The palimpsest system

ABSTRACT

We propose a method for turning a slideshow of photographs into a media art installation consisting of a digital video flux of intermingled images, a continuous, ever-changing stream of dynamically created pictures composed of parts of basic images taken from a database of digital photographs. We called our system Palimpsest, referring to the tradition of medieval copies of books, when a manuscript is erased and re-written with new text. The basic idea is to combine one photograph with another on a pixel-by-pixel basis and to apply Cellular Automata rules to further mix in real-time the images together. The Cellular Automaton, will, from a series of randomly chosen seed pixels, slowly merge an image with another. It is worth noticing that more than two images can overlap at the same time. The key point is that this transformation process is part of the artwork itself, bringing some mesmerizing aspect to the flux of images.

REFERENCES

• 1: Codognet, P. 2008. Palimpsest : a tool for turning series of photographs into artistic slideshows. In Proceedings of. EUROMEDIA'2008, Porto, Portugal, April 2008.
• 2: Greenberg, C. 1961. The Crisis of the Easel Picture. Art and Culture Critical essays, Beacon Press, 1961.
• 3: Kanizsa, G. 1955. Margini quasi-percettivi in campi con stimulazione omogenea. Rivista di Psychologia 49, 1, 1955.
• 4: Casey Reas , Ben Fry , John Maeda, Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists, The MIT Press, 2007
• 5: A new kind of science, Wolfram Media Inc., Champaign, Ilinois, US, 2002

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.3 Picture/Image Generation

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.4 Graphics Utilities

  J. Computer Applications
  J.5 ARTS AND HUMANITIES

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation

Keywords:
digital art