#art

Interactive 3D Chalk Murals By Kurt WennerImagine walking down the road and suddenly walking into the middle of a big chasm that was apparently on the path you’re taking. Upon realization, fear or surprise might grip you as your brain tells you that you’re going to fall– but you didn’t. It turns out that this is just one of many art chalk murals around the globe.Kurt Wenner is one of the many artists specializing in creating interactive 3D art chalk pieces. The former NASA employee prefers to draw on streets, sidewalks, and other public spaces. The more interaction it can get, the better! Check out the interview by Wired we've linked above, where he discusses the impactful nature of his work. According to Wenner, the beauty of his work is how it interacts with the environment, the spectators, the public, as well as the point of view of the viewer. From there, he says that it’s fantastic to see how the art piece creates the relationship between all the previously stated elements. #3D #art #chalk #murals #KurtWenner #NASA #interactive #artmurals #chalkart #3Dart 

The Beauty Of High-Rise Architecture, In Photographs The towering structures that loom over us during our walk around the busy city can look similar and bleak. With some of them opting for glass windows and minimal designs on their architecture, we might think that they’re all just bland– but not really!Photographer Chris Hytha decided to document historic high rises to show the different artworks that can be found atop a structure’s spire. Additionally, there is creativity and art involved in the choice of a building’s gilding and signage, which differentiates it from the rest of the city skyline.His initial idea to complete this project was to photograph them from adjacent rooftops, but it proved to be challenging. He then turned to the next idea on his list: photographing from a helicopter with a telephoto lens. This too proved challenging as the costs of renting helicopters were far too expensive for his budget. In the end, he decided to take the photos via drone photography. While he encountered issues with his drone, such as its low resolution, Hytha found a way eventually to solve them. “The high-rise images are created by scanning the building façade with images at each floor level, then manually stitching the series of landscape images into one vertical composition,” he shared. “This technique is time-consuming but well worth it for the extra sharpness and resolution it provides! One of the side effects of this method is the flattening of perspective, making the images almost like an orthographic architectural elevation.”Image credit: Chris Hytha via My Modern Met #photography #drones #dronephotography #highrise #art  

The Follower: Artist Used AI to Find Instagram Photo Moments as Captured by Surveillance CamerasSurveillance cameras are good when used to prevent crimes from happening. They can also play an essential role in capturing said crimes (and identifying perpetrators) when they happen. However, the same cameras can also be used for nefarious purposes, like secretly tracking people's movements. And with privately installed surveillance cameras spread in public places worldwide, monitoring persons of interest has never been this easy.To demonstrate the dangers of our current surveillance technology, Dries Depoorter created an art project called "The Follower." True to its name, The Follower would zero in on an unsuspecting Instagram user and then piece the Instagram photo together with footage from a nearby surveillance camera.Depoorter's inspiration for the project came as he watched a live feed of the New York Times Square wherein he saw a woman spending a lot of time taking photos of herself (most likely to capture that perfect shot.) Depoorter thought that the woman was probably an influencer, so he scoured Instagram photos that were geo-tagged to Times Square. Unfortunately, he found none. But this gave him an idea: he could combine people's Instagram photos and footage from cameras made available to the public.One of Depoorter's unsuspecting subjects was David Welly Sombra Rodrigues. One of his friends sent him a news article about Depoorter's The Follower, and he was surprised to see that he was, unknowingly, filmed.Unfortunately, Depoorter's YouTube video was already taken down because of a copyright claim by EarthCam, a company that streams webcam content on the Internet.Depoorter, however, states that his project is not about companies that make such things possible. Rather, his point is "there are many unprotected cameras all over the world."Whether we like it or not, we can be monitored, whether by an individual, or by an organization.Depoorter says it best. "If one person can do this, what can a government do?"(Image Credit: Dries Depoorter/ EarthCam)#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #EarthCam #TheFollower #Privacy #Surveillance #Art #Technology

Meet Loab, an AI-Generated Demon that Spontaneously Emerged and Now Haunts Many AI ImagesYou’re probably gonna need some bleach to wipe out that image from your eyes. If not, then kudos to you and your mental fortitude. The image above is from a Swedish musician called Supercomposite. The person started a thread on his Twitter account, sharing the story of how he might have found “the first cryptid of the latent space.” I discovered this woman, who I call Loab, in April. The AI reproduced her more easily than most celebrities. Her presence is persistent, and she haunts every image she touches.Well, the image looks like a grotesque, horrifying woman that can either look like a woman who’s suffering or a mythological being that can be classified as a demon or a weird eldritch entity. This woman is called Loab by her creator, Supercomposite.The musician shared that the “demon” spawned after he was doing some experimentation with artificial intelligence. He was playing with negative prompt weights, which are commands fed into the AI. The AI will then ensure that it will churn out the most different image from the prompt. The magic words that created Loab were “Brando::-1.” Supercomposite wrote that he only wanted to see if the opposite of the Brando logo would be a picture of the American actor Marlon Brando.  “I typed “DIGITA PNTICS skyline logo::-1” as a prompt. I received these off-putting images, all of the same devastated-looking older woman with defined triangles of rosacea(?) on her cheeks,” he further explained. After being scared and kind of amazed, the musician has continued to generate more images of Loab, which you can see in his mega-thread here. Image credit: Supercomposite/Twitter#AI #artificialintelligence #art #experimentation #horror #woman #Loab #Supercomposite #Twitter

