Robert's blog 'On Photography'

Project: Glasgow Architects

In the early days of digital photography (1999), while working in Glasgow, I was asked by Page & Park Architects to make a proposal for the outside of the Glasgow Herald building.
The idea was to make projections on the other side of the street (then a quite uninteresting carpark), large posters (for instance from exhibitions and cultural events) and coloured light ( as for instance the (then) PTT building in the Hague (NL) )

I remember it took me a night, the idea was never realised, but it was sure nice to work on!

Curating photography

Interview with Peter GALASSI, Former Chief Curator of Photography, MoMA, New York

By Daniel Palmer – Published: 25/08/2016

"The biggest thing that happened, and what defined the biggest challenge of my twenty years as Chief Curator, was that photography’s indigenous traditions, photographic traditions, were joined by a new tradition of photography within the contemporary art world. It really began to take shape in the 1960s, and by the late 1970s was a real force to be contended with."
"The other big challenge was that we’re now towards the end of the golden age of collecting"
"Well I think of Steichen as an aberration in an otherwise normal history of a museum. You know Steichen was a great artist, he was a great artist at least twice over, but by the time he came to MoMA he was a person who always wanted to be at the centre of things. And his perception, beginning sometime in the 1930s, was that the centre of things was the magazine business – photography as mass communication. He set out to be a big player in that world and at MoMA that’s what he was, he was like Life magazine inside the walls of the museum. "
"I think Szarkowski is still, by a long shot, the best curator and historian photography has had, so far. But that doesn’t mean he was always right. He was unresponsive to a certain swath of activity, that’s for sure. Of course, curators have a responsibility that artists don’t have, nevertheless, you judge artists on their best work, not on their average work. So if you judge Szarkowski on his best work, no other curator’s done that well. And after all, now that the dust is settling on this, if you had to pick the three most important photographers, the three most important artists who made photographs in the 1960s – Winogrand, Friedlander, Arbus…"
I am so tired of hearing about how digital technology has destroyed photography’s connection to the real world, that I’m thinking about organizing a show about all the ways that digital technology has enhanced photographers’ abilities to be involved in the real world.
Interview conducted in October 2013 photocurating.net/peter-galassi/

'Color and consciousness'

After an article by Maria Popova:
Psychedelic Dinosaurs, Four-Dimensional Hummingbirds, and how we got to our vision: Color, Consciousness, and the Dazzling Universe of Tetrachromacy

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
books.google.nl

A triangle

A portrait is so much more than a flattering, well-lit and sharp rightfull representation. One could convey an idea or feeling beyond that, which is not always rightly understood.
Try to see it as a triangle, with 3 persons or parties at the corners:
1. is the hard working photographer, the artist if you like with definite ideas and motivation.
2. is the one who is in the picture, the sitter, what is the sitter's expression or how do people react when their picture is taken? Are they aware of the camera / photographer? Do they connect with the photographer's idea?
3. Than there is the spectator, looking at the final portrait, to consider, who has his own opinion of the contents.

Robert Schilder, photo from the book 'Banaras, City of God, Heart of India
Another example of this 'triangle' is this:
1. what you say must have meaning
2. there must be someone who listens
3. that person must do something with what you are saying

'WATER'-een kunstprojekt: Zeilen op de Atlantische Oceaan

nederlandse tekst:

2 boekjes en een 'Memory Game' vormen samen een promotie set voor een internationale fotografie tentoonstelling over WATER. De boekjes -of reisjournalen- zijn handgemaakt en handgebonden, verpakt in een hoesje met een originele zeekaart zoals die is gebruikt tijdens de zeiltocht met de 'Gemini'.

De 2 boekjes bevatten achtergrondinformatie over de plaatsen, geschiedenis, die wij hebben aangedaan. Het eerste boekje gaat over de zeiltocht van Simonstown in Zuid Afrika naar Fortaleza in Brazilië. Het tweede boekje gaat over de tocht van Sint Maarten in de Cariben naar Nederland.

