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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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| Found Art: Model Predictions of Visible Distortion This is one funny project if you are used to looking at low-rez digital images from an aesthetic point of view. These computational neuroscientists from NYU are working on a model that can predict whether or not an image will appear distorted to the human eye. They don't talk much here about why this kind of modelling is valuable, but I can imagine there are a quite a range of possible uses, not the least of which being a step in the ongoing project of technologically simulating the human brain. But the surface logic of the demo (to a lay observer like me) is so back-asswards that it's extremely cute. There's a jpeg of Einstein, pretty good resolution. Then another that's somewhat compressed and a third that's super pixelated. These images are presented to the model, which simulates some of the neurological stages of vision but mashing different kinds of data sets. See a graph & explanation of the model. The results are blurry jpegs! Yay! And these blurry jpegs tell us whether the original jpegs will appear blurry or not. SO cute. It's totally not an art project, but if it was it would have all the self-reflexive tautology of 70s high-conceptual art combined with the artist/activist DIYtechnology-for-DIYtechnology's-sake aesthetic of online art in the 90s. See the results. |