Assignment #3 - light and shadow

Due Tuesday, February 27 (in class)

CS 99D - The Science of Art
Winter Quarter, 2001
Marc Levoy
Handout #6

Your third assignment is to write a 3-4 page double-spaced paper on one of the topics listed in the first section below. Alternatively, you may do one of the projects listed in the second section. You may also choose another topic or project if you clear it with me in advance. The format and rules for this assignment are the same as in the first one. Don't forget to cite your sources using footnotes and/or a list of references, as appropriate.

Writing projects

• In Baxandall's essay about Molyneux's problem, Condillac's statue cannot effectively utilize its sense of sight until also given the sense of touch. Do you agree with this prediction? If a person were paralyzed from the neck down and had sight but no touch, what would be their understanding of the world? If they suddenly regained the use of their body, what difficulties might they face?
  
  
• During your upcoming expedition to find the last Amazon tribe that has had no contact with modern civilization, you wish to bring with you visual depictions of the inventions, cities, and other wonders of the outside world. Some of your teammates propose bringing line drawings. Others propose bringing etchings with hatched shading, oil paintings, photographs, or even scale models. Critically evaluate each proposal. Which do you think will be most readily understood by the natives? Do you have other proposals? Feel free to draw for inspiration on Baxandall's essay about Molyneux's problem, but I want to hear your thoughts, not his.
  
  
• In our coverage of the history of chiaroscuro, we neglected to treat the effects of changes in painting technology, in particular the switch from egg tempera to oil-based paint in the 15th century and the development of synthetic pigments in the 18th and 19th centuries. Working from Lamb and Bourriau's Colour: Art and Science, the appendicies in Baxandall's Shadows and Enlightenment, or other sources, trace this fascinating relationship between technology and art from the Renaissance through the 19th century.
  
  
• The recent cleaning of the Sistine Chapel ceiling suggests that Michelangelo, rather than employing the Renaissance discovery that shadows should be dark, tending toward black, instead adhered to medieval tradition, in which shadows were fully saturated with color. If correct, then this radically changes our view of Michelangelo and his art. If, on the other hand, we have cleaned away Michelangelo's intended tones, as some critics claim, then we have ruined his masterpiece forever. Read one of the many books about the cleaning. Then read James Beck's scathing condemnation of it in Art Restoration: the Culture, the Business, and the Scandal. Who is right?
  
  
• Research and write a paper on an everyday optical effect not described in Minnaert's book. (Finding one not covered in his book may be hard!) For extra fun, target your essay at artists who might want to employ the effect. This will require you to think not only about what causes the effect, but also about how to paint it.
  
  
• Write on the treatment of light and shadow in a non-Western-European culture.

Some non-writing projects

• Create a illustration that convincingly depicts a scene in extremely bright light, a scene in extremely dim light, or a scene with an extremely wide range of illumination. Use any media you like, including computer graphics. You are also welcome to experiment with extreme viewing conditions as described in Helmholtz's essay.
  
  
• Create photographic demonstrations of as many of the optical effects described in Minnaert's book as you can. You may use any kind of camera you wish (film, polaroid, digital, video), but you must take your own photographs - no borrowing from books.
  
  
• In 1972 Carl Sagan designed a plaque for the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, the first to leave our solar system, that carried greetings from earthlings to any civilization that might intercept the spacecraft in the distant future. Design a follow-on plaque that would communicate, probably in graphical form, the structure of our urban environment. Think carefully about the visual conventions you are using, whether an extra-terrestial civilization would understand them, and what elements you might include to promote that understanding.

The David Disk: an independent study (or summer) project

An important problem related to archiving digitized cultural artifacts is insuring longevity for the bits. This is a hard problem, and although many solutions have been proposed, none have yet proven practical.

In lieu of a practical solution, I have been exploring the radical alternative of manufacturing an engraved disk that contains a microscopic but optically readable numerical representation of our three-dimensional computer model of Michelangelo's David. Once designed, multiple copies of the disk would be manufactured and deposited with selected cultural institutions for safekeeping. By coincidence, the year 2004 is the 500th anniversary of the carving of the David, and there will be special exhibitions about the statue at museums around the world. It's a convenient deadline for finishing our disk.

The goal of this project is to create a "backup" of Michelangelo's David that will last 10,000 years. Like the plaque Carl Sagan made for the Pioneer spacecraft, designing an artifact that can communicate over such a gulf of time is an interesting undertaking. How can we convey to a future human civilization the idea of a triangle mesh? Or the convention of describing triangles using three-dimensional cartesian coordinates? What numerical system should we use to denote these coordinates? What graphical conventions should we employ in writing these numbers?

Is anybody interested in helping?