VIP (Viewer Improved Painting)

VIP (Viewer Improved Painting) is a self optimising digital painting consisting of two large monitors in custom metal frames with a gaze tracker placed in the middle. By measuring the viewers gaze the work is continuously testing different and new compositions and colour sets and iteratively comes closer to the optimal, most viewed, most attention grabbing composition.'
Excerpt from the project outline

Gaze tracking has a range of applications in the fields of web usability, advertising, sponsorship, packaging design and automotive engineering. This mechanism, which makes each pair of eyes equal in its search for a median result, takes on the moniker 'VIP' with some irony. It offers the same anonymity as art market analytics or a museum visitor counters do in their quantification and assessment of artistic works and programs. Speaking to the acceleration of audience feedback - by which, for instance, television series' can be written in direct response to market research - 'VIP (Viewer Improved Painting)' generates new content in real time. Lund activates input mechanisms native to the gallery space, constructing a system by which the attention of his audience takes on a dynamic form.

Jonas Lund (b. 1984, Linköping) is an artist living and working in Amsterdam. He received his MFA from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and his BA from Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. Selected solo exhibitions include New Shelter Plan, Copenhagen, 2015; Steve Turner, Los Angeles, 2015; Boetzelaer|Nispen, Amsterdam, 2014; Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam, 2013; Galerie Van Gelder, Amsterdam, 2013. Recent group shows include ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2015; Seattle Art Museum, 2015; Transmediale, Berlin, 2015; Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, 2014; Witte De With, Rotterdam, 2014; Eyebeam, New York, 2013; XPO Gallery, Paris, 2013; De Hallen, Haarlem, 2013; Internet Week, New York, 2013; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, 2012; New Museum, New York, 2012; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2012. Lund has also spoken and performed at Rhizome, New York, 2014 and Barbican Centre, London, 2013, among others.

See Lund's accompanying commission for The Moving Museum Online, ‘Conversion Pixel', 2014