Category Archives: Vision
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 …
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 […]
This divine scanner
In How One Sees, Siegfried Zielinski and Franziska Latell trace the genealogy of vision. Quoting the philosopher Abu Nasr Al-Farabi (870-950), the authors write: Optics teach “according to the true circumstances of what is looked at to find the matter, the quantity, form, position and order and the other things which of the things is […]
Correspondences
Binford, O.T. & Nevatia, R (1977) Description and Recognition of Curved Objects, Artificial Intelligence 8(1):77-98.
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 […]
How to develop a picture from a corpse’s eye
“The morning of November 16, 1880, Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne (1837–1900), a professor of physiology at the University of Heidelberg, dissected the head of an executed murderer in his dark room within minutes of the man’s death. Kühne worked around the contracting muscles in the left eye socket to remove the eye and develop an image […]