under consolidation and has not beenfully implemented. Various potential applications are still under consideration.Hence this paper analyses very specifically what the implications of an informa-tion flow such as the one offered by a technology like the HIPS, regarding thework of art being viewed, might be for the art viewer.In an attempt to study what is entailed in an act of contemplation I will under-take a reading of an essay by Rudolf Arnheim in which he discusses the implica-tions of certain Gestalt experiments conducted by a Japanese psychologist,Hitoshi Sakurabayashi.1

I will also undertake a study of Martin Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work ofArt in an attempt to understand what Heidegger defines as a work of art andhow art must be viewed according to him. These essays will be examined in con-junction with specific artists and their views on contemplation.This essay will then tackle questions regarding what happens to a work of art whenviewed with the help of a technology like HIPS: does the role of the viewer undergo achange? Whether, in fact, the notion of contemplation as understood by Heideggerand Arnheim does not hold when using the HIPS? And finally, how can art be under-stood within this changed context? Art in this essay refers specifically to painting.

The man who has honesty, integrity, the love of inquiry, the desire to see

beyond, is ready to appreciate good art. He needs no one to give him an art

education; he is already qualified. He needs but to see pictures with his active

mind, look into them for the things that belong to him, and he will find soon

enough in himself an art connoisseur and an art lover of the first order.

Robert Henri in The Art Spirit, 1923

In 1997 the European Commission, within the Intelligent InformationSurfaces (I-CUBE) initiative, funded a three-year project called Hyper

1 Arnheim’s reference toJapanese psychologistHitoshi Sakurabayashiis taken from theJapanese Journal ofPsychology, 1953. Theparticular chapter istitled ‘Studies inCreation IV: TheMeaning of ProlongedInspection from theStandpoint of Creation’.

179JVAP 3 (3) 179–194 © Intellect Ltd 2004

Keywordstechnology

contemplation

art

spectator

Heidegger

Arnheim

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Interaction within Physical Space (HIPS). HIPS was a collaborative projectfunded in part by ESPRIT 13, a programme of the European Commission.The consortium of eight institutions included the University of Siena,(which was also the coordinating partner), the University of Edinburgh,University College Dublin, Instituto Trentino di Cultura (ITC) in Trento,SINTEF in Trondheim, Cara Broadbent and Jegher Associes (CB &J) inParis, Alcatel in Florence and the Institute for Applied InformationTechnology (FIT) which was formerly an institution of the German NationalResearch Centre for Information Technology (GMD).

The technology was specifically designed to develop a novel paradigmfor navigating a physical space. The technology aimed at enriching theexperience of a tourist visiting a city by providing him or her with contextualand personalized information. In this essay I am specifically concerned withthe implications of such a technology in the particular context of viewing awork of art in a museum. HIPS was applied to the visitor taking a tour of amuseum. In my opinion, it did not so much impact on the work of art itself,as much as the role of the spectator viewing the work of art. Field tests wereinitiated in 1999 with the Museo Civico in Siena chosen as the initial site forthe demonstration of the technology.

The HIPS technology is a nomadic information system. What thismeans is that it can be accessed by the user irrespective of his or her phys-ical location within the museum. HIPS was designed specifically to enrichthe experience of the user within a physical space.

The use of media technologies within museums to facilitate what has beenlabelled a ‘visitor oriented’ or ‘user-centred’ approach has been gainingmomentum over the past few decades. These media technologies have rangedfrom hand-held Palm Pilot(tm) personal digital assistants (PDAs) to web-ori-ented programs. For instance, hand-held audio guides are used in New York’sMuseum of Modern Art (MOMA). Programs like ArtView2 which was devel-oped in Cornell University allows a computer-facilitated communication whilstviewing digitalized images online much like New York’s Metropolitan Museumthat provides visitors with an online tour of the museum in order to allow fortime management. The Art Institute of Chicago has designed an interactivetouch screen program which is called Cleopatra for its exhibits in ancient art.The objects showcased on the program come with background informationand different perspectives. In February 2001, a survey3 evaluating the applica-tion of ‘user-oriented’ digital technologies in museums was conducted on 169art museums in the United States; 74 museums responded. One of the find-ings of the survey revealed that 60 per cent of art museums that responded onthis particular survey currently used some sort of digital technology to helpenrich the museum visitors’ experience.

Within the context of such a plethora of user-oriented technologies,what is the role of the viewer of art? This is a question that cannot beanswered without recourse to the question of what in fact art-viewinginvolves. Or to put it more aptly, what does contemplating a work of art andunderstanding it involve?

2 I am providing a fewexamples of user-ori-ented technologiesemployed bymuseums. Theseexamples are certainlynot a comprehensivelist of all the variousforms of technologybeing used. I wishonly to provide a briefoverview by citing cer-tain examples.A reference to thesecomputer-assistedprograms appears inthe article by Geri Gay,‘The MuseumExperience: DiverseResearch andDevelopmentApproaches’,http://www.cimi.org/whitesite/Handscape_MusExp_Gay.htm.Accessed 20 January2004.

