Category Archives: Photography
Face synch
Duchenne was based at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, where he researched muscular electrophysiology—the perceived electrical dysfunction underlying neurological conditions, ranging from strokes and epilepsy through to the more questionable areas of hysteria and insanity. […] The afflictions of the inmates of the Salpêtrière made them perfect candidates for Duchenne’s research and documentation: muscular paralysis […]
this third eye extracted from the abdomen
‘I feel a very sincere admiration for all those people who march around Spain and Italy laden with bags, cases, telemeters, extra lenses, pose—meters, thermocolorimeters (“for taking the temperature of colour”) and who, never losing the smallest clasp from their bags, or the tiniest roll of film, advance with great strides into the ‘Leican era’. […]
Building a social detector, Mass Observation
FOREWORD By Professor Julian Huxley Science in its progress is advancing nearer to the human heart of things, The first great advances in the scientific renaissance were made in the remoter and simpler fields of astronomy and physics. Then followed chemistry and a little later general biology and physiology. The great revolution in regard to […]
Every annotation is an act of vandalism
Asger Jorn reading Sartre’s L’Imaginaire. Questioning Sartre’s floating use of the term intentionality regarding the photograph. The fragment describes ambiguously the photograph or its content (the characters it depicts) as an object without particular intentionality. Jorn sees intentionality potentially elsewhere: “Intentionality on whose part, the artist?”
The Variability of Vision
LATE IN 1967 a book was published in England which is as charming as it must be fascinating to all who are interested in the theory and practice of interpretation. Its principal author is the Dutch naturalist and ethologist Niko Tinbergen, who combined with a friend and artist to photograph the tracks left in the […]
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 …
Universal Slide Show
https://babelia.libraryofbabel.info/ Part of the larger http://libraryofbabel.info/ project.
Accessorize to a crime
A team of researchers from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University have created sets of eyeglasses that can prevent wearers from being identified by facial recognition systems, or even fool the technology into identifying them as completely unrelated individuals. In their paper, Accessorize to a Crime: Real and Stealthy Attacks on State-of-the-Art Face Recognition, presented at the […]
NSFW “dreams”
In September 2016, engineers at Yahoo released a machine learning model trained to detect “NSFW” images. The acronym NSFW, “not safe for work”, is net slang for images with typically nudity or graphic sexual content. Recently (October 2016) PHD research Gabriel Goh has released experiments applying a means of generating images from such models. https://github.com/yahoo/open_nsfw […]
Containment
The minimal message of a photograph may be less simple than we first thought. Instead of it being: I have decided that seeing this is worth recording , we may now decode it as: The degree to which I believe this is worth looking at can be judged by all that I am willingly not […]