Accept no substitutes

Day: June 24, 2005

Faces of Chicago

Chicago knows how to put on good faces. I’ve been impressed about how faces are used by art and technology working together at least three times in the past 24 hours.

First, the great and somewhat eerie Philip K Dick robot whose facial movements were incredibly real. But wait there’s more. Dick also scanned to room for faces and locked in on each one until he could recognize the person speaking to him.

Second, the two 50 foot Crown Fountains (and on a day like today the Crown Wading Pool and Shower). These are constructed of glass blocks with a metal structure inside. Water runs down the blocks on three sides (most of the time). The side of the towers that face each other are screens for internally projected videos. These videos are the faces of various Chicagoans who cast their 50 foot tall visage toward each other across the small splashing bathers. They blink occassionally. The move their lips a bit. Then they both suck in a little and suddenly a stream of water sprays out of their mouths on to the waders. Suddenly the blocks go blank and water cascades down from the top of the towers.

Third, at the Art Institute of Chicago down in the Children’s section near the wonderful miniature the Thorne Rooms (thanks to telling us about them Max). Adobe Aftereffects are put to good use. They run a series of morphs across over 100+ images of faces in all styles from the Art Institutes collection. You see a Mayan head morph into an early American portrait into a Cubist face study into an African mask into a Walker Evans photograph into … What a great way to see who the various visions of artists related to the subject of the human face! The entire run is about 15 minutes

Our visit with Philip K Dick

Last night Sally and I sat down for a chat with Philip K Dick. Whilst it was no a seance, it was closer to that than to say Mark Twain Tonight. The Philip K Dick robot from Hanson Robotics (and others) features a very flexible and eeriely realistic face which seeks out people in the room (using facial recognition) to establish eye contact with them. He shutters and blinks as he thinks about how to answer your questions. Behind that blinking and shuttering is a program using latent symantic analysis (and indexing) to mine the entire works of Dick. [more after I get back]

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