60-461/761: Experimental Capture
CMU School of Art / IDeATe, Spring 2020 • Profs. Golan Levin & Nica Ross
when I was taking photos I was rotating the object rather than moving myself around the object. Once I put all the images in Metashape I realized that because the background is constant rather than thinking that I rotated around the object it knows all the photos were taken in a single place and now I have a bit of a goopy photogrammetry model.
In response to Izzy, who shared Learning to See:
I remember seeing Memo Akten’s lecture as well, but that happened when I was a wee first-semester freshman, unknowledgeable and unappreciative of the power of machine learning. I had completely forgotten about this project, and I’m delighted that viewing it for a second time felt completely different. Maybe I’ve just become a more philosophical person within the past year and a half in general, but this video creates a rollercoaster of emotion in me that did not happen back then. There was a strange empathy and attachment I felt for it; I could almost feel a humanness coming from the program because I was watching it learn, be resourceful, and try. It felt like I was witnessing a child do something for the first time, and I was proud of it. But then I snapped back to reality and realized that a computer was behind all of this, and it made me kind of fearful. It shows how close we are to faking humanness in computers, which is a dangerous place to be. Even though using machines to make art may be inspiring and beautiful on a surface level, it’s important that we also consider the repercussions of these tools. It’s ironic and terrifying to think that some random experimental media artist could be the culprit of the singularity.
Izzy, I know you’ve been at the STUDIO a while so you may have already thought about this, but I also want to note that Learning to See reminds me of Xoromancy, a collab by Gray Crawford and Aman Tiwali, two CMU alumni. I wonder now if the two of them took inspiration from Akten, as Learning to See was made a year or so before Xoromancy.
Other posts I read:
Steven
Huw
Jacqui
Stacy
Marianne’s post introduced Eliasson’s water pendulum, a water stream illuminated by strobe light to highlight the unpredictable flow of water. This reminded me of Daniel Wurtzel’s work which shows the chaotic nature of air currents and how it can be made visible through various materials. however, rather than focusing on the erratic movements of the air currents Wurtzel has tried to highlight the fluidity and beauty of this unstable movement by often incorporating dancers or other performers to interact with the materials trapped in his invisible vortex.
Air Fountain | Daniel Wurtzel
artist website: http://www.danielwurtzel.com/index.cfm
(also reviewed: David, Steven, Joyce, and Oscar)
Scan of a pink Playdough container. Didn’t turn out very accurate, but I think it still made an interesting image.
I’m not sure what went wrong here since I didn’t have any trouble with the group still life. Perhaps I didn’t correctly bound all the images in the bounding box, or took too few photographs?
I scanned an orange. It worked surprisingly well; I wasn’t sure if Metashape would be able to detect points given there aren’t many unique points on an orange. There’s still some weird stuff going on in the shadows and on the table though.
(Thank you Claire!)
As Marianne pointed out in her response to Olafur Eliasson’s work ‘Water Pendulum,’ the work uses strobe to suspend a chaotic system in separate moments. The use of a strobe light allows the artist to stop the piece – for an instant – in time. In essence the artist can change the frame rate at which we observe the system, so that the intermediate frames – where the system travels from one state to another – are cut away. We are left with a jittery, lightning bolt hanging for only an instant in space. This piece offers a unique perspective on the change of a system in time.
Additional Post reviewed: