Photorealism: a reaction to the detachment of Minimalism and conceptual art
"Chuck Close is associated with the style of painting called Photorealism or Superrealism. In this style, artists in the early 1970s created a link between representational systems of painting and photography. Photorealism developed as a reaction to the detachment of Minimalism and conceptual art, which did not depict representational images. Photorealists frequently used a grid technique to enlarge a photograph and reduce each square to formal elements of design. Each grid was its own little work of art. Many of the Photorealists used the airbrush technique.
Big Self-Portrait, in black and white, was the first of Close's mural-sized works painted from photographs. This painting took four months to complete. To make this work, Close took several photographs of himself in which his head and neck filled the frame. From these he selected one of the images and made two 11 x 14-inch enlargements. On one of the photographs he drew a grid, then lettered and numbered each square. Using both the gridded and ungridded photographs, he carefully transferred the photographic image square by square onto a large canvas measuring 107 1/2 x 83 1/2 inches. He used acrylic paint and an airbrush to include every detail.
When Close was making his painting he was concerned with the visual elements--shapes, textures, volume, shadows, and highlights--of the photograph itself. He also was interested in how a photograph shows some parts of the image in focus, or sharp, and some out-of-focus, or blurry. In this portrait the tip of the cigarette and the hair on the back of his head were both out-of-focus in the photograph so he painted them that way in Big Self-Portrait."
(ArtsNet Minnesota)
Fig.1 Chuck Close 'Big Self-Portrait', 1968 acrylic on canvas 107 1/2 x 83 1/2 in. Walker Art Center
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
L.A. Noire brings actors' full performance to gaming
"With a technology called MotionScan, an actor's complete performance--their facial expressions, how they talk, when they blink--are captured for use in a video game. We spoke to Brendan McNamara, the head of the team behind the detective game using this tech, 'L.A. Noire.' ...
Made by Team Bondi and Rockstar--the AAA developer behind the violent and cinematic Grand Theft Auto series--L.A. Noire is set in post-WWII Los Angeles, giving the player the role of Cole Phelps (Mad Men's Aaron Staton), a war-hero turned police detective."
(Kevin Ohannessian, Fast Company, 4 February 2011)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Image Metrics: hyperrealistic CG facial animation
"When [Image Metrics] first started working on Emily, our goal was to create an exact replica of the real actress Emily O'Brien. Why? Because there was no other way to determine how close we had come to reality if we did not replicate a 'real' person. Judging from the reaction of people at SIGGRAPH 2008, and the hundreds of media hits, we've come pretty close to the mark.
...
Image Metrics began planning the Emily project in March 2008. After Image Metrics developed a script for the animation, the ICT Graphics Lab scanned O’Brien to develop the template for her CG double. A team of eight artists working part-time on the internal project then built a custom rig for the Emily character, captured O’Brien’s performance with video and applied it to the CG character with its proprietary facial animation solution. Once the capture and rigging processes were finalized, the 90-second animation took just one week to complete."
(Image Metrics)
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Deb TuckSHARE
Indie games: audience not just authenticity
"Once upon a time, not long ago, it looked like bedroom coding was dead - at least as a commercial pursuit. The nineties brought in a growing obsession with detailed 3D visuals, requiring ever-larger teams of ever more specialised coders, artists and designers. And while an indie gaming scene continued to flourish online, the fruits of those labours were largely unseen and unappreciated by mainstream gamers.
But a lot has happened over the last three years. Vitally, Microsoft started trawling the indie scene for content to fill its Xbox Live Arcade service. Sony and Nintendo soon followed suit, resulting in the likes of Braid, World of Goo, Mutant Storm and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People becoming key downloadable releases. At the same time, the growing PC casual gaming scene, together with the arrival of the iPod and iPhone as fully-fledged gaming platforms, has built an audience that clamours for graphically simple puzzle and word games. In a sense, casual gaming has legitimised non-naturalistic, often 2D, visuals and intuitive gameplay, reclaiming videogame culture for the masses.
Bedroom coding is back."
(Keith Stuart, 6 January 2009, The Guardian)
[This represents a broadening of the rather narrow trajectory of hyper-realism that has preoccupied the games development industry since its adoption by computer science advocates. This departure can be seen as a strengthening of voices questioning the authority of modes of representation derived (seemingly unquestioningly) from a default Modernist position e.g. favouring authenticity and fidelity over audience and interpretation.]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Family resemblance: installation, hyper-realism
"Nina Levy's hyper-realist works touch the theme of family, as displayed by her recent exhibition at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn. Family Resemblance included Toss, a sculptural installation created for the space that included a five-foot baby head, modelled after the artist's son, being tossed between two headless parents. Husband and Son is a lifelike sculpture that includes everything but the dad's head, suggesting the importance of the child in the new dynamic. Some photographs were also part of the exhibition - and here it is important to note that Levy does not digitally manipulate her photos to achieve the desired effect, but works with plaster pieces she creates for the narrative."
(mocoloco.com)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
