Portraits from the other side

What has computer science to do with art? Perhaps the first thing you might think of is that artists can now use computer painting packages instead of paint. Some artists do use computers to create art but that isn't really computer science. It's just a way ICT - using computers - has crept into the Art world in the same way as it has crept into all other aspects of our lives.

A more interesting answer might be that computer scientists have been exploring ways to make computers creative, and creating computer artists is one such area to explore. For example, AARON, the Artificial Intelligence program written by Harold Cohen, paints pictures that have been exhibited in art galleries around the world including the Tate Modern Gallery in London. They also sell for pretty tidy sums. Sodacartoon is another example of this approach - a student computer science project that resulted in a program that can draw realistic caricatures.

There is another way art and computer science can interact though: computer science techniques can give artists whole new ways of seeing reality, inspiring them to create works of art they never would have done if painting just from their subject. Leonardo do Vinci is perhaps the most famous artist to use science to inform his art. He was as much a scientist as an artist, arguably the first real scientist, and he went to great lengths to understand the world using science to ensure his art was as accurate as possible. He even went as far as dissecting human corpses to understand how the body worked.

This is an approach (using science to inform art not dissecting rotting corpses ...though still 'portraits from the other side' perhaps) being explored by Alla Tkachuk, artist-in-residence at Queen Mary, University of London working with the Computer Science Department. The portrait above is an early painting resulting from this collaboration.

Alla painted it, not just from its subject Pat Healey, but from a series of 3D images of his head. Basically, a computer generated mask of the surface of his head was created by a special scanner. Working from these 3-dimensional images led Alla to paint this portrait of Pat's face from behind... something she was unlikely to have done without the computer science first giving her this alternative view of her subject.

See the video including an optical illusion buried in the painting.