From jim at vispo.com  Wed Oct 19 12:00:06 2016
From: jim at vispo.com (Jim Andrews)
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2016 10:00:06 -0700
Subject: [x] Ben Bogart's new work of public art in Vancouver
Message-ID: <6db3c1f9-2876-f9ec-9140-e6a78579a121@vispo.com>

I see Ben Bogart has a new work of public art outside the Queen 
Elizabeth theatre in downtown Vancouver. Congrats, Ben!

Info at
http://www.ekran.org/ben/wp/2016/as-our-gaze-peers-off-into-the-distance-imagination-takes-over-reality-2016

What can you tell us about this piece, Ben?

ja




From ben at ekran.org  Thu Oct 20 11:31:31 2016
From: ben at ekran.org (B. Bogart)
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2016 09:31:31 -0700
Subject: [x] Ben Bogart's new work of public art in Vancouver
In-Reply-To: <6db3c1f9-2876-f9ec-9140-e6a78579a121@vispo.com>
References: <6db3c1f9-2876-f9ec-9140-e6a78579a121@vispo.com>
Message-ID: <df6e179e-da12-7ab4-c891-c210988a9e53@ekran.org>

Hello all!

Thanks Jim for sharing the project, I hope you all get out to see it. It
will be up until March, so there is plenty of time.

I was originally planning something along the lines of my Self-Organized
Landscapes
(http://www.ekran.org/ben/wp/2009/self-organized-landscapes-2009-present/),
as I've been interested in making a diptych with an image of the whole
site along side the reconstruction. In short, these are collages of
thousands of images which are arranged in a grid according to (colour
histogram) similarity.

The project was initially meant for the City Centre Canada-line station,
so I proposed a diptych with one "realistic" image on one side and the
Self-Organized composition on the other. At that point the imposed
constraints of the image became clear, from the difficulty of shooting
in that area (I was proposing shooting thousands of images with a robot
camera, and somehow needed to avoid both adverts and people's faces),
the requirement of only one image, and printing on 50% transparent vinyl.

The requirement to make a single image got me thinking about a single
SOM whose organization process was variable, rather than all on or off.
I ended up using a single large panorama of the site as source material.
This was down-sampled and the colour of each pixel was used as an input
pattern to the SOM, as well as defining the initial SOM weights. I then
trained a SOM where the neighbourhood function (the parameter that
defines the degree of organization) changed according to the y position
in the grid. The resulting image resembles the original photo at the
bottom, but becomes increasingly self-organized moving up, where the top
is is an abstract colour field.

The final composition is emergent, but also deterministic. This is
because the order in which pixels are fed to the SOM and the initial
weights are always the same. This emergent composition is "imaginary" in
that it includes structure that is not visible in the original photo.
The imaginary structure is also bounded by reality because the SOM
preserves statistical properties of the underlying data. Please do check
out the video at the bottom of the paged linked in Jim's original
message, which shows the decompositional process.

I blogged my whole research and production process, and there are many
interesting images and approaches that ended up being abandoned. The
following URL shows them sorted from oldest to newest:

http://www.ekran.org/ben/wp/category/production/platforms/?order=asc

Ben


On 16-10-19 10:00 AM, Jim Andrews wrote:
> I see Ben Bogart has a new work of public art outside the Queen 
> Elizabeth theatre in downtown Vancouver. Congrats, Ben!
> 
> Info at 
> http://www.ekran.org/ben/wp/2016/as-our-gaze-peers-off-into-the-distance-imagination-takes-over-reality-2016
>
> 
> 
> What can you tell us about this piece, Ben?
> 
> ja
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________ x mailing list 
> x at vispo.com http://vispo.com/mailman/listinfo/x_vispo.com
> 



