April 26, 2004
image reconstitution again
Just an extension, really, of my previous post.
More links: my student Matt's image description and Emy's "reverse ekphrasis" here. ("Reverse ekphrasis" is my student Lauren's neologism. I like it.)
I mentioned that I'd first experimented along these lines at the Eastman School of Music. I gave my students the William Blake Archive's description of plate 25 of Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy Z ("Infant Joy"). My student Chanjae Park drew the following (without having ever seen the original upon which the description is based):
(C) 2001. This image may not be reproduced without the express permission of its author. Click on the image for a larger reproduction.
I've always liked Chanjae's image for its immersiveness. The blossom opens into a vast landscape that from its own internal perspective loses any semblance of a flower: stamens, pistils, leaves, petals--all the recognizable trappings of flowerness disappear. Among other things, it points up the omission of proportional information in the image description.
Why, you might ask, does the Archive include such granular descriptions of visual objects alongside its high-res facsimiles of them? Redundancy, of course, is a core tenet of information theory, but I'm afraid our reasons are far more practical and mundane. It's a problem I've written about extensively elsewhere, but suffice it to say that it's exceedingly difficult at this stage of the technological game to search image databases via images themselves, i.e., via low-level image properties such as shape, color, texture, etc. While vast R&D money is currently being earmarked for the development of such tools (see Blobworld for one example among many), we still depend primarily on linguistic metadata to do the job for us. This isn't a localized problem, but a historical and semiotic one: language has enduringly played a pivotal role in the transmission of pictorial information.
Your class just sounds so damn cool.
Reverse ekphrasis - is this the same as illustration (visual representation of a verbal representation)?
Or a 3 times removed ekphrastic moment (visual rep. of a verbal rep. of a visual rep)?
Posted by: Jason at April 28, 2004 12:38 PM |
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Kari
You might be interested in a _Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper_ by Harriet Scott Chessman. It is a work of fiction published in 2001 whose five chapters are each in turn based on Mary Cassatt's painting of her sister Lydia.
Even more recently I've come across a palimspet/ekphrasis/reverse ekphrasis that incorporates words and images. See Elouise's Oyzon's composition/layering under the rubric of "Negative Space" in a little past midnight posting on April 29, 2004. http://weez.oyzon.com/archives/000920.html
Good luck with the next teaching assignments and the course development.
Posted by: Francois Lachance at April 29, 2004 2:22 PM |
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Thanks, Jason--I've been having a blast. the latter definition is exactly right: "a 3 times removed ekphrastic moment . . . a visual representation of a verbal representation of a visual representation." (I like that.)
Francois, many thanks for the references. Elouise's post is lovely.
Posted by: kari at April 29, 2004 3:57 PM |
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Your class sounds very interesting. I found your post while trying to track down a friend of mine, Chan-Jae Park... Did he return to Eastman for spring 2004, or was this an old class? If you have any contact info for Chan-Jae, could you either pass it along to me, or pass along mine to him... I would ever so greatly appreciate it. Thanks...
Rob Demeri
Robdemeri@hotmail.com
Posted by: Rob Demeri at May 4, 2004 11:53 AM |
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Rob,
I wish I had current contact info. for Chan-Jae, but I don't (he was enrolled in my Spring 2001 Humanities course--so it's been a while). Good luck. He's a remarkable talent, no? The first and only genuine synesthete I've ever met (he once brought a wall-sized abstract painting he'd made into class, propped it up against a window, and then escorted his friend, a fellow musician, to the piano (classrooms at Eastman have them, of course) and had her play a musical score he'd composed to accompany the image. For Chan-Jae, the soundscape was embedded in the brush strokes and pigment of the painting. It was fascinating.
I seem to recall he was quite a sensation in Japan too (on the pop-charts or something).
Do let me know if you discover his whereabouts.
Posted by: kari at May 5, 2004 10:46 AM |
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I enjoy reading through this informal place. I will surely visit you again to see if anything new appears on it.
Good luck for the future.
Posted by: Peter Jason at November 19, 2004 3:18 AM |
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