Statue Bought at a Garden Sale Turned Out to be a Lost Antonio Canova Sculpture Worth £8,000,000Talk about a lucky find!An old statue that was bought in a garden sale turned out to be a very, very, valuable piece of artwork. Called a “landmark re-discovery,” the sculpture turned out to be Antonio Canova’s (1757-1822) Maddalena Giacente (Recumbent Magdalene). The long-lost art piece was estimated to have been created between 1819 to 1822. Noted as Canova’s lost masterpiece, the Magdalene sculpture was commissioned by the UK Prime Minister of the day, Lord Liverpool. According to lead Canova scholar Dr. Mario Guderzo, finding the sculpture 200 years after its completion was a miracle. He added:“This work has been searched for by scholars for decades, so the discovery is of fundamental importance for the history of collecting and the history of art. It testifies to the intensive thought process of the work of the Italian sculptor who was a fundamental witness of his time: faithful to Pope Pius VII, sought after by Napoleon, beloved by the English sovereign George IV, esteemed by the world of European collecting and of critical importance for the restitution of works of art seized under Napoleon. The re-discovery of the ‘Recumbent Magdalene’ brings to a conclusion a very particular story worthy of a novel, of a marble of significant historical value and great aesthetic beauty produced by Canova in the final years of his artistic activity.”The value of the sculpture is certainly remarkable,  it is worth around £5,000,000-8,000,000 according to lead auction house Christie’s.Image credit: Christie’s #artwork #AntonioCanova #art #sculpture #Christies

This Art Exhibit Consists of Photos of VomitDo you know what vomit on the streets of London looks like? If not, then you’re in for a treat!The art duo Bompas & Parr are putting on a show of what Timeout calls an “immersive exhibition” that takes you deep inside the vibrant, colorful world of London-based street vomit. From April 8-12, visitors of The Crypt Gallery will be able to enter a vomitous experience that, Bompas & Parr promise, includes the smells as well as the sights of barf. Don’t worry about losing your lunch during the show. Staff plans to hand out barf bags to everyone who enters.-via Dave Barry | Photo: Bompas & Pharr#vomit #art

Artist Used AI to turn Buzzfeed Headlines Into Horrifying PicturesGenerative artist Max Ingham, also known under the pseudonym Somnai, created images from infamous and memorable BuzzFeed headlines. The artist was “inspired” to generate images after an interaction with Max Woolf, a BuzzFeed data scientist. Woolf quipped that he needed to look into how the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (better known as CLIP) neural network would handle memorable headlines. Ingham did the job for him, and they were kinda creepy.As seen in the photo above, the disgusting and nightmarish pink Kraft mac and cheese and the weird and abstract-looking baby that the network generated from mashing up Grimes and Elon Musk are unsettling. However, they also look like images you'd see in a museum.Image credit: @Somnai_dreams via Twitter#art #AI #aritificalintelligence #technology #Buzzfeed #CLIP

The Virgin and Child by Albrecht Dürer: $30 Drawing Bought at a Yard Sale could be worth $10 MillionA long-lost work by one of the most important sixteenth-century German artists, Albrecht Dürer, has been valued in excess of $10 million. The drawing, titled “The Virgin and The Child'', was rediscovered by accident by a Boston-based art collector Clifford Schorer at a Massachusetts bookstore that happened to sell collectible items. He was asked to look into the drawing’s authenticity and reluctantly agreed to do so (such an impressive discovery almost never occurs, after all) unaware of what was awaiting him. But when he began to examine the artwork, he was taken aback by the staggering quality he saw. He then began a three-year journey to verify the artwork, which involved taking 17 international flights around the world to consult experts. And thus “The Virgin and The Child”, which the bookseller had obtained at a yard sale for $30, was back in the spotlight, and this time with a $10 million price tag.Image: Agnews Gallery#AlbrechtDurer #art #artcollector #Renaissance

The Tsuzuri Project: Canon Captured Japanese Art "The Wind and Thunder Gods" by Tawaraya Sotatsu in 4.2-Gigapixel ImageThe Tsuzuri Project is a joint effort by the Kyoto Culture Association (NPO) and Canon to create and donate a high-resolution copy of the Edo period artwork“The Wind and Thunder Gods” by Tawaraya Sotatsu. The project, also known as the Japanese Cultural Heritage Inheritance Project, produced a 4.2-gigapixel photo that is a visually identical copy of the artwork thanks to the combination of modern and ancient techniques. The original work was first photographed with a Canon EOS R5 multiple times. The massive resolution was the result of combining all the photos taken by the camera. After the high-resolution image was produced, it was then printed onto silk paper. Authentic Nishijin craftsmen, or “leaf” artists then applied gold leaves to the print and shaped it to fully recreate the original artwork. The artwork was then placed on an authentic Japanese sliding door. Image credit: Canon, The Tsuzuri Project #Japan #art #heritage #TsuzuriProject #TawarayaSotatsu #Canon #camera

