2021s MAT255 - Techniques, History & Aesthetics of the Computational Photographic Image


2021s Instructor TA		MAT255 Techniques, History & Aesthetics of the Computational Photographic Image George Legrady \| http://vislab.mat.ucsb.edu Jungah Son Course materials are protected by US Copyright laws and by University policy. Contents of this course may not be reproduced, distributed, or displayed without my express prior written consent. Tues-Thurs 1-2:50pm (online)

Course Information		An interdisciplinary course that examines, thorugh case studies, the state of the photographic image, its history, the theoretical, conceptual, and philosophical underpinnings. The course bridges studio arts, engineering, and humanities. This course may be of interest to artists, humanities researchers or programmers as there are three directions to explore: The aesthetic creative applications, opportunities and constraints, The computational processes from image processing to machine-learning, and The social considerations – to what degree can we believe in the image given the considerable software-based processing and autonomous image detail generation we are seeing through machine-learning processes. The end goal is to investigate the photograph’s transformation through weekly presentations of projects, methods and discussion leading up to the impact of machine-learning on the creative process resulting in computational generated artworks.

Course Workload		Attendance and participation at zoom lectures Weekly contribution to course journal at Student Forum \| Legal agreement Final presentation pdf documentation of either a research paper OR project

03/30 04/01		Course Overview, Apparatus Fundamentals An overview of the optical-mechanical image capture machine Photographic History Selection (1830-1990) A range of explorations from documentary, pictorialism, composite assembly, photograms, formal composition studies, etc.

04/06 04/08		Raster/Pixel Digital Photographic Explorations (1960-1990) The image as a 2D matrix data structure consisting of numerically assignable pixels Image Processing Fundamentals The manipulation of the image through mathematical filtering

04/13 04/15		Material, Machine-Generated Images Examples of the artistic application of the analog/chemical based materiality of the photograph and electronic delivery systems such as screens Data, Signal & Noise/Glitch Data for artistic exploration, Information Theory’s noise and signal, randomness, Brownian motion

04/20 04/22		Volumetric Data Points, Photogrammetry Motion and depth sensing laser-based devices, artistic applications of photogrammetry image stitching (Weidi Zhang presentation) Computational photography The transformed camera through computers embedded within it

04/27 04/29		Computational Aesthetics An engineer’s approach to understanding and quantifying the rules of aesthetic processes Generative Art Rule-based artistic explorations

05/04 05/06		Vision Science & Perception Human/Animation visual perception and how it determines what we see and the design of the machines by which we see and capture images Machine-Learning, CNN, Deep Learning An introduction to machine-learning, convolutional neural networks (Weihao Qiu presentation)

05/11 05/13		Aesthetic Explorations of ML, CNN, DL, GANS An overview of some artistic applications of machine-learning Image Classification & Image Generation Perspectives on image classification, machine-learning applications, texture neural synthesis demo

05/18 05/20		Various Deep Fakes, Social Implications Humanities perspectives, news perspectives, use in arts and entertainment and business, applications of Deep Fakes Individual Meetings

05/25 05/27		Individual Meetings Concept Presentation

06/01 06/03		Open Studio, individual meetings Final Class Presentation (Reports due June 10, 2021)

Student Projects Kevin Clancy Alexis Krasnoff Jungah Son		Mirror With a Memory What They Say Photography and Emotion