TITLE: Rethinking the image archive with computational vandalism

A presentation LGM 2016, London
http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2016/

proposed by:
   the Scandanavian Institute for Computational Vandalism http://sicv.activearchives.org
as represented by:
    Nicolas Malevé
    Michael Murtaugh

DESCRIPTION (200 words)

Today "computer vision" techniques are pervasive, integrated in smartphone cameras, surveillance systems, and cloud-based image search and tagging. Within the last 15 years, CV engineers increasingly use so-called "visual vocabularies" -- statistically determined clusters of algorithmically determined visual "features" -- to index and order image collections. But what precisely are these features in visual terms? What can visual art practices offer to (and receive from) these techniques?

This project is inspired by the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism (SICV) founded by Asger Jorn shortly after leaving the Situationist International in 1961. The SICV was an art and research association experimenting with the practice of collage, the forces of photography, image archives, and political imaginaries. Today Computational Vandalism challenges the assumptions at the basis of computer vision, the discipline that programmatically ties together the visual and the mnemonic.

Work of the SICV has taken several forms: software "probes" (documented in blog form), installations, and publications. We will present an overview of the work, addressing the questions:



Website: http://sicv.activearchives.org/

BIO:

Michael Murtaugh (1972, USA) designs and researches community databases,
interactive documentary, and tools for new forms of reading and writing
online. He teaches on the Masters Degree programme in Media Design and
Communication at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.

Nicolas Malevé (1969, Belgium) is an artist, software programmer and
data activist developing multimedia projects and web applications for
and with cultural organizations. His current research work is focused on
cartography, information structures, metadata, archives and algorithms.

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Lecture 17: Bag of words
https://youtu.be/iGZpJZhqEME?t=15m55s

16:12 -->
... Descriptor for each interest point. High dimensional space. Cluster them, and this is our vocabulary.
English language has a vocabulary [since] 1000s of years, visual language we don't have a vocabulary so we have to come up with our own vocabulary.

SICV
See slides 

http://guttormsgaard.activearchives.org/surf/
http://guttormsgaard.activearchives.org/surf/pairs/

Princess and the Pea... / Bag of VIsual Words
http://sicv.activearchives.org/logbook/bag-of-visual-words/


Manually annotated words
http://sicv.activearchives.org/features/03_annotations.html

http://sicv.activearchives.org/features/04_sift_features.html
http://sicv.activearchives.org/features/05_collage.html

http://sicv.activearchives.org/audio/randomwalk2.webm

Vitrines samples with Jorn
http://sicv.activearchives.org/vitrine/20160303/collage20160303_163425.webm
http://sicv.activearchives.org/vitrine/20160305/collage20160305_131451.webm
http://sicv.activearchives.org/vitrine/20160303/collage20160303_224323.webm
http://sicv.activearchives.org/vitrine/20160304/collage20160304_220741.webm
http://sicv.activearchives.org/vitrine/20160304/collage20160304_182423.webm
http://sicv.activearchives.org/vitrine/20160304/collage20160304_220212.webm
http://sicv.activearchives.org/vitrine/20160305/collage20160305_011251.webm
http://sicv.activearchives.org/vitrine/20160305/collage20160305_013026.webm
http://sicv.activearchives.org/vitrine/20160305/collage20160305_111701.webm


Feature film: Faces
http://sicv.activearchives.org/video/jorn.faces.webm

( WOULD it not be nice to talk about the "3rd" faces ... ie the faces from training )
http://docs.opencv.org/2.4/doc/user_guide/ug_traincascade.html
(Showing the contents of the vec file)
opencv_createsamples -vec trainingfaces_24-24.vec  -w 24 -h 24
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eay7CgPlCyo

Deep Learning? Are hand crafted features old fashioned?


MM todo. check centering of jorn / contours (fit with resoution)
Random walk with Jorn would be nice (and faces?)
TRANSLATE SLIDES INTO WEB/Leaflet page ... LINKABLE!


THIS PAGE: http://pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/lgm2016-sicv