Marc Gauthier

[L'église d'Auvers-sur-Oise, Vincent van Gogh, 1890, oil on canvas, 74x94,5 cm, Musée d'Orsay]

A selection of recent articles on computer science and art.* Researchers at Penn State analyze the patterns and geometric characteristics of van Gogh’s stroke brush to detect counterfeits. [Article]

* A new software called Zotero allows historians to classify images, web pages and texts more efficiently. Could the image of the college professor surrounded by his/her boxes of documents be soon part of… history? [Article]

* A new technique allows graphic artists to change their images to emphasize one part of the picture to guide a viewer’s attention. [Article]

* The exhibit Le Louvre à Québec [The Louvre Museum in Quebec City] now has a microsite.

* Claude Monet’s The basin of waterlilies sold for 80.5 million Canadian dollars this week. In an AFP article, printed by several newspapers across the world, the conversion from British pounds to Euros is completely crazy. Forty million pounds is equivalent to about 50 million, not 80… Jeers go to Montreal daily Le Devoir for reproducing the mistaken conversion while cheers are in order for Cyberpresse. Perhaps the agency issued a correction that was not published? More details at Le Figaro.

[newyorkcitywaterfalls.com]

* Waterfalls will flow under the Brooklyn Bridge and three other spots the East River this summer. [article]

* How to detect forgery? Easy: you just have to check for the presence or absence of nuclear isotopes caused by nuclear explosions. [article]

* Who knew that John McEnroe and Tatum O’Neal had been captured by Andy Warhol? The double portrait is on sale in London on 1st July. [see the work]

* A new copyright law could see the light of day in the USA. It would allow the reproduction of works whose authors can not be traced. In Canada, you have to go through the Copyright Board when such a case occurs to fill out an application. Board then possibly delivers a license.

* Always the same debate: one commentator finds that art is empty.

[City of Shadows, Alexey Titarenko]

* I’ve been observing these pictures from Alexey Titarenko and I don’t get tired. In his serie City of Shadows, he stretched the exposure time of his camera to catch the passage of people on his film prints. The result provides ghostly photographs where passerbies seem to leave parts of themselves behind them… [see all images]

* In computer news, Carnegie-Mellon (PA) has developed software to determine the most likely place where a photograph was taken. An algorithm is looking for similar photos on Flickr… One step closer to the recognition of images by computers. [article]

Some interesting readings found on the Web:
* The Indianapolis Museum of Art had a great idea: what if the community created Web entries in Wikipedia for works in their collection?

In this era of user-generated content, it’s a neat idea! [ Read the museum's blog entry ]

* The J. Paul Getty Trust built a thesaurus in art and architecture. The technical challenges that had to be solved are related in a Computer World article. [ Read the article ]

The database is available to the general public. Just enter a word and you’ll get synonyms, variations on spelling and sources. [ Access the thesaurus ]

The image is a detail from Girl reading a Letter at an Open Window, circa 1659, 83 x 64,5 cm     Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden from Wikipedia.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about research done by a Stanford team. They developed an application that try to render 2D pictures in a 3D format. You can read about my failures while trying their online tool and then my successes - or the other way around!

Another team of researchers recently came into light with their award-winning algorithm for 3D image reconstruction. Working at University of California, San Diego, Manmohan Chandraker, David Kriegman and their respective Ph.D. directors should bring autocalibration a step further.

For non tech-savvy readers, a mathematical tool like this algorithm allows the development of software that can transform your personal pictures from 2 dimensions to 3 dimensions. Just like the Stanford tool, you could get a 3D feel from those pictures of the Grand Canyon you took last summer!

Google and Microsoft are currently trying to put these ideas to commercial use. The Redmond giant’s solution is called Photosynth.

Further reading

• UCSD article on the algorithm
• Technology Review on Microsoft’s Photosynth

An artist born with a congenital inability to view colours is now preparing for his first exhibit in London. And surprisingly, his phone booths will be red and his Barcelona recycling bins will be multicolored.

