Spring 2011 Speaker

David G. Stork, Chief Scientist, Ricoh Innovations

"When Computers Look at Art: 
Image analysis in humanistic studies of the visual arts"

Thursday, April 14, 7pm
Textor 102

Free and Open to the Public
Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Kim Wojtanik at 274-3102.  We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.
 

New computer methods have been used to shed light on a number of recent controversies in the study of art. For example, fractal analysis has cast doubt on the authenticity of a cache of paintings attributed to Jackson Pollock, while computer analysis of shading and perspective has also shed light on the debate over David Hockney's bold claim that as early as 1420, artists were using optical devices such as concave mirrors to project images on to their canvases.

How do these computer methods work? What can computers reveal about images that even the best-trained connoisseurs, art historians and artist cannot? How much more powerful and revealing will these methods become? In short, how is computer image analysis changing our understanding of art? This profusely illustrated lecture for non-scientists will include works by Jackson Pollock, Vincent van Gogh, Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, Lorenzo Lotto, and others.

You may never see paintings the same way again.

Biographical Information
Dr. David G. Stork is Chief Scientist of Ricoh Innovations. The breadth of his interests and contributions is revealed through the academic departments and programs in which he has held faculty positions: physics, mathematics, electrical engineering, statistics, computer science, neuroscience, psychology, and art and art history. He has taught a variety of courses, including "Light, color and visual phenomena," "The physics of aesthetics and perception," "Optics, perspective and Renaissance painting," and "Computer vision and image analysis in the study of art," at a variety of institutions, including Wellesley College, Swarthmore College, Clark University, Boston University and Stanford University.

A graduate in physics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland at College Park, Dr. Stork also studied art history at Wellesley College. He has published seven books, including Seeing the Light: Optics in nature, photography, color, vision and holography, Pattern Classification, and HAL's Legacy: 2001's computer as dream and reality (the source of his PBS television documentary 2001: HAL's Legacy). He has also edited volumes of SPIE proceedings, including: Computer image analysis in the study of art, Computer vision and image analysis in the study of art,  Computer vision and image analysis in the study of art II.  Dr. Stork holds forty U.S. patents and has published numerous technical papers on human and machine learning and perception of patterns, physiological optics, image understanding, concurrency theory, theoretical mechanics, optics, and image processing. He has served as an Artist-in-Residence through the New York State Council of the Arts, and was a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition and Chair of its Technical Committee on Computer Vision in Cultural Heritage Applications. He was one of four scientists invited to comment on David Hockney's optical projection theory at the December 2001 Art and Optics Symposium at the New York Institute for the Humanities. He has made over 220 scholarly presentations on computer analysis of art in 17 countries, including in major museums such as the Louvre, National Gallery London, National Gallery Washington, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, van Gogh Museum, and many others.

For more information, please see Dr. Stork's professional website.