In my capacity as a professor of electronic art at Carnegie Mellon University, I travel several times per year to visit various high schools and National Portfolio Review Days in order to meet with prospective undergraduates. These are mostly high school seniors who are on the path toward figuring out where they would like to go to college. On these trips, I frequently hear the same questions from interested students. Some want basic information about the city (“What’s Pittsburgh like?”); others want to know about our academic offerings (“Is it possible to double-major?”), while still others may have (justifiable) confusion about the fact that the School of Art is a separate entity from the School of Design. To help answer these frequent questions about the CMU School of Art, I created this diagram which will soon go out with our school’s publicity materials. Click on the image below or on this link to access the full-resolution PDF file (475k):

I’m proud and delighted to announce that Ben Kinsley, one of my MFA students at the CMU School of Art, has finally gone live with his first-of-a-kind project, “Street with a View” – in which he and collaborator Robin Hewlett choreographed a neighborhood-wide performance intervention into Google Street View. Here’s the AP article about the project, here’s their “making-of” video on YouTube, and here’s a quick quote from the Street with a View website:

“Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…

Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform. This first-ever artistic intervention in Google Street View made its debut on the web in November of 2008.”

The CMU School of Art, where I teach, is committed to exploring two emerging areas of artmaking: (1) the intersection of arts and technology; and (2), so-called “contextual practice”, or “art-in-context”, in which our students are encouraged to look beyond the white box (gallery) and the black box (theater) to discover and create new audiences for their work in the outside world. Street with a View is a perfect example of a project that touches both areas, not just for the way that it claims Google’s mapping technology as a new artistic medium, but because of the new audiences that it creates: from the high-school marching band and RPG swordfighters which Ben and Robin convinced to participate in the tableaux, to the neighborhood spectators who wondered why scores of costumed people were flooding their back alley, to the people performing Google searches on the Internet who will accidentally stumble upon their intervention. Congrats Ben and Robin!

Documentation of the IEEE Infovis 2008 Art Exhibition, which I co-curated with Fernanda Viégas, is now online here, with some additional photos and panoramas here on Flickr. The exhibition featured the talents of Amy Hoy + Thomas Fuchs, Stefanie Posavec, Peter Crnokrak, W. Bradford Paley, Jonathan Feinberg + Katherine McVety, and Stefanie Gray. It was held from October 19-23 at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Columbus, Ohio.

This was the third annual art exhibition for the Infovis conference, and probably the last one for a while. This is ultimately for the best, as the circumstances for the Art Exhibition at Infovis have never been quite ideal — e.g. a tiny budget; charmless conference-center surroundings; and relatively few artists among the conference’s attendees. The organizers of Infovis have wisely proposed an open-ended new exhibition format for the future, more similar to the “Emerging Technologies” section at Siggraph, which will be much more agnostic about questions of art/design, pure/applied, commercial/research, etcetera.

I’d like to give a heartfelt thanks to the artists for putting in the sweat to prepare their contributions, and to my Student Volunteer assistant, Jihyun Kim, for deftly managing so many additional details of the show.

Reading the questions posted to the OpenCV (Open-Source Computer Vision) mailing list is one of my small pleasures in life. My favorite inquiries are those which combine charmingly flawed English, an improbable or unexpected problem domain, and the implicit expectation that the writer’s problem is not only solvable as described, but has a well-understood solution that everyone must have surely seen before. (These posts form a welcome relief, in any case, from the seemingly endless chatter of spooks asking how to improve their surveillance techniques.) This past week has offered up another bumper crop of gems, from a gaggle of internationals apparently charged with various tasks in food quality control. I give you:

Fun with Food on the OpenCV List

Subject: pineapple segment
From: sunrainhard
Date: Mon, Sep 29, 2008
Now i am researching on the pineapple project.
At first i must segment the pineapple in image.
Could you give me some advise about pineapple segment or pineapple
model? That’s very nice of you if you do me a favor.

And

Subject: how can I count the rice on the image?
From: Ilyas
Date: Thu, Oct 2, 2008
I have just starting learning OpenCV. I am more comfortable when I use Matlab but it is time to start OpenCV. I would like to know that anyone knows how to count the rice on the image ?
Best Regards,
Ilyas

OK – I’ve got one more. And to be fair, this person seems to speak English and have a clue or two about machine vision. I just love the humility of the problem.

Subject: Surface Crack Detection
From: rumsdiegeige
Date: Wed, Oct 1, 2008
Hello,
I’m trying to detect cracks on the surface of nuts using a greyscale image. The cracks are oriented radially and are a little less bright than the normal surface. However, the cracks do not have a certain width. I know this question is quite general but nevertheless I am looking forward to your opinion how to proceed with that detection. I am currently thinking to apply the top-hat transform to the image. My boss said one could use a “radial FFT” – does that exist?

Whenever I’m in Linz for Ars Electronica, I flip out for the poppy-seed cake, which is a Central European specialty. My Austrian pal (and legendary software artist) Lia, originally from Graz, took note and kindly emailed me her grandmother’s original recipe. Thanks Lia!

Easy Mohn-Cake:
Note: 1 “cup” in Austria means something like a 250-gram yoghurt cup.
Note: 1 “package” of baking powder or vanilla sugar is a 16 gram quantity, like this.
Note: Poppy seeds (mohn) must be ground with a mohnmühle; this is critical.

3 whole eggs,
1 cup fine sugar (the really fine one),
1 cup of fine flour, [cake flour?]
1 cup of ground mohn,
1 cup of yoghurt (or sour cream),
1/2 cup of oil,
1 package of vanilla sugar,
1 package of baking powder.

Put all together, and bake on medium heat for around 60 minutes.