May 92 - THE VETERAN NEOPHYTE
THE VETERAN NEOPHYTE
YEAH, BUT IS IT ART?
DAVE JOHNSON
Digital image processing has come a very long way. Remember when MacPaint® was a revolutionary
concept? Now we've got a plethora of sophisticated graphics programs available on the Macintosh for
regular folks: 32-bit painting programs, image-processing programs, CAD programs, photo-realistic
rendering programs, solid modeling programs, animation programs--you name it. The power to be
your best, or the power to run off into the weeds? I guess it depends on who's at the keyboard. One
thing is sure: art will never be the same.
I've been messing around lately with digital filtering of scanned images: taking an existing image and
applying some sort of mathematical transformation to it. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes
beautiful, often ugly, but always fun.
One of the programs I've been spending time with lets you interactively type in mathematical
expressions and apply them to an image. This application, called Pico, is a Macintosh implementation
of an image-processing language developed by Gerard J. Holzmann at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and
described in his bookBeyond Photography: The Digital Darkroom. (The Macintosh version I've been
using was written by John W. Peterson here at Apple, and I've included it on theDeveloper CD Series disc so that you can play with it, too.) If you're the least bit interested in image processing, you
should read Holzmann's slim, friendly book. It describes the language in detail and gives lots of
examples of its use. The book is full of fascinating photographs that have been tweaked and
transformed using the language, ranging from the hilarious (in particular, see the Einstein caricature
on page 35), to the sublimely beautiful (make up your own mind). The overall feel is one of whimsy
and fun, with a strong dose of the joy of discovery. The book also includes a very instructive and in-
depth discussion of the software that implements the language (a lexical analyzer, a recursive-descent
parser, and an interpreter) and source code in C.
Holzmann's language allows you to invent, implement, and try out digital filters on the fly. It uses a
C-like syntax and is decidedly mathematical, but that's where a lot of the fun comes in: seeing a
photographic image quickly transformed by a simple mathematical formula is really fascinating. The
language makes it easy to mess around and discover unusual things about math and filters: you can
just type in an expression, hit the Enter key, and see the results immediately. The program operates
only on 8-bit gray-scale images that are 256 by 256 pixels, but the power of the language far
outshines this limitation. Try it, you'll like it.
There's another kind of digital filtering that I first learned about a little over a year ago in an article
by Paul Haeberli at Silicon Graphics:Paint By Numbers: Abstract Image Representations , in the
SIGGRAPH '90 Conference Proceedings. This is an interactive kind of filtering, which makes it a lot
of fun. The concept is simple: Start with a given image, any image (call it the source). Create a new,
blank one (the destination) that's the same size. Then you "paint" on the destination with the mouse,
and at each point you touch, the color of the source image is determined at that same location. A"brush stroke" is then drawn in the destination at that position, with the source's color. If the brush
just drew single pixels, you would be copying the source image exactly, which would be a pretty
tedious way to copy it. Ah, but the brush can do anything it wants to, and that's where the fun
begins. If the brush draws, say, a circle a few pixels in diameter, you get a sort of "blot" effect, with
the blots overlapping each other haphazardly. Or you could draw a line in some random direction
from the source pixel's location, or add some noise to the color so that it varies a little from the
source color, or draw a clump of dots centered at the source pixel, or draw a silhouette of a wiener
dog in the appropriate color, or . . . the possibilities are endless. In a way you're tracing the source,
but the brush you use to trace with isn't exact, and the results can be striking.
The finished images tend to look very "painterly" and are often evocative of impressionist paintings
like those of Monet or Renoir, or of the pointillist "divisionist" technique of Seurat. (Can you tell
I've been spending some time with my handy-dandyRandom House Encyclopedia ? Thanks, Mom.) This
is a refreshing move away from the trend toward photo-realistic rendering that you see so much of in
computer graphics.
