Browsing by Author "Wendell, Augustus"

Although an integral part of art historical studies, authentic experiences of architecture have been excluded from the cathedrals of cultural objects, art museums. The built forms can seldomly fit into the doors of museums like art objects in a collection, due to their physical sizes and inseparable links with their surrounding environment. When architecture is presented under traditional museum setting, the visitor experience is often mediated and created by photos, videos, and scaled models. When architectures are converted into public spaces like tourists’ sites, onsite experiences in these spaces are typically biased for a particular duration of time and weather. Interaction with the space is limited due to preservation concerns. This project aims to provide an alternative architectural experience in response to these above limitations using digital methods, instead of trying to substitute the traditional museum experience or the authentic onsite experience. The digital component of this project curates a virtual space using the early access version of Unreal Engine 5, as an exploration of the state-of-the-art technologies in rendering virtual spaces. The project contains three example scenes: Church of the Light, Glass House, and Dom-Ino House. Instead of merely promoting a virtual or a physical experience of architecture, this study takes a critical stance towards the growing attention around digitization and discusses the possibilities of experiencing architecture in a virtual setting.

Many installation art projects have appeared from the 20th to the 21st century. There are diverse types of installation art. Due to the development and implementation of technology, installation art is divided into physical installation art that is entirely physical, without any digital application. On the other hand, virtual installation art implements virtual elements to physical installation art or is a complete virtual experience. This article discusses the relationship between these two art forms, from their definitions to the examples of different artists and works that have become famous in the field. It also explores how different digital platforms can serve as a medium for the completion of installation artists' work. A collaborative project is introduced at the end to deeply explore the relationship between physical installation art and virtual installation art. The project led to the conclusion that one can find elements and characteristics of physical installation art applications in a completely virtual installation artwork. However, with the development and usage of technology and digital tools, artists can flexibly create the installation art space they want to complete.

With the emergence of the computer, the digital image has become one of the most prevalent visual mediums in the 21st century. This paper aims at analyzing the current limitations in interacting with digital image databases in art historical research. In response to the limitations of current image database structures, this paper explores how emerging computer vision technologies can be applied to enrich the ways database users interact with art image databases. While current image databases primarily rely on manually-defined metadata and textual descriptions to associate art images, this digital project demonstrates how deep neural networks can add visual connections between art images through feature extraction algorithms. This thesis documents a digital product that demonstrates how deep neural network models can extract images’ visual features and connect art images by these visual features. Although it offers a new approach to the problem, this digital project is not intended to replace the existed metadata structure and text-based search in existing image database system. Metadata and text-based search have developed over time to assist people in managing data and navigating the digital world in the era of big data. As such, this digital project offers to overlay a visual-driven search path upon the existing database structure in order to provide a more diverse search environment.