3 The results of the sur-vey conducted werecompiled by MandySmith, a graduatestudent at theDepartment ofMuseum Studies atJohn F. KennedyUniversity andappeared in the articleby Marjorie Schwarzer,‘Art and Gadgetry: TheFuture of the MuseumVisit’, p. 9http://www.cimi.org/whitesite/Handscape_Gadgets_Schwartze.htm. Accessed 20January 2004.

180 Shilpa Venkatachalam

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I answer the above questions by focusing on two specific thinkers:Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Arnheim. With attention to two particularessays: Martin Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ and Arnheim’s‘Contemplation and Creativity’, this paper understands contemplation of awork of art with reference to the above-mentioned works. My choice ofthese two thinkers is motivated by certain reasons.

Rudolf Arnheim was trained as a psychologist and wrote extensively on thepsychology of art and aesthetics among other things. Arnheim tries to bringtogether the way we think about and create art and the way art reveals itself. Iam particularly interested in the experimental observations made on thecomplex workings of the human mind in areas of perception and understand-ing art. Identifying patterns of perception, thinking and organizing, that thehuman mind engages in, leads toward a generalized understanding of humanindividuality. If there is, in fact, an identifiable way in which human beingsrespond to visual stimuli, what are the implications that this might have onthe notion of an individual response and the very mystery of art itself? Theseinvestigations lead me to Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, sincehis starting point is one that tries to understand what exactly an art object is.He uses a methodology similar to Arnheim’s that draws together the subjec-tive and the generalized through his concepts of ‘earth’ and ‘world’. This isexplained in the latter part of my paper. Understanding art and contemplatingan artwork within the contexts of the two thinkers mentioned above is seen asan active, dialogic process between the subjective and the generalized. ForArnheim and Heidegger, much of how we understand art leads us back to anunderstanding of ourselves. It is a process of simultaneous hermeneutic inter-pretation, both of the artwork and of oneself. My contention with the HIPStechnology is that it allows for no such hermeneutic interpretation to occur.

The HIPS claims to differ from other forms of digital technology that wereat the time being used in various museums. Within the museum, HIPSallows the user to explore the physical environment by navigating his or herway within an information space while simultaneously exploring a physicalenvironment. HIPS combines digital enhanced cordless telecommunications(DECT), multimedia, multi-agent systems (MAS) and user profiling systems.A laptop in the museum detects the position of the individual visitor usinginfra-red emitters and a global positioning system (GPS). The user holds apen-controlled Palm Pilot(tm) and wears a pair of headphones throughwhich audio information is transmitted. The user is thus ‘in control’ of thesystem and is not tied to any specific location in order to be able to access it.

The user can ask for information about a particular exhibit. Further, theinformation asked for can be information-specific in terms of genre, historicalbackground, biographical information, form, content and so on. The systemautomatically stores such information and based on this and previous brows-ing history provides the user with information geared to his or her interestsfor future exhibits. The system might then suggest museums other than theone being visited that might prove to be of interest to the viewer. It mightsuggest another work in the same museum that it detects as being of interest

181Technology and the contemplation of art


to the viewer. For instance, should the user have just viewed a particularartwork, the system might ask the viewer to turn around and hence direct hisattention to the painting behind the viewer that might arouse the individual’sinterest. In the event that the user finds it interesting and proceeds toward itthe system will continue to provide information on that artwork but shouldthe user walk away, the system will automatically stop spewing information.Thus, researchers of the HIPS assert that the user is not coerced into listen-ing to information that the viewer might not want to listen to. There is hencethe feeling of being in control of the information and not the sense that theinformation is in control of the individual. Furthermore, the system provides aspatial representation of the physical space in the form of maps to suggestalternative routes that the specific user might want to follow.

However, the interaction of the individual viewer with the physical spacein the museum follows a rigid typing of visitors according to four cate-gories. These categories were established based on a study performed byVernon and Levasseur4 who identified four kinds of people who visited amuseum.

1. The Ant Visitor: The ‘ants’ usually follow the route suggested by thecurator. They stand in front of the painting for a long time, stand closeto the work of art and generally take the time to view almost all theworks on display.

4 The research resultsobtained by Vernonand Levasseur appearin the article byJonathan Broadbentand Patrizia Marti,‘Location AwareMobile InteractiveGuides: UsabilityIssues’, http://www.media.unisi.it/hips/pubblicazioni/ichim-w5.pdf. Accessed 20January 2004.


Figure 1: Model of a HIPS generated environment.The model above is a diagrammatic representation of a HIPS generatedenvironment. A laptop in the museum detects the user position by GPS andtransmits information to the user through audio input into the headphonesand through visual medium on the hand-held Palm Pilot(tm) which is used tosearch, request and store information.


