Tag Archives: memory

A certain indeterminacy of color, neither cerise nor taupe nor burnt umber, nor gray either

Fragments from Eric Schwitzgebel’s Why did we think we dreamed in black and white? Prior to the rise of scientific psychology, scholars interested in dreaming generally stated or assumed that dreams have color. For example, Aristotle specifically includes colors among the remnants that sense-impressions may leave in the sense-organs and which thus appear to us […]

MarI/O

A self learning genetic algorithm finding its way through the maze of Super Mario’s games. Exhibiting a behavior similar to Shannon’s mouse in the previous post.

Claude Shannon demonstrates machine learning

You are green

“As I recovered at home, colour started slowly creeping back into my life, whispering around corners. This was a very perplexing time, for often I only felt I was seeing a colour but was unable to identify it. I would stare endlessly at trees and lamp-posts, desperate to match the colour I believed was there […]

Dead lends a hand, murder lends glasses

Your browser does not support the video tag. In Dead Lends a Hand, the investigator Brimmer kills a woman he attempts to blackmail. The camera shows Brimmer’s face just after the murder and zooms in. After a few seconds, the image of the face becomes still as if Brimmer was paralyzed in shock. At the […]

Every contact leaves a trace.

Both questioned document examination and computer forensics belong to a branch of forensic science known as “trace evidence,” which owes its existence to the work of the French investigator Edmond Locard. Locard’s famous Exchange Principle may be glossed as follows: “a cross-transfer of evidence takes place whenever a criminal comes into contact with a victim, […]

Operationalizing Aby Warburg’s Atlas of images

Franco Moretti presents collaborative project (with Leonardo Impett) on computational approaches to Aby Warburg’s image atlas. Formulating pathos, faces are irrelevant. Clarity is not option, it’s a constraint. A strange encounter of qualitative and quantitative …

Native contours

In this experiment [Hochberg & Brooks, 1962], a human baby was raised until the age of 19 months under the constant supervision of his parents who avoided exposing the child to line-drawings or two-dimensional pictures of any kind. Although the baby accidentally had opportunities to glance at some pictures on a few occasions, at no […]

Damnatio memoriae

Recarving Nero

Portrait heads of the emperor Octavius Augustus. “The Joslyn portrait displays clear indications that it was recut from another person’s likeness, limiting the sculptor by dissimilarities to Augustus’ features in the original subject. Recut portraits in general exhibit asymmetries, undercutting, and unnatural planar features where a chisel or other implement has been used to remove […]