6/25 — Week 6 — Image/Face averaging/compositing (Nancy Burson/Jason Salavon)

[tarngerine]

Reading recap

Art and Technology, a Panacea that failed

Artist: Nancy Burson

• Artificially aging, based on general morphing technique: break image into triangles,and crossfade/manipulate the triangles in some way (e.g. morph your face into someone else's face)
• Really inspired by participatory art > build machine to age people, "warping" "morphing"

• Merged portraits (composite) faces of politicans merged based on % of nuclear arms owned:
  

a system for seeing words/phrases in 3 diff directions simultaneously:

"patent pending" thinks about patents a lot

animorphs

problematic aspect of her work:

aging machine:

human race machine

"its artificiality revealsnothing about how people live their lives"
in order to create these images it requires stereotyping

eugenecists did composites before, "average criminal face". dark side to face averaging

related to ML biases today

Jason Salavon

Data portraits, image averaging/stats to tell diff stories

The Simpsons averaged

Rembrandt averaged

Graduation photos

Every frame of Titanic

Data has an essence that always come thru no matter how much you transform it. It has a core

Past friend/student work

GTA5 (Claire H)

Interactive work, averaging all the photos of people who go up to it

https://www.alifibrahim.com/copy-of-you-are-not-who-you-think-i

Pareidolia (humans seeing faces in stuff)

Take things that look like faces and average them (run thru face detection algo and align and average) you create this ghost

Research

https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Nancy-Burson--A2nbdC6UErtLUcgN72D4a4YmAg-0Y9tEB5HBSrDjXto4G9G8
https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Jason-Salavon-TCojb9CiFu1v8eVZU2nxh

Technical notes

1. face detection
2. averaging/normalize/rotate/scale/align (e.g. align so eyes are always in the same point)

https://www.reddit.com/r/ImageStabilization/