Exploring everyday encounters with street art using a multimethod design

Author(s)
Vanessa Mitschke, Jürgen Goller, Helmut Leder
Abstract

In a combination of an outdoor and a laboratory study, we tested how people encountered sculptures and graffiti in an everyday setting. To accomplish an ecologically valid design, we let twelve participants engage in a free exploration walk at the Danube Canal in Vienna equipped with a mobile eye tracker. To further investigate our field measures we conducted a follow-up laboratory session, in which the participants commented on first person videos from their own walks. After watching the video, participants rated various views from their walk for aesthetic liking and interest. We found that participants spent up to 50% of the overall fixation time exploring aesthetic objects and artworks. Further, aesthetic liking and interest for certain views predicted gaze behavior during the walk. The free exploration task gave the participants the freedom to interact with the environment and yielded valuable results about the modalities of attention deployment in a real setting. Our study shows that the combination of field and laboratory testing is feasible and can be beneficial for a more ecologically valid study of empirical aesthetics. Furthermore, our findings illustrate the importance of art displays in everyday life and encourage the use of art, supporting the urban art movement and its stance as a public asset. Keywords: eye tracking, empirical aesthetics, graffiti, urban art, multi-method

Organisation(s)
Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology
External organisation(s)
Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
Journal
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts
Volume
11
Pages
276-283
No. of pages
8
ISSN
1931-3896
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000131
Publication date
08-2017
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
501001 General psychology, 501011 Cognitive psychology
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Developmental and Educational Psychology, Visual Arts and Performing Arts, Applied Psychology
Portal url
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/exploring-everyday-encounters-with-street-art-using-a-multimethod-design(59cffa99-6cb9-43d7-ae02-c2837b9bf0d1).html