Tag Archives: image

The ‘dawning’ of an aspect

“I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience “noticing an aspect…” And I must distinguish between the ‘continuous seeing’ of an aspect and the ‘dawning’ of an aspect… I see two pictures, with the […]

A vision substitution system

Two illustrations of Bach y Rita’s vision substitution system, in 1969. “Four hundred solenoid stimulators are arranged in a twenty x twenty array built into a dental chair. The stimulators, spaced 12 mm apart, have 1 mm diameter “Teflon” tips which vibrate against the skin of the back (Fig. 1). Their on-off activity can be […]

Zero bandwidth video

MIT’s experiments in the 80’s to give voice synthesizers a face.

The cloudy days of machine learning

Once upon a time, the US Army wanted to use neural networks to automatically detect camouflaged enemy tanks. The researchers trained a neural net on 50 photos of camouflaged tanks in trees, and 50 photos of trees without tanks. Using standard techniques for supervised learning, the researchers trained the neural network to a weighting that […]

A Brief History of ‘Pixel’

Figure 1. The first appearance of picture element, in a news item in Wireless World and Radio Review, about a demonstration by Ives at Bell Labs of a 50-by-50-element television system. A few RCA researchers, notably Albert Rose and Otto Schade, continued to use picture element to examine the theory of imaging, but with differing […]

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 …

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 […]