
Weidi Zhang’s Ph.D Qualifying Exam
Committees
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Prof. George Legrady (chair)
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Prof Marko Peljan
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Prof Curtis Roads
Keywords
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Spatial data visualization
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Image-classification algorithms
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Non-linear narrative
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Immersive experience 【 audio-visual interactive 】
Research Statement
Collage is an artistic technique for artists to assemble different pictorial motifs, forms, materials into new entities which often suggest non-linear narratives, poetic meanings, and new symbols. The ideas and methods of collage art production widely emerged in the twentieth century in the early stage of modernism and were closely involved in modern art movements like Cubism, Surrealism, and Dada.
While image manipulation methods (including collage, photomontage and mixed media) have been present in the art world for a long time, computational photography and image classification algorithms (including convolutional neural network (CNN) borrowed from the field of engineering) enable artists to conceive new directions by reconsidering the process of collage. This can be accomplished by embracing Surrealist chance operations and mechanisms of poetic choice and by re-examining the automatism of the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists in the context of current and emerging A.I. age.
Oliver Grau mentioned in his book Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion that the creation of an artificial immersive virtual reality, arising as a result of technical exploitation of new inventions, is a long-standing human practice throughout history. Such environments as dioramas were made of composited images.
The technology of virtual reality enables a great many possibilities for spatial assemblage. The booming market of the entertainment industry makes virtual reality a commercial platform for gaming and 360 films. VR art is still an area under development although it has been 25 years since the exhibition of first VR art piece Osmose (1995).
I came up with the following questions:
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How do we embrace the chances and choices in relation to the subconscious in the collage-making progress?
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If the real world is a collage, how about the virtual one?
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How can we transfer the image-making process into world-building strategies in order to experience images as an ever-expanding territory?
Thus my research will focus on the development of an intelligent algorithmic system that investigates the possibilities of non-linear narrativity and semantic meanings through spatial collage of images in virtual reality environments. The tentative methodology of the research for the algorithmic spatial assemblage of images for VR world-building will include:
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The development of data-driven image processing methods
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Image classification algorithms (including convolutional neural network CNN),
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Virtual reality world-building strategies and techniques
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3-d modeling techniques: including 3-d image-based structure generation/photogrammetry/ visualization of point cloud
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spatial sound development.
+ + VR history & Theory
Into the belly of image, historical aspects of virtual reality by Oliver Grau
Leonardo
Virtual Reality, a brief survey by Namrata Singh & Sarvpal Singh
IEEE
+ + Images Classification & Assemblage
Is deep dreaming the new collage? [2017]
Margaret A. Boden
Modeling the world from internet photo collection
Noah Snavely · Steven M. Seitz · Richard Szeliski
+ + Image & Autonomous & Simulation & Narrativity
What is an image? Harold Cohen
Schizophrenia and Narrative in Artificial Agents
++ Non Linear Narrative & Computational Composition in Cyberspace
Marjorie Perloff: Radical Artifice concrete poetry
William Burroughs
Matei Calinescu: The Five Faces of Modernity
Recombinant Poetics | VS | OULIPO [2000] Bill Seaman
An Experiment in Computational Composition , Marcos Novak
Virtual assembly using virtual reality techniques [1997]
Sankar Jayaram, Hugh I Connacher and Kevin W Lyons*
Towards a philosophy of Virtual Reality: issues implicit in “unconsciousness reframed” [2000]
Crafting virtual reality [2018]
Lynne Heller
++ Collage & Musique concrète
collage, montage and the composer Pierre henry:
The real, the concrete, the abstract in sound art and music
++ Sound Spatialization and narrativity
Chapter 4 - Creating sound materials
Chapter 8 - Articulating space
Chapter 10 - Sonic narrative
Composing Electronic Music - A New Aesthetic, Curtis Roads
Reader related
Related History
+Artist
+Creatures
Chimera_(mythology)#Use_for_Chinese_mythological_creatures
+Books
Rona Cyan [2016]
Jennifer A. E. Shields [2014]
Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments
Bargain Price [1996]
+Optional Articles
Intermedia [1966 ] Dick Higgins
Depth map generation by image map classification
CollageMachine An Interactive Agent of Web Recombination
constructivism meets Virtual Reality
Progressive Feedback Point Cloud Rendering for Virtual Reality Display