2. The Fish Visitor: The ‘fish’ kind, unlike the ‘ants’, tend to cross emptyspaces, moving to the centre of the room from where they are able toget an overall view of the exhibit. They might view almost all works ondisplay but the time spent on each display is relatively short. Howeverthey are interested in getting an overview of the entire exhibition andhence do not spend time looking at details of the paintings on exhibi-tion.

3. The Butterfly Visitor: These are visitors of the type that frequentlychange their direction, moving from the right to the left end. The timethey spend in front of a work tends to vary, thus making it a ‘semi-long’visit. They generally avoid empty spaces.

4. The Grasshopper Visitor: The ‘grasshoppers’ choose to view thoseworks of art which are of interest to them and hence are informed bytheir personal interests and the knowledge that they already have aboutthe contents of the exhibition. They, like the ‘fish’, tend to cross emptyspaces but do not stop very often. When they do stop in front of anartwork they tend to spend a long time viewing it but the overall visit isgenerally short.

Using these categories, experiments were conducted in two museums inSiena: Santa Maria della Scala and Museo Civico. Experiments affirmed thatmost visitors fell into one of the four proposed category. Furthermore, thedifferent categories suggested that different durations of audio presenta-tion were required for each kind, for instance ants preferred longer andmore detailed descriptions as opposed to the fish visitor, and so on.

Researchers associated with HIPS are still conducting experiments onthese various issues. However, in this paper I am specifically concernedwith what happens when the viewer stands in front of an artwork and isassailed by an information overflow. Let us take a particular example. Say, acertain visitor walks into a museum of Impressionist art and stands in frontof one of the many variations of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies. The systemdetects the position of the viewer and starts reeling off information on thepainting, on Impressionism, on Monet’s life in Giverny, on the technique ofbrushstrokes in Impressionistic painting, on the play of light in the paint-ing, on Monet’s idea of what art is and on the content of the particularpainting, in this case the water lily. There might be music playing in thebackground or in the intervals between sets of information.

Once the information has been divulged, the viewer is able to record hisor her view on the painting. This might include what the spectator feels andthinks, what his or her impressions might be. The art viewer then moves onto the next exhibit. Thus one might argue that the viewer is able to external-ize his inner feelings on a particular exhibit. Researchers working on theHIPS have much to say about the assimilation of information that the usercan gain access to using a technology such as HIPS and the museum expe-rience that allows the user not to merely understand a painting but in factto record his reflections on the work in the same environment.



In studying how the HIPS can mediate the experiential modality, weadopt the concept of optimal flow; the absolute absorption in the activitywhere the experience is guided by external events, which stimulate thevisitor and facilitate the assimilation of information. HIPS should be ableto support the optimal flow by providing intensive embedding in thephysical and virtual environment, to motivate the visitor through a senseof engagement, enhancing the experience. According to Norman, this isthe power of experiential mode: the mind is externally driven, captured bythe ‘constant barrage of sensory information’.5 (Marti, P et al.: 2 [originalemphasis])

The user is bombarded by information as is evident from the descrip-tion above. What in this context is the role of the viewer? With the HIPS, the‘absolute absorption’ that is referred to in the quote, is akin to beingdrowned by an information flood. The mind, according to the researchers,is stimulated and captured by the ‘sensory information’. I argue that themind is made dormant by the incessant chatter of information comingtowards it. This information distracts the viewer from being absorbed intothe work of art. The ‘absolute absorption’ is an absorption in the informa-tion, not the work of art. The viewer is instructed, directed and notified con-stantly. This is not an engagement with the work of art. It is indeed a severedisconnection with it: a pallid and insipid way of looking at something thatcould be potentially exhilarating and inspirational.

In his essay ‘Contemplation and Creativity’, Rudolf Arnheim discussesexperiments conducted by Japanese psychologist Hitoshi Sakurabayashi.Sakurabayashi based his experiments on visual patterns used by Gestaltpsychologists. According to Gestalt studies, the human eye, when exposedto visual patterns, focuses on those patterns that demand the least amountof tension in the visual field. Using patterns common to Gestalt studies,Sakurabayashi found that with prolonged inspection (about ten minutes ormore) certain structural changes begin to arise. These changes do not haveto do merely with reversals of patterns. There might be a breakdown insymmetry, changes in secondary details and margins coming into thecentre of visual focus and the combining of components of the figures toform different wholes. Arnheim explains that with prolonged inspection,certain electrochemical responses of sensory organs begin to decline.When the eye is exposed to an unchanged stimulus photosensitive sub-stances that are essential for vision become exhausted. However, such adecline is only one part of the effect of prolonged inspection. Experimentshave shown that when the eye focuses on a visual stimulus for a longperiod of time, new patterns begin to emerge. The dominant structure notonly breaks down but the eye frees itself from the reign of the dominantstructure. There is an active exploring and patterns that were formallyunseen begin to emerge.

