Computer-assisted animation creation techniques for hair animation and shade, highlight, and shadow

制度:新 ; 報告番号:甲3062号 ; 学位の種類:博士(工学) ; 授与年月日:2010/2/25 ; 早大学位記番号:新532

Higher level techniques for the artistic rendering of images and video

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Painting/Politics/Photography: Marlene Dumas, Mme Lumumba and the Image of the African Woman

This essay looks at the politics of portrayal, photography and figuration in relation to the colonial/apartheid archive. It focuses on the Dutch/South African artist Marlene Dumas's reworking of a selection images – both personal and public – in order to question contemporary painting's capacity to deal with history, and in particular its spectacular or photogenic trace. By using the painted reworking of both her old school photograph as well as an iconic depiction of Mme Pauline Lumumba, it asks what painting can do when it takes on the photographic past. At the same time, it explores the interpretive filters that have coalesced around the figure of the ‘bare‐breasted African widow’

Selection V: French watercolors and drawings from the museum\u27s collection, ca. 1800-1910

French art from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries forms one of the strongest areas of our holdings. In addition to the paintings and sculpture that are normally on view in our galleries, the Department of Graphic Arts is blessed with an impressive array of watercolors and drawings by most of the figures that gave such prominence to the period. Yet the breadth and quality of this collection has only been suggested by those few drawings by Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh that are exhibited with some regularity. We have long felt the need to systematically research, publish and exhibit a larger group of these sheets, thus sharing with our several publics one of the true treasures of this Museum.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/risdmuseum_publications/1007/thumbnail.jp

Integrated multi-scale architecture of the cortex with application to computer vision

Tese de dout., Engenharia Electrónica e de Computadores, Faculdade de Ciência e Tecnologia, Universidade do Algarve, 2007The main goal of this thesis is to try to understand the functioning of the visual cortex through the development of computational models. In the input layer V1 of the visual cortex there are simple, complex and endstopped cells. These provide a multi-scale representation of objects and scene in terms of lines, edges and keypoints. In this thesis we combine recent progress concerning the development of computational models of these and other cells with processes in higher cortical areas V2 and V4 etc. Three pertinent challenges are discussed: (i) object recognition embedded in a cortical architecture; (ii) brightness perception, and (iii) painterly rendering based on human vision. Specific aspects are Focusof- Attention by means of keypoint-based saliency maps, the dynamic routing of features from V1 through higher cortical areas in order to obtain translation, rotation and size invariance, and the construction of normalized object templates with canonical views in visual memory. Our simulations show that the multi-scale representations can be integrated into a cortical architecture in order to model subsequent processing steps: from segregation, via different categorization levels, until final object recognition is obtained. As for real cortical processing, the system starts with coarse-scale information, refines categorization by using mediumscale information, and employs all scales in recognition. We also show that a 2D brightness model can be based on the multi-scale symbolic representation of lines and edges, with an additional low-pass channel and nonlinear amplitude transfer functions, such that object recognition and brightness perception are combined processes based on the same information. The brightness model can predict many different effects such as Mach bands, grating induction, the Craik-O’Brien-Cornsweet illusion and brightness induction, i.e. the opposite effects of assimilation (White effect) and simultaneous brightness contrast. Finally, a novel application is introduced: painterly rendering has been linked to computer vision, but we propose to link it to human vision because perception and painting are two processes which are strongly interwoven

Mobilizing The Collective: Helhesten And The Danish Avant-Garde, 1934-1946

This dissertation examines the avant-garde Danish artists\u27 collective Helhesten (The Hell-Horse), which was active from 1941 to 1944 in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen and undertook cultural resistance during the war. The main claim of this study is that Helhesten was an original and fully established avant-garde before the artists formed the more internationally focused Cobra group, and that the collective\u27s development of sophisticated socio-political engagement and new kinds of countercultural strategies prefigured those of postwar art groups such as Fluxus and the Situationist International. The group and its eponymous journal involved the Danish modernists Asger Jorn, Ejler Bille, Henry Heerup, Egill Jacobsen, and Carl-Henning Pedersen, as well as anthropologists, archeologists, psychologists, and scientists. Helhesten\u27s twelve issues from April 1941 to November 1944 featured essays on art theory, non-Western artifacts, literature, poetry, film, architecture, and photography, together with exhibition reviews and profiles of contemporary Danish artists. The group appropriated certain stylistic traits from German Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism. Yet rather than partaking in a retrograde modernist nostalgia, the Helhesten artists radically reformulated the tactics of these movements into what they called a living art, or new realism, which emphasized subjectivity, indeterminacy, and a fundamental anti-essentialism that rejected the Nazi obsession with purity as much as it did the prescriptive manifestos of the historical avant-gardes. What emerged was purposefully unskilled, brightly colored painterly abstraction and naïve styles that were humorous and disarmingly child-like on the surface but trenchant and sophisticated underneath. Helhesten consciously challenged Nazi racist propaganda and its conception of Volk, caricatured the idealized Aryan body, defied Hitler\u27s attempts to assert a common Nordic heritage, and critiqued the National Socialist obsession with historical continuity and order. Moreover, as a fundamental link between pre- and postwar vanguard art movements, Helhesten\u27s living aesthetic celebrated quotidian existence through play, disruption, and heightened awareness in a manner that presaged the postwar avant-garde\u27s engagement with everyday life

