The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

Convolution matrix image processing - 17 images from SL -


In order to reproduce the emotional/compressive tenor of the original
state-of-affairs in the Second Life exhibition, I've worked for at least a
decade with Gimp's convolution matrices to bring you a kind of exactitude
I could only otherwise hint at. These photographs are one-of-a-kind hence
completely reproducible; each is another take yet on the augmented
filigree aspect of The Accidental Artist. Surely they are worthy of more
than a glance, less than a lifetime well spent doing otherwise? Check out
Digital Imaging, Trial and Applications, Howard Burdick, McGraw-Hill,
1977.

I usually shy away from image modification 'outside' Second Life, prefer-
ring to keep it within the bounds of the topography itself. Following
Bazin and others, it appears as if a certain veracity is lost when one
succumbs to overt digital filtering, as opposed to either direct-from-ccd-
to-you (with all the attendant processing that goes on there) or a minimal
augmentation, say slight blurring or saturation increase or raising the
contrast, whatever - designed to reproduce the 'effect' of the work upon
the subject-in-world (with hir attendant visual and psychological process-
ing). All of these distinctions are clearly suspect of course - but still
there's a difference between 'sweetening' or 'tending' an image, and
changing it drastically to hopefully reflect the affect in the original
viewing.

All of this moves from digital to digital, remains within the framework of
the digital; all of this occurs within what might be considered 'sliding'
from an immersive three-dimensional virtual world experience (rendered as
a two-dimensional dynamic image), to a static two-dimensional recording of
that world as static image. (Of course, again, all of this is just appar-
ent, for in fact there are no static digital images - they're continually
refreshed on-screen. In print, they're static - in the sense I'm using the
word here - but in print they're not strictly digital. One can go on and
on with these distinctions.)

In any case, here are images which were actively filtered in ways that
might engage the viewer differently.

r\= mv23c5604865ensional recording of that world as image.

as dynamic and two-dimensional) to a static

As for emotional content - melancholia, sculptor, dusk, archaic, chthonic,
miasma, ghastly, sadness of ember sexuality, broken hearts; images on the
ways, out from worlds

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http://www.alansondheim.org/exp01.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp02.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp03.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp04.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp05.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp06.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp07.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp08.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp09.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp10.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp11.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp12.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp13.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp14.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp15.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp16.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/exp17.jpg

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