Sakurabayshi researched the working habits of artists like Cézanne andRodin and found that they spent a substantial amount of time looking at anobject rather than setting out to paint them immediately. Arnheim writes,

5 Quoted in an articleby JonathanBroadbent andPatrizia Marti,‘Location AwareMobile InteractiveGuides: UsabilityIssues’, http://www.media.unisi.it/hips/pubblicazioni/ichim-w5.pdf. Accessed 20January 2004.

The originalreference appears inM. Csikszentmihalyi(1990), Flow: ThePsychology of OptimalExperience, New York:Harper Perennial; andD.A. Norman (1993),Things That Make UsSmart, Reading, MA:Addison-Wesley.



Once coerced into viewing the object longer than it would spontaneously, the

mind exerts its curiosity and its power of discovering and inventing new pat-

terns. Freed from the tyranny of the dominant structure, the image yields

hidden possibilities; aspects out of the ordinary ... the new views present

themselves as surprises to the passive observer. But when these spontaneous

changes are exhausted and the threat of monotony persists, the response -

according to Sakurabayashi’s report - rises above the threshold of conscious-

ness and the person finds himself actively exploring and inventing. (Arnheim

1972: 296)

What is evident from Sakurabayashi’s experiments and Arnheim’s com-ments is that aesthetic response is not a pre-programmed set of feelingsand impressions that given information is able to stimulate. The relation-ship between the work of art and the viewer of an artwork is a relationshipwhereby the work of art ‘comes alive’ in front of the viewer’s eye. The ques-tion remains whether with a technology such as the HIPS such a ‘comingalive’ is possible at all? This is not to argue that there is no response on thepart of the viewer. My contention is that there is a difference in understand-ing art intellectually and appreciating it aesthetically, though it is not imper-ative that both should be mutually exclusive from one another. What HIPSallows for is purely an intellectual understanding of art. Intellectual under-standing involves a mastery over information regarding the work, its tech-nical aspects and so on. Aesthetic appreciation entails an involvement withthe work of art such that the work is able to bring alive a space that thework occupies. However, with the constant flow of information regardingform and content and historical background and genre, does not the spec-tator of art become a passive receptor of information? The researchers ofthe HIPS technology allude to the spectator as the user. Has the viewerthen been transformed into precisely that: a mere user of information?Does the viewer simply assimilate all the information coming towards himor her in a package of knowledge about the particular exhibit and walkaway? The art viewer might leave the museum with a sense of fulfilmentregarding the database of knowledge that he or she has accumulatedregarding where Monet was born, what led him to paint The Poplars or theWater Lilies, what year he died, who he was influenced by, who influencedhim, what came before Impressionism and what came after. And who is tosay? Perhaps the visitor to the museum really wants the museum experi-ence to be just this. Perhaps such information might help the viewer toappreciate art.

Or then perhaps we are jumping ahead too fast. If the viewer has beentransformed into a user then the HIPS might just be a fantastic aid. Butdoes viewing a work of art involve merely that? Has art viewing been conve-niently adapted to suit the needs of a passive consumerist society? Is con-templation in art a collecting of facts regarding the painting? And isconsumerism passive? It is my opinion that art viewing has become dic-tated by a manual approach, whereby, what I see is what I informed must



be seen by ‘specialists’ in the field. And I am confident to say that I know artbecause all of what I know has a stamp of authority on the appropriate waythe work should be viewed.

Once again Arnheim argues:

The ‘consumer-mentality’ of our times inclines people toward passivity. The

person acts as a receiver, who picks up what he gets and takes dictation from

what the world imposes on him. If changes from the ordinary are needed - for

the sake of originality or progress - he tends to wait for such changes to be

revealed or donated to him by his outer environment, that is, by the perceived

and the social worlds ... Given this state of mind, we are inclined to see con-

templation as a purely passive activity. (Arnheim 1972: 297–98)

Of course Arnheim does not talk with the HIPS technology in mind. Yet it isobvious how the HIPS works in perfect synchronization with this so-called‘consumer-mentality’. Art is literally made ready for consumption. There isno effort on the part of the viewer to look and experience. It is replaced by amechanistic approach where any potential for experiencing the work onexhibition is stifled swiftly by a pre-arranged response. One might argueagainst this saying that art has become accessible to every individualbecause of the presence of such varied audio guides. This is, however, aweak case to make. It has instead been made available for passive con-sumption, where there is no intense looking but a preoccupation with lis-tening to a mundane description. It is the viewer who must ideally animatethe work of art, not the audio description. To subject the viewer to a con-stant onslaught of information almost amounts to saying that the viewer isnot capable of experiencing the art without being tutored at each step. Iwould go as far as to say that it amounts to an offence to the viewer who isdeemed impossible of an individual and unique response.