Screening psychedelic aesthetics: film and television representations of the LSD experience

This thesis explores film and television representations of the psychedelic experience using a neoformalist-intertextual analytical framework developed specifically for this purpose. In doing so, it contributes to a small body of existing screen studies literature that interrogates psychedelic aesthetics. However, in contrast to other film and television studies scholarship, which typically discusses the psychedelic experience in vague terms, this thesis employs a neoformalist-intertextual approach to meticulously analyse film and television representations of the drug-state. Indeed, the structure of this thesis, which eschews a case study led approach to ensure its analysis of the psychedelic drug-state is as comprehensive as possible, enhances the originality of its scope. As the first academic study of its length to interrogate psychedelic aesthetics, it addresses a significant gap in the film and television studies literature. The distinction this thesis makes between the phenomenology of experiences produced by different psychedelic substances, which are largely overlooked by existing screen studies scholarship, is an original aspect of its contribution to knowledge. It also underpins the rationale for the study’s primary focus on representations of a single psychedelic, LSD. The scope of the study is further limited to an interrogation of films and television shows that attribute the drug-state to the subjective experience of characters. This enabled the thesis to engage with set and setting, which is a significant psychedelic concept that is rarely addressed in the analysis of audio-visual depictions of the drug-state. Further, as LSD features in a substantial number of films and television shows released since the 1950, the thesis examines a broad array of psychedelic phenomena depicted in productions released during various historical periods

Dream work: the art and science of Fin de Siècle fantasy imagery

In this dissertation, I argue that the fantasy imagery of tum-of-the-century British illustrators Arthur Rackham, Aubrey Beardsley, and Sidney Sime, and French filmmakers Georges Méliès and Emile Cohl functions as visual rhetorical "texts" that explicate contemporaneous ideas about the self. At the fin de siecle, models of the self were shaped, in part, by scientific thought that interrogated themes of materiality and immateriality, visibility and invisibility, univalence and multivalence, permanence and impermanence. Dream Work grapples with these oppositions, the questions they brought up, and the provisional answers they elicited. I argue that both the science and the design considered in this study dealt with these oppositions, and the models of the self they elaborated, through a shared visual rhetoric of literal representation or hazy abstraction. I reveal this shared visual rhetoric through analysis of the form of the design considered in this study and its relationship to visual aspects of contemporaneous scientific discourse. I first show how Rackham's imagery, which echoes the visual vocabulary of physiognomical diagrams, deals with material aspects of self and mind. But Rackham's work likewise positions the mind as part of a grand continuum with the natural world. I describe the ways that Beardsley's imagery fluctuates between expression of material and ethereal elaborations of the self manifested in contemporaneous dream theory. And I show how Sime's imagery - which mirrors late nineteenth-century notions of the realms of other dimensions - probes abstract qualities of the self in strangely material forms. Finally, I discuss the ways that the mystifying abstraction that characterizes tum-of-the-century ideas about time, space, and motion marks the mutable selves expressed in Méliès and Cohl's work. In this dissertation, I likewise challenge the hegemony of the written word and of verbal analytical methods for interpreting visual entities. My goal, however, is not to dispense with the verbal analysis of visual artifacts. Rather, my intention is to foreground visual rhetorical analysis as a powerful method for understanding the visuality of both visual and verbal entities

Pictorial Primates: A Search for Iconic Abilities in Great Apes

Pictures and other iconic media are used extensively in psychological experiments on nonhuman primate perception, categorisation, etc. They are also used in everyday interaction with primates, and as pure entertainment. But in what ways do primates understand iconic artefacts? What implications do these different ways have for the conclusions we can draw from those studies on perception and categorisation? What can pictures tell us about primate cognition, and what can primates tell us about pictures? The bulk of the thesis is a critical review of the primatological literature concerned with iconic artefacts. Drawing on work in developmental psychology, cross-cultural research, and semiotics, distinctions between different kinds of pictorial competence are made. The alternatives to viewing pictures as depictions, are to view them as the real world is viewed, in which case only realistic pictures evoke recognition, or to view them as a set of disjoint properties, in which case recognition of categorisable motifs fails. It is argued that approaching a picture as a depiction entails a set of expectations on the picture, which affects attention to e.g. part - whole relationships, "filling in," and integration into context. This in turn allows recognition also of non-realistic similarity. The question, then, is whether such expectations can be formed in other brains than an exclusively human one. The different forms of pictorial competence are discussed in relation to research on similarity judgements, abstraction, and categorisation, as well as applied to other iconic media than the picture, such as scale-models, mirrors, toy replicas, and video. Two lines of original empirical investigation are presented: A study of photographic recognition in picture-naïve gorillas, and recognition of line drawings in picture-experienced and language-competent bonobos. Only the latter study yielded evidence for recognition. The failures in the former study are discussed in terms of experimental shortcomings, and suggestions for future improvements are made