Landscape 10'40'' 2012 HD stereo 16:9 black and white.
Synopsis.
Landscape,
is what can be seen, and not in physical terms but as an outward expression of human perception: "a landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings", so it will always be a personal take over an area of land, of human elements buildings or structures with a cultural and aesthetic dimension.
Credits
created-directed-produced by anabela costa
created-directed-produced by anabela costa
music by tiago cutileiro
animation-FX-edited by anabela costa
scientific advisor evelyne lutton
This film was possible by the use of an INRIA software- http://evelyne.lutton.free.fr/ArtiE-Fract-CA2012.pdf
ArtiE-Fract,
used by Anabela Costa for
generating Landscape’s raw video material- by Evelyne Lutton.
The artwork
presented by Anabela Costa is based on an original exploitation of the
interactive evolutionary design software ArtiE-Fract. Initially dedicated to
static shape design, ArtiE-Fract is based on an interactive GP mechanism that
helps an artist or a designer to explore a space of 2D fractal shapes. Since
its first version, it has been used by various artists and designers, mainly
for the design of textile motives and posters. Anabela Costa fully exploited
the morphing utilities provided by ArtiE-Fract, to produce videos. She pointed
out new potential usages of this design tool.
Fractal pictures
have always been considered as attractive artistic objects as they combine
complexity and “hierarchical” structure [2, 6], and provide a simple way to
generate shapes that look “natural”. Born from the analysis of “strange”
mathematical objects (such as an infinite length curve embedded in a finite
surface, or as a continuous nfunctions nowhere
differentiable) at the end of the XIXth century, the so-called Fractal geometry
became famous with the work of Benoit Mandelbrot [9] in the middle of the XXth
century. The main argument was that these mathematical objects were convenient models to
represent natural shapes: fern, coast of Britanny, romanesco caulifower, are
examples of natural fractal shapes. ArtiE-Fract is based on Iterated Function
Systems (IFS), a model of fractals that became famous in image compression
applications
[1], but that has
many other applications (for example in speech signal processing [4]). The
mathematical structure of iterated function systems attractors [1] let some
more or less direct access to its characteristics and therefore, shape
manipulation and exploration is possible [5, 11]. The IFS model is also very
convenient for building nice continuous morphings. In ArtiE-Fract, an
Interacitve Evolutionary Algorithm (IEA) is used as a generator of fractal
pictures with controlled randomness. This interactive approach is not new in
computer graphics [13, 12], but it was extended for the exploration of a
fractal pictures space based on non-linear IFS. Flexibility has been carefully
considered with the help of advanced interactive tools related to the specific
fractal IFS model that is used.
ArtiE-Fract is
the result of a quite long maturation process, a common work with engineers,
artists and designers to provide a set of user-oriented tools. It intends to
approach the interactive efficiency of a “photoshop” or a “gimp” software (of
course in its own domain, that is fractal images design).
THE MORPHING
UTILITY
The IFS model is
very convenient for builing continuous transformations between attractors. A
simple interpolation formula, based on a linear combination of the functions of
each attractors, allow building a set of intermediate IFS of any length, i.e. a
continuous morphing between two initial shapes. This operation is accessible for
any couple of IFS generated with ArtiE-Fract, and produces a set of IFS that
can be re-used in the system for further evolution, or used for building
videos.
Other tools for
building image sequences are also available in ArtiE-Fract, for instance based
on some continuous predefined movements of some control points, or based on
zooming or other parameters modifications.
THE WORK OF
ANABELA COSTA
Anabela Costa
based her artistic research on an intensive exploitation of the video making
utility of ArtiE-Fract, going back and forth between interactive evolution
window and video making window. The artwork she created were finalised using an
external editing tool for the final video montage. The way she uses ArtiE-Fract
let revisit some constraints on IFS attractors that may be set a priori. For
instance minimal density of images or size of attractors, that constrain the
search to visually interesting images, has an impact only for still image. If
we deal with moving objects, a very small attractor (or a set of points) may be
considered as aesthetic, because of its movement perceived in a succession of
images, and not because of its static shape. Another important output of this
work is related to the use of artificial evolution for video design: a
straightforward strategy that consists in directly manipulating videos and
displaying it in an interactive evolutionary algorithm was not what whished
Anabela Costa for her artistic design. This strategy may be too constrained for
the way she works. She used the evolution of still images as a source of raw
material for her video montages.
References
[1] M. Barnsley and S. Demko. Iterated function system and the global
construction of fractals. Proceedings of the Royal Society, A 399:243–245,
1985.
[2] M. F. Barnsley. Fractals Everywhere. Academic Press,N Y, 1988.
[3] J. Chapuis and E. Lutton. Artie-fract : Interactive evolution of
fractals. In 4th International Conference on Generative Art, Milano, Italy,
December 12-14 2001.
[4] K. Daoudi, E. Lutton, and J. Levy Vehel. Fractal modeling of speech
signals. In Fractals in Engineering, 1994. 1-4 June, Montreal.
[5] B. Forte, F. Mendivil, and E. R. Vrscay. “chaos games” for iterated
function systems with grey level maps. SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis,
29(4):878–890, 1998.
[6] J. Hutchinson. Fractals and self-similarity. Indiana University Journal
of Mathematics, 30:713–747, 1981.
[7] Evelyne Lutton. Evolution of fractal shapes for artists and designers.
IJAIT, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence Tools, 15(4):651–672,
2006. Special Issue on AI in Music and Art.
[8] Evelyne Lutton, Emmanuel Cayla, and Jonathan Chapuis. Artie-fract: The
artist’s viewpoint. In EvoMUSART2003, 1st European Workshop on Evolutionary
Music and Art, Essex, April, 14-16 2003. LNCS, Springer Verlag.
[9] B.B. Mandelbrot. The Fractal Geometry Of Nature. W.H.Freeman and company,
1977.
[10] Riccardo Poli and Stefano Cagnoni. Genetic programming with user-driven
selection : Experiments on the evolution of algorithms for image enhancement.
In 2nd Annual Conf. On Genetic Programming, 1997.
[11] Frédéric Raynal, Evelyne Lutton, Pierre Collet, and Marc Schoenauer.
Manipulation of non-linear ifs attractors using genetic programming. In CEC99,
Congress on Evolutionary Computation, July 6-9, Washington DC. USA., 1999.
[12] Karl Sims. Artificial evolution for computer graphics. Computer
Graphics, 25(4):319–328, July 1991.
[13] S.J.P. Todd and W. Latham. Evolutionary Art and
Computers. Academic Press, 1992.
