Fun

Self-taught Romanian collage artists Silviu and Irina Székley consider their works to be “conceptual spontaneities” that distort familiar images into new, transfigured realities. The duo takes traditional images, especially 19th century masterpieces and shatters our expectations through unorthodox manipulation. As the artists say themselves, “Our approach to art is very naïve, ludic and hazardous.”

This Is Not Private

Tech art from Let It Brain is a video portrait display which applies facial details of the viewer to the subject using facial recognition technology:

This work explores the possibilities of empathy as a meta-language through the most powerful physical interface which is our face. The face is a part of ourselves which is not visible to us without the use of a mirror or an external tool (photography, video, etc.). Dedicated entirely to the “other”, it becomes our window to the world and the world’s window to ourselves. I asked 8 people to share a personal episode of their lives which they could somehow reconnect to one of the 6 basic emotions (P.Ekman) anger, fear, sadness, joy, disgust, surprise. Everyone of them picked up a very diverse subject and I asked them to tell me that story in their original language. By doing this I am trying to disconnect the reason linked to the language, in favour of a more fluid emotional communication. My challenge with this work is inducing in the viewer a sort of ‘identity displacement’, which reminds the phenomenon of the empathy. The more the viewer empathize with the actor the more the faces merge into a new identity which is no more the actor’s nor the viewer’s but something new.

Deconstruction of America by Mike Campau

Mike Campau is an digital artist from Michigan, USA who has over 15 years of experience creating powerful imagery for large brands and their high profile agencies.

I never talk politics on social media (or even with friends) as it usually leads to a heated discussion, hurt feelings, and a few “F” bombs.  So, I decided to convey my thoughts through images. 

Whether you are liberal or conservative, we can all agree there are some major problems facing our country right now. Everything from government corruption, broken justice system, religion (or lack there of), poor diet and nutrition, the shock value “look at me” YouTube generation, and how we have all become desensitized and almost apathetic in our response to hate crimes and mass shootings. 

I’m not here to get on a soap box and say who is right or wrong, but to invoke a sense of urgency to make a change before it’s beyond repair. The images use a visual metaphor of a living tree being cut down, disassembled into logs, and burned to the point where it has little to no value.  (photography + CGI)

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A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style

Academic paper from Bethge Lab shows method of recreating various artistic styles using neural networks and applying them onto photographs:

In fine art, especially painting, humans have mastered the skill to create unique visual experiences through composing a complex interplay between the content and style of an image. Thus far the algorithmic basis of this process is unknown and there exists no artificial system with similar capabilities. However, in other key areas of visual perception such as object and face recognition near-human performance was recently demonstrated by a class of biologically inspired vision models called Deep Neural Networks. Here we introduce an artificial system based on a Deep Neural Network that creates artistic images of high perceptual quality. The system uses neural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images, providing a neural algorithm for the creation of artistic images. Moreover, in light of the striking similarities between performance-optimised artificial neural networks and biological vision, our work offers a path forward to an algorithmic understanding of how humans create and perceive artistic imagery.