It is all very well to criticize the ‘consumer-mentality’ of the viewer, butwhat after all is the point of going on at length about this if in fact we havenot been able to point out what the viewer’s experience might be in an actof contemplation devoid of the use of the HIPS technology. What the HIPStechnology essentially provides is a bank of knowledge and hence a precon-ditioned set of responses. The onlooker is literally told how to appreciatethe work on display. By this I do not mean to say that HIPS literally tells theviewer to ‘feel the plight of the potato workers’ or to ‘feel the attractivemelancholy of the water lily pond’. HIPS restricts viewing to an informa-tional appreciation. That is what I mean when I say that HIPS provides apreconditioned set of responses. Knowledge begins to equal response.

This response is an intellectual understanding of art rather than anexperiencing of the artwork. An intellectual response is not something to beentirely avoided and condemned but when it begins to entirely dictate howone experiences the work of art, then it must be acknowledged that artviewing has submitted to the numbness of sight and the staleness of a setof rules on how to look at art.



But how does one experience a work of art? Sakurabayashi’s experimen-tal results indicating that something previously unseen and hiddenbecomes visible after a span of prolonged inspection, of visual patternsbeginning to emerge from behind the dominant patterns; the invisiblebehind the visible beginning to take shape, strike a parallel with whatseveral artists themselves allude to in their experience of artistic creation.Pablo Picasso, for instance, states,

An idea is a beginning point and no more. If you contemplate it, it becomes

something else. What I think about a great deal, I find I have always had com-

plete in my mind. How can you then expect me to continue being interested in

it? If I persist, it turns out differently because a different matter intervenes. As

far as I am concerned, at any rate, my original idea has no further interest,

because while I am realizing it I think about something else.6 (Chipp 1968: 273)

And Max Beckmann says,

... I am seeking for the bridge which leads from the visible to the invisible, like

the famous cabalist who once said: ‘If you wish to get hold of the invisible you

must penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible.’7 (Chipp 1968: 187)

Curiously, both Picasso and Beckmann talk of contemplation in a signifi-cantly similar way to Sakurabayashi’s experiment results. Both refer to anoriginal idea or pattern turning into another pattern or idea in such a waythat what one sees initially gives way and literally reveals and brings forththe new pattern. What one sees initially has now been penetrated into.

With HIPS, is not the spectator saturated by an information overflow?Where then is the time to look? And how then, without this intense looking,can we penetrate anything at all? If the user is constantly being bombardedby a complex set of information then how is any sort of prolonged inspec-tion possible? The eye, according to Sakurabayashi’s experiments, mustlook until it is tired of looking, until the visible is able to reveal that which ishidden. This is the point where creativity unmasks itself.

With the HIPS, what the viewer discovers is not the opening up of thework of art. A mechanical response begins to take hold whereby the viewerlistens to instructions on how to view an artwork. The spectator of artbegins to understand intellectually without understanding emotionally. Thework of art no more reveals itself but is revealed to the onlooker. And yetwhat is revealed in all of this? Do we need to understand art according tothe rules of a critical history? Bernard Berenson, one of the foremost artcritics himself, denounces this mere collection of data and facts that theviewer understands as contemplation. He says,

The only so-called criticism of literary, artistic or musical works to be consid-

ered as worth while are those which impel the reader with the force of an hyp-

notic suggestion to read, to see, to hear what he has been reading about. The

6 Quote by PabloPiccaso, published inHerschel B. Chipp(1968), Theories ofModern Art: A SourceBook by Artists andCritic, Berkeley:University of CaliforniaPress, p. 273.

7 Quote by MaxBeckmann, publishedin: Herschel B. Chipp(1968), Theories ofModern Art: A SourceBook by Artists andCritic, Berkeley:University of CaliforniaPress, p. 187.



rest may be good metaphysics, aesthetics, cosmology, economics, etc., etc.,

etc., but is not specific criticism, and generally is cultivated by readers as well

as writers who do not care for the work in question but for problems to which

the work of art merely serves as a springboard for the discussion of irrelevan-

cies ... You must look and look and look until you are blind with looking ...

(Berenson 1974: 18–19)

Is my argument, then, one that is against all information that has to do withart? Not in the least. What is being argued against here, by me, is that anyinstruction that has to do with how an artwork should be responded to,does not allow the work of art to come unto itself. I am not arguing againstall kinds of intellectual understanding of art, say for instance, what criticsmight have to say on particular artworks but I am making the case that anysuch understanding must follow from the initial experience of the artworkcoming alive, from the experience of being stirred and awakened by theartwork in question. The mind must first be stimulated by an urge toexplore, only then can curiosity be roused. If the viewer is assaulted withinformation the urge to explore is not even allowed to be born.