Neil Harbisson suffers from achromatopsia. This means he is unable to see world in anything but black and white. A meeting with a cybernetics specialist changed all that.

Adam Montandon was giving a lecture at Dartington College of arts in Devon when he met the art student. The cybernetics expert took up the challenge offered by his inability and provided a simple yet brilliant solution.

How can Neil see colours?

A digital camera is mounted on the head of the student. Connected to a laptop he wears in a backsack, coulours captured by the device are then transformed in sounds. The computer transmits those sounds to a prothesis placed in the ear of the artist who can now «hear» colours.

More informations (including a picture of the device) can be found on Times.

The obsolence of technology causes problems for institutions safeguarding knowledge on outdated storage media. For example, one has to see the speed at which the music industry went from LP vinyls to audiocassette, CDs and Mp3s to understand what the challenges facing the retrieval of data on obsolete media. These challenges are the subject of a just-published Christian Science Monitor article.There appears to be some possible solutions to migrate data from obsolete technology to current ones. On one hand, it is possible to maintain old computers and readers to be able to read archaic media. Microsoft chose such an approach. The company has purchased many computer systems, even the historic Altair computer, to be able to run every single operating sytem it produced. This expensive solution may not be a problem for a company with the means of Microsoft but it isn’t necessarily the solution for everyone.

Another solution is emulation. This allows a simulation of the old system on the new system. That way, obsolete media can be accessed. The problem that arises in that case is the emulation of emulators when new technologies are put in place.

Both solutions are expensives ones. Two teams of researchers, one American , the other European, will be looking for answers for these challenges in the coming years.

There are already three models being discussed: a pay-per-use model where users pay for each transfer, a privatized model where corporations hosting the files are responsible for its maintenance and a public model where the governments are the ones responsible for the public good.

The American project, lead by Dr. Francine Berman of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Library of Congress. The NSF provided in total 100 million dollars in funds to her project and four other ones.

The European project will try to find ways to protect 4.3 billion dollars of data a risk of being obsolete and lost.

These initiatives raise some questions.

In art, like everywhere else, new technology is transforming the way things are being done. They are being used by artists to produce current art pieces. But what will be left of video art made of BetaMax movies in 20, 30 or 100 years?

Although it is always possible to transfer these movies to DVDs, isn’t is a form of transformation of the art piece to do so? I guess each case has to be studied indiviually, according to the artist’s wishes.

But still, I wonder what Marshall McLuhan would say about this, he who stated that medium is the message?

To draw a comparison, in a world where oil on canvas would become obsolete, would anyone consider that a scan of the Mona Lisa is the same as the original painting?

Anyhow, the article doesn’t mention if the tast forces will study art pieces. Hopefully they will since there are archivists in the group. This is something to be followed in the coming years.

A team of researchers from the University of Virginia and UCAL, associated with colleagues from Italy, Germany and Britain, have recreated rome as it stood in 320 A.D. The project, which is the largest historic simulation ever, cost around 2 million dollars. Visitors are allowed to take a stroll through the streets of the city. It is even possible to walk through the bowels of the Colosseum. Visitors of the Web site have access to clips and 2D images of the project.

Related post : Moving on the Via Flaminia

A team of CompSci researchers at Stanford have developed a tool that can convert 2D pictures in 3D objects. By comparing pictures they took around the campus to laser scanners, they created an algorithm that reflected the links between these two types of representations.

An online tool allows everyone to give it a try. I submitted a picture taken at the Louvre museum in 2006. Unfortunately, I got a processing error both times I tried.

If I say leaf, what color comes to your mind? In most likelihood, you’ll answer green for spring and summer and yellow or red for fall. That’s an easy one. Now, what if I tell you words like «daily » or « media », what color comes to your mind? A team of scientists from M.I.T. answered that question by giving every word of the English language a color. The result is available after the jump.

Furthermore, I use this orginal idea to search for the « color » of artists like Paul Gauguin and Marc Chagall.

[ More after the jump ]

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