Stop Motion Animation Created with Embroidery by Huw MessieThis is embroidery taken to the next level! New media artist Huw Messie plays with the ideas of stop motion animation and embroidery and marries them into an experimental art: moving embroidery.Messie started making stop-motion animations when he was just seven years old. Now, after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art, he decided to apply some of the work he did in machine embroidery to stop motion.The artworks may look easy to create at first glance, but the process of creating Mussie’s moving embroideries employs a lot of knowledge on algorithms and just a lot of patience. Since the artist uses a machine for embroidery, he programmed an image processor that could convert any image to a recognizably similar stitch path. The program helps Mussie determine how he would command the machine to alter the stitches over time to create specific actions or movements for the animations.Check more of his work here!Animation above: Netting Carriage (2021) stop motion animation embroidery by Huw Messie#DigitalNewMedia #Art #Embroidery #StopMotion #HuwMessie #MovingEmbroidery

5 Wondrous Ways People Used Science To Make ArtScience appeals to the mind and art appeals to the heart, but when you get right down to it, they aren't so different. The beauty of our natural world is often described as a work of art, and there is science behind our perception of beauty. but using accidence as an art medium is special, as it can appeal to those who think science is beyond their understanding. Like the time Via Muniz etched a castle on a grain of sand.

AI Creates Photorealistic Portraits of Historical FiguresDutch photographer and digital artist Bas Uterwijk gives us a glimpse of how historical figures would have looked like through these amazing reconstructions made possible through the use of a neural network. The photo above is the artist’s reconstruction of Nefertiti, the great royal wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten. Nefertiti is one of the newest additions in Uterwijk’s series, alongside figures from the Renaissance, 18th-century Europe, and other time periods.To create these portraits, Uterwijk uploads numerous references of the person's likeness to the AI applications. Then, he makes small adjustments to the program until he is satisfied with the result. “These ‘Deep Learning' networks are trained with thousands of photographs of human faces and are able to create near-photorealistic people from scratch or fit uploaded faces in a ‘Latent Space' of a total of everything the model has learned,” Uterwijk explains. “I think the human face hasn't changed dramatically over thousands of years and apart from hairstyles and makeup, people that lived long ago probably looked very much like us, but we are used to seeing them in the often distorted styles of ancient art forms that existed long before the invention of photography.”Uterwijk also bases some of his recreations from paintings and sculptures, like his reconstruction of David (which is based on Michelangelo’s sculpture of the biblical figure).Neural networks truly are a technological marvel.(All Images: Bas Uterwijk)#NeuralNetwork #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Reconstruction #Art #Photorealism #History

Citric Acid Photographed in Stunning Clarity Meet Vance Williams, a professor of organic materials at Simon Fraser University. Williams, aside from being a scientist, is also creating art with his scientific findings.In order to convey the information he discovered during his studies, Williams creates images of different chemicals and organic materials. His photos are bright, vibrant, and abstract. At first glance, the photos he publishes online look like drawn artworks, but they’re not!Williams employs different steps in creating his magnificent images. Take, for example, his photo of a citric acid crystal. First he dissolves the material in water, then he lets it evaporate on a microscope slide. To generate the different colors for the image, he views the crystals with polarized optical microscopy. Finally, he chooses a slide and processes it using the site Make Hyperbolic Tilings of Images.Aside from generating images of citric acid, Williams has also captured images of different organic materials. Check some of his images below and more on his Instagram! Image credit: Vance Williams #Chemistry #Photography #ScientificPhotography #OrganicMaterials #Science #Art #CitricAcid #PolarizedOpticalMicroscopy

Giant Snake Graffiti by Spanish Street Artist SFHIR Decorates This Staircase In Portugal Slytherins would be proud! Spanish street artist SFHIR has created a large-scale graffiti that portrays a little girl and a huge king cobra snake. The artwork, titled The Golden Legend, was commissioned by the International Contemporary Art Festival. The mural, located in Guarda, Portugal, shows a large snake slithering down the staircase as a blond girl stands on guard, ready to fight it.SFHIR specializes in imposing murals that combine spray paint graffiti with paintings using different tools such as airbrushes, brushes, and rollers. His skills are reflected in the intricate artwork details in the stand-off between the snake and the little girl. To showcase the various details in The Golden Legend, the viewers of the mural are placed in specific areas of the public space so they can get a perfect view of the artwork from different perspectives. Looking at the images alone proves that the artwork is mesmerizing. Imagine if you get to view it in person! #StreetMural #Artwork #Mural #Painting #Graffiti #SFHIR #TheGoldenLegend #Portugal #Art #StreetArt Image credit: SFHIR