Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a few subtle changes to the blog. While the focus remains the same, I’ve updated the look in keeping with a fresh new year — more responsive layout, improved performance, easier to browse and find content, and updated typography.
I hope this is more pleasing to your eye and more efficient for your browser whether you’re chained to a desk or on the move. Please drop me a line if you have any feedback. Thanks and Happy New Year!
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This animated montage of female portraits needs little explanation. Watch and enjoy.
Though, eagle-eyed viewers may note that the very first portrait in the sequence dates from the 12th century — so the evolution actually spans eight centuries.
See all the separate portraits here.
Video courtesy of artfido.
Take the ugly Christmas sweater (or jumper, if you’re a Brit) as a sign that humans have not evolved as far as we’d like to believe. theDiagonal’s favorite of the worst shows a festive meal emblazoned on the chest. Pass the gravy!
See more of the worst of this season’s sweaters here.
Image: Sweater, River Island. Courtesy of Telegraph.
A new BBC documentary chronicles the influence of flamboyant sixties hairstylist Raymond Bessone, better known as Raymond “Teasie Weasie”. He was the first stylist to appear on television, and is credited with inventing the modern bouffant and innovating with hair color. He also trained Vidal Sassoon, who later created the bob.
From the Guardian:
From the beehive to the afro and the footballer’s perm, a new BBC documentary celebrates the nation’s love of a flamboyant hairstyle – the bigger the better.
…
Possibly the most famous haircut of the 1960s, the asymmetric bob created by Vidal Sassoon in 1963 liberated a generation of women from the need for a weekly appointment and a session under the hood-dryer. With these sharp, swinging styles, the blowdry was born. This cut is by Roger Thompson, a stylist at Sassoon’s salon.
See more images hair[sic] or check out a preview of the documentary here.
Image: Cover of the 1976 paperback book “Raymond – The outrageous autobiography of Teasie-Weasie”. Courtesy of Raymond Bessone/ Wyndham Publications / Wikipedia.
Image: Bob cut. Courtesy of Vic Singh/Rex.
Where evaluating artistic style was once the exclusive domain of seasoned art historians and art critics with many decades of experience, a computer armed with sophisticated image processing software is making a stir in art circles.
Computer scientist, Dr. Lior Shamir of Lawrence Technological University in Michigan authored a recent paper that suggests computers may be just as adept as human art experts at evaluating similarities, and differences, of artistic styles.
Dr. Shamir’s breakthrough was to decompose the task of evaluating a painting into discrete quantifiable components that could be assigned a numeric value and hence available for computation. These components, or descriptors, included surface texture, color intensity and type, distribution of lines and edges, and number and types of shapes used in the painting.
[div class=attrib]From the Economist:[end-div]
Dr Shamir, a computer scientist, presented 57 images by each of nine painters—Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Vasily Kandinsky, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mark Rothko and Vincent van Gogh—to a computer, to see what it made of them. The computer broke the images into a number of so-called numerical descriptors. These descriptors quantified textures and colours, the statistical distribution of edges across a canvas, the distributions of particular types of shape, the intensity of the colour of individual points on a painting, and also the nature of any fractal-like patterns within it (fractals are features that reproduce similar shapes at different scales; the edges of snowflakes, for example).
All told, the computer identified 4,027 different numerical descriptors. Once their values had been established for each of the 513 artworks that had been fed into it, it was ready to do the analysis.
Dr Shamir’s aim was to look for quantifiable ways of distinguishing between the work of different artists. If such things could be established, it might make the task of deciding who painted what a little easier. Such decisions matter because, even excluding deliberate forgeries, there are many paintings in existence that cannot conclusively be attributed to a master rather than his pupils, or that may be honestly made copies whose provenance is now lost.
[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]
[div class=attrib]Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí, courtesy of Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation/Artists Rights Society.[end-div]
[div class=attrib]Love Song by Giorgio de Chirico, courtesy of Wikipedia / Creative Commons.[end-div]