Visual

Today, I took part in an interesting panel conversation at Fotografiens Hus in Oslo in connection with the exhibition What We Call Real by Camila Urrego. This was the first time they had invited a photographer to exhibit works explicitly made “with AI,” and I was invited to contribute thoughts on the potential of AI for creative practice (in this case, photography). As MishMash picks up speed, I receive many requests for talks and panels on AI and creativity, and I try to say yes when I can make it. I have found this to be an excellent way to think about various AI use cases outside my core focus areas and to meet interesting people. Here are some thoughts based on my preparatory notes and reflections after the event. ...

I am at the Movement Computing Conference (MOCO) in Montpellier and have been discussing motion capture and analysis all day. Someone asked about my work on video visualisation, and this reminded me about a long wish for creating a browser-based visualiser. I have been developing video visualisation tools for more than two decades. In the beginning, I did it with Max/MSP/Jitter, then moved on to Matlab, and later Python. Until recently, web technologies were not advanced enough, and hardware was not powerful enough to do anything in the browser in real time. And, I didn’t have the programming skills to make it work. Now, with the help of CoPilot, I have finally made it happen: VideoViz is here! ...

Some weeks ago, I wrote about how I modified the SVG image of the MishMash “bubbles”. Today, I got around to doing a similar process with the MishMash “cube”, an illustration summarising how we want to work in MishMash. The cube The idea of the cube is to present the work packages that structure the organisation, the perspectives that are central to all our work, and the approaches which describe the methods used. One of the aims of MishMash is to enable true interdisciplinary collaboration, and the idea is that the cube will assist us with communicating the multidimensionality of such an endeavour. ...

I have previously written about the MishMash emblem and how I cropped it in a text editor. This was based on the fact that an SVG image is a “vector image” in which all elements are described programmatically. So what appears as an image on screen: is, in fact, an XML file with information. Ever since I discovered this, I thought it could be fun to script changes to the SVG. However, when I opened the file to inspect the content, I quickly realised that it wasn’t as easy as that: ...

Yesterday, I wrote about some reflections I had during Olgerta Asko’s PhD defence. Today, while chopping up the video recording to put on the RITMO web page, I thought that it might help to use a videogram to assist with segmentation. Videograms A videogram is similar to a motiongram, the main difference being that the videogram uses the regular video image as input to the “compression” instead of a motion video. Both give an impression of what is in a video file over time. We have functions for creating both videograms and motiongrams in the Musical Gestures Toolbox, but they are optimised for using other functions in the toolbox. ...

Yesterday, I wrote about how I cleaned up a lot of old mess here on this blog. This made me realize that I have not paid attention to creating alt text for all my images, that is, descriptive text that describes the content of the image. That is an enormous job when you have several thousand images on a blog like this. So I decided to ask CoPilot for help. Getting AI help CoPilot first suggested creating alt text based on the image file names. That could have been a good idea if the filenames had been descriptive. However, they are not (in general), hence I asked for a solution that would actually analyse the content of the images. After a series of iterations, we (CoPilot and I) ended up with a Python script that does the job. ...

I have previously written about the differences between sound and audio and sound/light vs audio/video. In this short blog post, I problematize the concept “audiovisual”. Dictionary definitions The term “audiovisual” is ubiquitous. Unfortunately, for those of us working both on technology and psychology, it causes a lot of confusion. For example, consider the definition by Wikipedia: Audiovisual (AV) is electronic media possessing both a sound and a visual component, such as slide-tape presentations, films, television programs, corporate conferencing, church services, and live theater productions. ...

One of my MUS2640 students asked which AI tool I had used to create the illustration on top of the textbook I have been developing for the course. The fact is, it isn’t AI-generated; it is a photo! I took the photo holding a 360-degree camera on my head while visiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) a couple of years ago. I was standing inside Olafur Eliasson’s One-way colour tunnel, located on a bridge inside the gallery. It is a fascinating three-dimensional light sculpture that no photo could capture. However, the 360-degree photo gives an impression of what it looks like: ...

In this post I write about how it is possible rename all the photos in a folder based on the date and time information stored in the file. I mainly take photos with my mobile phone these days (a Samsung Galaxy Ultra S23) but occasionnaly also use “regular” cameras. As opposed to my phone, which saves the files with a filename that includes date and time (YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg), these cameras typically just use some random name (e.g. P43435.jpg). This is impractical when combining photos from several cameras, so I prefer renaming the files with the same filename schema. ...

Many image file formats exist, but which ones are better for what task? Here is a quick overview in my little series of PhD advice blog posts (the previous being tips on dissertation writing and the public PhD defense). Two different image types When choosing a file format for your image, the first thing is to figure out whether you are dealing with a raster image (photos) or a vector image (line illustrations). These are fundamentally different and should be stored with particular file formats. ...