Ann-Sophie Lehmann

Don’t Measure—Appreciate! NPR Seen Through the Prism of Art History

Non-Photorealistic Rendering is now an established discipline, yet the question of how to evaluate ‘artistic’ NPR output is often raised. The question is most acute when the NPR algorithms are fully automatic, because then the output has no human involvement other than authorship of code. This paper addresses the question how can we assess the value of automatically produced NPR that has no purpose other than to be art? We doubt there is any single objective answer to this important question. We argue that experiments are at best difficult to design, and even the Turing test is of limited value because we are not asking whether a piece has been produced by a human but whether it possesses artistic merit regardless of its source. We conclude by suggesting that to assess progress in NPR, one must adopt an art historical perspective and appreciate it both for itself in its own terms, and within a wider cultural context.

Showing Making: On Visual Documentation and Creative Practice

Abstract This article discusses visual representations of creative practice as source material to study the complex procedures involved in the making of artifacts. After a brief discussion of theoretical approaches to production processes, the genre of showing making is introduced as a new line of enquiry. The still and moving images belonging to the genre contain at least four main elements which are extremely useful to the analysis of making. They have an archival function, as they store tacit knowledge about making; an instructional function, in that they enable the acquisition of skills and material knowledge; a participatory function, in the sense that demonstration incites pleasure in the viewer through kinaesthetic identification with the depicted process; and finally a display function, which showcases some but hides other elements of the creative process. These functions can be made instrumental to the study of creative practice, it is finally argued, if the mediated nature of images (which is the result of material processes) is taken into account.

The Transparency of Color : Aesthetics, Materials, and Practices of Hand Coloring Photographs between Rochester and Yokohama

An inconspicuous yet unique coloring booklet titled Peerless Japanese Transparent Water-Colors (1902) in the Getty Research Institute holdings contains instructions on how to color photographs as well as the colorants to do so. The analysis of its origin, instructional text, and colors sheds some new light on the production and import of large amounts of Japanese hand-colored photographs to the United States around 1900 and ultimately shows how the histories of hand-colored photographs and early color photography are related through materials, practices, and aesthetics.

Hiding Making - Showing Creation. The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean

The aim of Hiding Making - Showing Creation is twofold. In the first instance, we seek to trace the Nachleben of these studio topoi from the nineteenth century to today, in particular focusing on how artists have employed them as strategies for showing certain aspects of their practice (above all those which perpetuate the notions of artistic genius and autonomy), while carefully hiding others from view (routine, failure, craft). Secondly, in order to achieve these goals, we have adopted a method that we feel not only does justice to the richness and diversity of the topic but which, we believe, will add a new dimension to the already abundant and ever growing literature on the artists studio.