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LTU student shows that computers “understand” art

First of two news stories that could get you thinking about the future of technology and art museums.

The first, a student puts together a database of examples of art history for a computer program to visually analyse and make connections (such as above) - from Lawrence Technology University blog:

LTU student Jane Tarakhovsky showed, for the first time, that computers can match art historians in understanding and analysis of visual art.

In the experiment she let the computer analyze ~1000 paintings by 34 well-known painters, and let the computer automatically deduce the similarities between the artistic styles without using any information other than the visual content. The similarities were then visualized using a phylogeny (a tool normally used to visualize similarities between genomes of different species, but in this case was used to visualize the similarities between artistic styles). Surprisingly, the analysis of the computer was almost identical to the analysis of Art Historians.

For instance, the computer automatically placed the High Renaissance artists Raphael, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo very close to each other, and the Baroque painters Vermeer, Rubens and Rembrandt were placed by the algorithm in another cluster, indicating that the computer sensed that these painters share a common artistic style.

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