The image above, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” was painted in 1884 by French artist Georges Seurat. The black lines crisscrossing it are not the work of a toddler wreaking havoc with a permanent marker, but that of neuroscientist Robert Wurtz of the National Eye Institute in the US. Ten years ago, he asked a colleague to look at the painting while wearing a contact lens–like contraption that recorded the colleague’s eye movements. These were then translated into the graffiti you see here.
Art lovers may cringe, yet it is likely that Seurat would have been intrigued by this augmentation of his work. The movement Seurat kick-started with this painting — Neo-Impressionism — drew inspiration from the scientific study of how our vision works. Particularly influential was the pioneering research of Hermann von Helmholtz, a German physician, physicist and philosopher and author of a seminal 1867 book, Handbook of Physiological Optics, on the way we perceive depth, color and motion.