To understand how exactly a work of art comes alive let us look atMartin Heidegger’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. Heidegger startsby outlining the three traditional definitions of a thing. A thing according tothese three definitions is:

1. An object or subject to which various properties belong2. An object that produces in us a manifold of sensations3. Matter invested with form

However, according to Heidegger, these three definitions allow for no wayof distinguishing between what he calls equipment and art, as according tothese three definitions, almost everything falls under the category of athing. He proceeds by clarifying the concept of equipment as opposed tothing. Equipment is that which is made by the human hand solely for thepurpose of being used in a specific way, for instance a jug for pouring outwater or a knife for cutting bread. A thing, on the other hand, comes into itsown being (a stone, for instance). Art is a bringing forth of truth, an uncov-ering of a world. Art is not merely a thing, even though art comes alive byits own self-presencing, and it is not merely equipment either, even thoughit has been made by the human hand. Equipment likewise is half-artbecause it has been made by the hand but something less, and it is half-thing but something more. Heidegger explains:

But the work [of art] is not a piece of equipment that is fitted out in addition

with an aesthetic value that adheres to it ... The making of equipment never

directly effects the happening of truth. The work belongs, as work, uniquely

within the realm that is opened up by itself ... we no longer raise this question

about the work’s thingly element for as long as we ask it, we take the work



directly and as a forgone conclusion, as an object that is simply at hand. In

that way we never question in terms of the work, but in our own terms. In our

terms we, who then do not let the work be a work but view it as an object that

is supposed to produce this or that state of mind in us. (Heidegger 1977: 164)

Heidegger would argue that a work of art has been transformed into anobject of art by making it the study of critical inquiry. Such a critical inquiryhas attached attributes to various artworks whereby the viewer is able tounderstand the work. Hence while looking at Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters(1885), the onlooker appreciates the painting knowing that:

• Van Gogh left Paris for Arles, which soon became the centre of his artisticactivity.

• In Paris he met with Emile Bernard and Paul Signac, met Gauguin andso on.

• Theo, Van Gogh’s brother, was an important source of support to him.• His painting The Potato Eaters shows people eating their potatoes under

a dark light.• The painting was the largest he had ever done.

HIPS might provide the viewer with all this information. By doing so it willnecessarily blur the distinction between art and equipment. The system eval-uates the interests of the viewer and sets a default series of attributes that fitsthe viewer’s interest. Interestingly, researchers associated with HIPS speak ofthe user understanding the work of art. This understanding assumes certainconclusions regarding how the work must be received. According toHeidegger, the making of equipment never directly brings about the happen-ing of truth. This is because an equipment has already been fitted out with apre-adhered-to response, and has been created moreover keeping in mind


Figure 2: The Potato Eaters (1885) by Vincent Van Gogh.Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.


this response. The artwork has now become a piece of equipment fitted withinformation for a viewer who studies the painting according to a set ofnotions associated with a particular painting. The viewer might look at ThePotato Eaters and appreciate what he or she sees, once the viewer has beengiven all this information. He or she might be able to walk out of the museumand discuss with a fellow viewer all that he or she has learnt. But what theviewer will fail to communicate, should they rely solely on such information, isthe experience of standing in front of the work and experiencing it.

One might argue that the HIPS is useful in drawing out neat boundariesbetween the different genres of painting. The argument that might be used,is that we need to look at different genres in different ways. Impressionistpainting, for instance, has a different visual effect from classical painting. Myassertion is that, in order to appreciate a work of art fully, we do not need toknow beforehand that classical painting employed three or more layers ofpainting to create a certain visual outcome where often the painting lookedlit up from behind, as compared, to say, the Impressionists who used thick,dense colours that would reflect light directly without allowing the light to beabsorbed by the canvas, thus giving the effect of outdoor lighting. We mightperhaps be intrigued by such information but this curiosity must come afterwe have been aroused by the works themselves. The viewer in a museummust experience the work of art that lies before him or her. Experiencing thework is not synonymous to merely an intellectual grasping of the more tech-nical aspects that allow for a different experience from different works of art.Such information is often fascinating but must not be the first step to artviewing. It must be stimulated by a uniquely individual experience of beingawakened by the particular artwork in question.

Yet what is the meaning of an artwork taking on a life of its own? Theunconcealing of truth happens in the strife between world and earth,remarks Heidegger. Earth is that which is closed, that which shelters andhence the fixing of a certain tradition in the arts. Earth, explains Heidegger,destroys every attempt to penetrate it. Earth can hence be understood asthe technical aspect of the work being viewed - the colours used, thesubject and the content painted, the method of brushstrokes, the thicknessof paint. Hence, viewing The Potato Eaters with the above HIPS-style gener-ated information is allowing earth to reign. And as Heidegger says himself,‘this may herald itself under the appearance of mastery and of progress inthe form of technical-scientific objectivation of nature, but this mastery nev-ertheless remains an impotence of the will’ (Heidegger 1977: 172).

World on the other hand is a process of opening up. Earth resists world.World sets itself back into earth and through earth brings forth world.Hence, colours, brushstrokes, canvas, or thickness of paint conceal a spacebehind them in a painting. This space breaks through as world.