De 'Memory Game' (ter 'leering ende vermaeck') is net als de twee boekjes door nummers verbonden met een website waar alle gegevens van het onderzoek, wat is gedaan voor het project, op staan.

english text:

WATER -an art project

2 long sailing trips on the Atlantic Ocean were the reason for my fascination with WATER, ocean and discovery and the start of a thorough research. Project's aim is an exhibition of art photography which will travel the world and a book "SAIl- around the world in 80 pages"

2 booklets and a 'Memory Game' form together the promotion pack for this project. They are handmade, handbound and packed together in a case with a jacket made from an original nautical chart as used during our voyage with sailing yacht 'Gemini'.

The first booklet 'South Atlantic Ocean' gives more information about countries and places we visited from Simonstown in South Africa to Fortaleza in Brazil.

The second booklet 'North Atlantic Ocean'', covers Sint Maarten in the Caribbean to the Netherlands and has also more information about our living ocean as an environment.

The 'Memory Game' will test your memory and knowledge about some of the topics from the project.

Numbers in the book link directly to a website with much more information (www.water-artproject.com/resources.html). Because of the size of this webpage it may be easier to download a pdf file here: www.WATER-artproject.com/water-artproject-resources.pdf

Detailed information about the actual sailing can be found on these two websites: 2014sail2015.wordpress.com (English) and www.sy-gemini.nl (in Dutch).

The Art Photography has been created in such a way -by layered printing, combining images and unique techniques- that the works become 3-dimensional. they all measure 120 x 70 cm., framed and packed in flight cases, ready to travel the world!

For more information please contact:

Robert Schilder
Turkeye 6
4508PB WATERLANDKERKJE
The Netherlands
+31-6-21138318
robertschilder@gmail.com

AI & Phot. part I: Computer vision, human senses, and language of art

"What is the most important reason for using Computer Vision methods in humanities research? In this article, I argue that the use of numerical representation and data analysis methods offers a new language for describing cultural artifacts, experiences and dynamics. The human languages such as English or Russian that developed rather recently in human evolution are not good at capturing analog properties of human sensorial and cultural experiences. These limitations become particularly worrying if we want to compare thousands, millions or billions of artifacts—i.e. to study contemporary media and cultures at their new twenty-first century scale. When we instead use numerical measurements of image properties standard in Computer Vision, we can better capture details of a single artifact as well as visual differences between a number of artifacts–even if they are very small. The examples of visual dimensions that numbers can capture better then languages include color, shape, texture, contours, composition, and visual characteristics of represented faces, bodies and objects. The methods of finding structures and relationships in large numerical datasets developed in statistics and machine learning allow us to extend this analysis to very big datasets of cultural objects. Equally importantly, numerical image features used in Computer Vision also give us a new language to represent gradual and continuous temporal changes—something which natural languages are also bad at. This applies to both single artworks such as a film or a dance piece (describing movement and rhythm) and also to changes in visual characteristics in millions of artifacts over decades or centuries".
Manovich, Lev (2020). Computer vision, human senses, and language of art. AI & Society. doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01094-9

manovich.net

tags: Computer vision, Digital humanities, Cultural analytics, Language of art, artificial intelligence, lev manevich

In the original vision of artificial intelligence (AI) in 1950s, the goal was to teach computer to perform a range of cognitive tasks. They included playing chess, solving mathematical problems, understanding written and spoken language, recognizing content of images, and so on. Today, AI (especially in the form of supervised machine learning) has become a key instrument of modern economies employed to make them more efficient and secure: making decisions on consumer loans, filtering job applications, detecting fraud, and so on.

What has been less obvious is that AI now plays an equally important role in our cultural lives, increasingly automating the realm of the aesthetic. Consider, for example, image culture. Instagram Explore screen recommends images and videos based on what we liked in the past. Artsy.net recommends the artworks similar to the one you are currently viewing on the site. All image apps can automatically modify captured photos according to the norms of "good photography." Other apps "beatify" selfies. Still other apps automatically edit your raw video to create short films in the range of styles. The App The Roll from EyeEm automatically rates aesthetic quality of you photos (...)

Does such automation leads to decrease in cultural diversity over time? For example, does automatic edits being applied to user photos leads to standardization of “photo imagination”? As opposed to guessing or just following our often un-grounded intuitions, can we use AI methods and large samples of cultural data to measure quantitatively diversity and variability in contemporary culture, and track how they are changing over time?

manovich.net/index.php/projects/automating-aesthetics-artificial-intelligence-and-image-culture