prehysteries of new media: >> Bela Julesz

<< preface

this blog is nina wenhart's collection of resources on the various histories of new media art. it consists mainly of non or very little edited material i found flaneuring on the net, sometimes with my own annotations and comments, sometimes it's also textparts i retyped from books that are out of print.

it is also meant to be an additional resource of information and recommended reading for my students of the prehystories of new media class that i teach at the school of the art institute of chicago in fall 2008.

the focus is on the time period from the beginning of the 20th century up to today.

2008-07-09

>> Bela Julesz

Jasia Reichardt in "The Computer in Art", 1971:

"Activities in the field of computer graphics at Bell Telephone Laboratories also include Bela Julesz's experiments with texture and visual perception, in which he used the techniques employed in the random generation of patterns. Ranom-dot patterns generated by computers have shown that the recognition of familiar shapes is not needed for the discrimination of textures, or even for the binocular perception of depth. Julesz used random fields of coloured dots. He discovered that texture discrimination is highly dependent on the way component colours are paired, which, for instance, red and yellow giving a higher degree of discrimination than blue and yellow or blue and green. The objective was to determine those pattern properties that make it impossible to distinguish immediately two adjacent displays. He found that it is the statistical properties of patterns that allow for spontaneous discrimination. This is independent of vrightness distribution but relies on the isolation of darker clusters hich could be said to form certain patterns. Using stereo pairs, Julesz found that one can perceive camouflaged objects with binocular vision which are invisible in a two-dimensional representation."