For instance, when I look at Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, what I noticeis that the people eating their potatoes in the dimly lit room are peasantswho have toiled through the day. Their hands are dark brown because of themud that has stuck to them in their work on the fields. The light bulb that



hangs above them reveals tired faces that must rise again the next morningto dig the fields. Their faces are crumpled with weariness and hard labour;their hands have become hard from ploughing. The painting reveals a rurallifestyle and the people who inhabit that particular life.

The preserver of the work of art is the individual through whom worldjuts out into earth. According to Heidegger truth can never be proven fromwhat went before, because what went before was rooted in its exclusiveactuality. The artist has seen the work through his eyes and his eyes alone.The work of art lives by itself and with the onlooker who stands before it.But how then can we say with certainty that Heidegger is not merely allud-ing to a subjective process whereby the viewer simply derives whatever heor she wishes to from the work of art? Heidegger provides the reader withan answer:

... however, in the work, createdness is expressly created into the created

being, so that it stands out from it, from the being thus brought forth, in an

expressly particular way ... what is created cannot itself come into being

without those who preserve it. The working of a work does not consist in the

taking effect of a cause. It lies in a change, happening from out of the work, of

the unconcealment of beings and this means of being. (Heidegger 1977: 189,

190, 191, 197)

The preservers of the work of art are the viewers rooted within a restrictedhistoric moment. I will explain this with reference to my particular experience.When I visited the Metropolitan Museum in New York, El Greco’s works werein a special exhibition and amongst several of the works that caught my inter-est was the particular painting titled A View of Toledo. This was the point inthe exhibition from where on I decided to pay no attention to the descriptionpasted at the corner of each work. To me the painting revealed a landscape atfirst. After a few seconds I began to see that it was about to rain, that it wasrather windy which was suggested by the way the bushes swayed in the wind.At first I was unable to detect whether it was night or day. Since a silverymetallic light seemed to envelop the surrounding area it might have beennight-time but something suggested that it was in fact daytime. Perhaps itwas the people who seemed to be fishing and bathing and I concluded that itwas probably late afternoon on a day when a dark heaviness descends on thelandscape making it seem like neither day nor night. The clouds seemedheavy with moisture and though the green landscape was overwhelming, thedark and heavy clouds weighed themselves down on the landscape reducingsomewhat the impress of the green. This scene could have been any land-scape but to me it brought back a region in the south of India. It opened thelives of a select population of farmers living in that particular region in India.A View of Toledo is clearly about Toledo, painted sometime between 1597 and1599. However, to me, the work opened itself within the realm that it waspainted in: the colours, the scene, the landscape, and the thickness of paint.But it did so in my terms.



Thus the work projects the not yet historic Dasein. There is a bringingforth from a founding leap. The work of art contains a realm of possibilitiesthat has already sprung forth in the process of creation but is as yet veiled.Because the work of art in its original leap has released a realm of possibil-ities and because Dasein is a being that is, in essence, at least according toHeidegger, a being with infinite possibilities, historical Dasein will open upa work of art differently at different fixtures in time.

Dasein in coming to the work of art is meeting earth, that which isalready fixed by history. In viewing the work of art and thereby making itcome alive once again in one of its infinite possibilities, Dasein is bringingforth world. If instead, art were to be viewed only on the basis of a past con-glomeration of facts and information, on what the appropriate way to viewit might be, there would occur no such strife between world and earth.Wassily Kandinsky in a brilliant passage alludes to just such a process oflooking at the world anew.

The little bug, which runs in all directions under a glass, believes to seebefore it an unrestricted freedom; and an act of making more precise thedirection in which the searching must take place. At a certain pointhowever, it encounters the glass: it can see further but not go any further.And moving the glass forward gives the bug the possibility of runningthrough more space. And the bug’s main movement is determined by thecontrolling hand. In like fashion our epoch, esteeming itself to be com-pletely free, will encounter certain limits: these limits, however, will beshifted ‘tomorrow’.8 (Chipp 1968: 159)

I think Kandinsky’s little bug draws on a similar idea to Heidegger’sDasein; always attempting to push the glass further and create more spacefor new interpretations. Does the HIPS technology hamper such interpreta-tion? It is perhaps erroneous to dismiss the HIPS technology altogether.The question remains instead, what do we seek in art? If we are aiming atthe building of a bank of objective information then yes, the HIPS mightjust enable the formation of a swift gathering of facts. But is that what aes-thetic experience is about? Or does it entail a relationship between viewerand artwork such that the work comes alive to the viewer in a unique way,that allows the viewer to penetrate into it, and gives expression to the innerlife of the viewer? Yes, it is enlightening to have knowledge about form andcontent, colour and composition, genre and historical background butshould not interest in these aspects be stimulated because a certain workof art has stirred the inner feelings and sensations of the viewer. Or is it theother way around? Must we simply go and stand in front of a Monet,Degas, Klee, Munch, Van Gogh, Picasso or Klimt so as to test all we knowand have learnt about the difference between the techniques that Monetused in his brushstrokes from that of Klimt?

