New developments in interactive computer software programs such as Photoshop have opened up many new avenues to view and manipulate the arts. Visual Arts Professor Lev Manovich of the University of California, San Diego, has recently unveiled promising new research in the analysis of the arts — creating artwork in the process that’s on view at The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Manovich is joined in collaboration with his research associates: Calit2 post-doctoral researcher Jeremy Douglass and visual arts Ph.D. student William Huber. The art show is called “Mapping Time.” The title does not refer to mapping time as a temporal phenomenon but to the mapping of the front covers of Time Magazine. Some 4,000 issues dating from 1923 to 2009 were inputted into Photoshop as a data set. The researchers developed the ability to zoom in and out of these covers to show all 4,000 on a single page, making it possible to note changes in the covers over time. For example, you can see evolving color choice and density differences over certain decades. This is a new way of linking art to culture — the Time covers being cultural artifacts that can be mined for cultural content. Manovich and his colleagues call their process “cultural analytics” which refers to the techniques used in the analysis and visualization of large cultural data sets. “It was my exposure to Calit2 in the first place, specifically the vision of a new scale of cyberinfrastructure and scientific research, which led me to begin thinking about cultural analytics back in 2005. It is therefore exciting to be able to share with the community the results of this work five years later,” Manovich said. Manovich said the team’s goal is to demonstrate how gradual changes over time and at a number of scales can be visualized — from a single minute of a video game to 11 years of Naruto (the most popular Manga title) to 130 years of the journal Science (1880-2010). The Calit2 exhibition includes visualizations of novels, video games, web comics, Manga (a type of Japanese comic book), motion graphics, feature films and mass media publications. All are presented via large-scale prints, animations and real-time generative projections. These researchers’ projects include: inputting one million Manga pages as data for comparison and mapping; frame-by-frame analysis of movies and video games; examination and scaling of the constantly changing Google logo (some 587 different designs have been detected and compared); and analyzing the content of novels like Tolstoy’s “Anna Karina.” One of their most notable projects involves the comparison and ordering of all the paintings of Mondrian and Mark Rothko along dimensions of coloration and complexity. This is a small art show (only a handful of pieces) presented in a very small room, but the potential is great. This work is like a seed — a seed which will soon sprout and proliferate along many avenues of artistic research. By seeing this show, one can get in on the ground floor of what is sure to be the next wave in the analysis of art. The exhibit will be on view until Dec. 10, and there will be a closing reception and a film on Dec. 3. For more info visit www.software studies.com or http://gallery.calit2.net.