I have on certain occasions used audio systems provided by museums.While understandably HIPS is different from audio systems that are generallyavailable at museums and while researchers of HIPS clearly distinguish it fromsuch systems that according to them often hinder the museum experience,

8 Quote by WassilyKandinsky, publishedin Herschel B. Chipp(1968), Theories ofModern Art: A SourceBook by Artists andCritic, Berkeley:University of CaliforniaPress, p. 159.



both ergonomically and in terms of user-adaptability, HIPS nevertheless is aninformation-centred experience. Whilst I have found that in certain scenariosthe audio system is of help, for instance while viewing artefacts or in a naturalhistory museum, painting and art viewing does not rest solely on an informa-tion-generated paradigm of experience. While in Dublin, about a year and ahalf ago, I visited the Writers Museum, which houses objects owned by writers,early editions of some ‘classic’ literature books and so on. The WritersMuseum is clearly information-based and seeks to provide ‘facts’ aboutvarious writers. Within this setting I found the audio system to be an aid. It isalso why I think that the HIPS technology would be well suited to a sciencemuseum or a natural history museum. When I walk into a natural historymuseum, for instance, I am concerned about learning facts. What might havebeen the cause for the extinction of dinosaurs, how many years ago did theyexist, what are the different classifications of plants or what tools did theancient Greeks use for various purposes.

However museums that exhibit paintings and artworks are experience-based. The artwork is to be experienced. And experience does not mean apackage of information which the viewer can listen to and then move on tothe next work. One thing can be said with certainty. Contemplation of awork of art does not simply involve a compilation of pieces of trivia. Theviewer does not engage merely in this activity. The user, however, does.

AcknowledgementThis paper is the outcome of a series of Techno-Science seminars orga-nized by Professor Don Ihde, that she attended whilst she was on anexchange programme at the State University of New York at Stony Brook fora period of one semester starting September 2003. The main ideas in thepaper were presented at one of the seminars in the series.

Works citedArnheim, Rudolf (1972), Toward a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays, Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Berenson, Bernard (1974), Looking at Pictures with Bernard Berenson (intro. HannaKiel), New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Broadbent, Jonathan and Marti, Patrizia, ‘Location Aware Mobile Interactive Guides:Usability Issues’, http://www.media.unisi.it/hips/pubblicazioni/ichim-w5.pdf.Accessed 20 January 2004.

Chipp, Herschel, B. (1968), Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists andCritic, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990), Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, New York:Harper Perennial.

Gay, Geri, ‘The Museum Experience: Diverse Research and Development Approaches’,http://www.cimi.org/whitesite/Handscape_MusExp_Gay.htm. Accessed 20 January2004.

Heidegger, Martin (1977), ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Basic Writings: FromBeing and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964) (ed. David Farrell Krell), SanFransisco: Harper.



Henri, Robert (1923), The Art Spirit (New edition), Hagerstown, Maryland, U.S.A.:Lippincott, 1958.

Marti, P., Rizzo, A., Petroni, L. and Diligenti, M., ‘Supporting Emotional Engagementin Art Settings with Adaptivity’, http://www.dfki.de/imedia/workshops/i3-spring99/w3/hips.html. Accessed 20 January 2004.

Norman, D.A. (1993), Things That Make Us Smart, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Schwarzer, Marjorie, ‘Art and Gadgetry: The Future of the Museum Visit’,http://www.cimi.org/whitesite/Handscape_Gadgets_Schwartze.htm. Accessed20 January 2004.

Further worksBenelli, Giuliano, ‘Esprit Project 25574-HIPS: Hyper-Interaction within Physical

Space’, http://www.cordis.lu/esprit/src/25574.htm. Accessed 20 January 2004.

Oppermann, Reinhard and Specht, Marcus, ‘Adaptive Mobile Museum Guide forInformation and Learning on Demand’, http://www.fit.fraunhofer.de/~oppi/publications/HCI99.NomadicComputing.pdf. Accessed 20 January 2004.

Suggested citation:Venkatachalam, S. (2004), ‘Technology and the contemplation of art. Contemplating

the work of art using the HIPS technology’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 3: 3,pp. 179–194, doi: 10.1386/jvap.3.3.179/0

Contributor details:Shilpa Venkatachalam is currently doing her Ph.D. in the area of philosophy and liter-ature at the Postgraduate School of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, University ofNottingham. Her research focuses on the notion of ‘being, consciousness and theself’ and the expression of this in certain literary texts and in the philosophy of MartinHeidegger. Shilpa completed her Masters from the University of Durham, in Englishstudies, with special emphasis on the interrelation of literature with philosophy andscience. Contact: The Postgraduate School of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies,University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK.e-mail: [email protected]



technology and contemplation of art

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