I wrote a Macintosh application that implements a simplified version of what Haeberli did, so I could
play around with it. (The application and all the source code are on this month's CD, for you to mess
around with. If you find any problems, please let me know.) The most fun part turned out to be
writing the brush routines, and I was curious to see just how hard it is to incorporate plug-ins into an
application, so I made up a simple plug-in interface for the brushes (plug-ins are code resources
separate from the application that are loaded and run as needed). Surprisingly, it turned out to be
pretty trivial to implement plug-ins. I figured I was going to be forced to descend to the level of A5
worlds and code resource headers, but with the exception of one subtle gotcha it was easy. Basically
you just get a handle to the code resource with GetResource, lock it, dereference it, and call it. I had
to do some ugly casting to convince the C compiler to let me make the call, but other than that there
were almost no problems.
One thing turned up that I couldn't figure out, and I was forced to seek help. I was writing a filter
routine (the application supports both brushes and filters as plug-ins) that was a modified version of
the RedGreenInvert routine from the article "Drawing in GWorlds for Speed and Versatility" in this
issue. I first tried it linked into my application, so I could use the source debugger on it. Once it was
working, I converted it to a plug-in and BOOM, it crashed with a bus error. Some investigative work
pointed to SwapMMUMode as the culprit, but I couldn't figure out why. (Trumpet fanfare) Bo3b
Johnson to the rescue once again! It turns out that since I was calling the plug-in in 24-bit mode,
when it came time to call SwapMMUMode the PC contained an address that had some of its high
bits set (in this case the "locked" bit since I had locked the handle and the "resource" bit since it was
a handle to a code resource). This is a bad thing. The solution, of course, is to call StripAddress on
the pointer to the plug-in before calling it. That way the address in the PC is clean and
SwapMMUMode is happy.
There are several commercially available applications that do Haeberli-like image manipulation.
Monet, by Delta Tao Software, is a much more complete and sophisticated implementation of
Haeberli's concepts, incorporating some of the cooler features like opacity control, getting the
direction of the brush strokes from the movement of the mouse, and so on. (You gotta love Delta
Tao Software: when a customer asks for an IBM version of one of their products, they gleefully
answer "Buy a Macintosh.") There's also Painter, a truly unique and remarkable paint program from
Fractal Design that simulates very naturally the media artists use--chalk, pencil, charcoal, and so on.
It has a "cloning" function that's similar to Haeberli's in concept: you can manually or automatically
draw over the "source" image with any of the brushes. Aldus Gallery Effects by Silicon Beach
Software is a product that basically consists of canned filters that can be applied to images to
transform them in interesting ways, many of which are similar to the effects you get with Haeberli's
technique. And then of course there's Adobe Photoshop, the brilliant, precocious teenager of image-
processing programs.
Photoshop seems to have become the de facto industry standard image-processing program. Its
versatility is, so far, unmatched by any other program I've seen. And its plug-in interface has also
become something of a standard: many Macintosh graphics programs (Painter, for one) now support
Photoshop plug-ins, and I know of at least one software company that does nothingbut writePhotoshop plug-ins. I think plug-ins are a very cool thing: they allow extension and customization of
an application on the fly, bringing us a tiny step closer to the dream of "erector set" applications that
can be taken apart, rearranged, and rebuilt by users to suit their needs. If you want to write some
Photoshop plug-ins, you can find the documentation for the plug-in interface (along with examples
in MPW C, MPW Pascal, and THINK C) on the CD.
Here's the big, deep question about these digitally transformed images: Are They Art? An image
produced by any of these applications can indeed be "arty"; of that there is no doubt. But is it really
art? Many graphic artists would immediately answer with a resounding "NO!" They'd say that it just
looks like art, that it imitates art (kinda like life), but isn't really art because it'sautomatic . But many
painters in the surrealist and abstract impressionist movements took great interest in what they
termed "automatic" painting, painting without the intervention of conscious control. Jackson Pollock
was a notable practitioner of this technique. Is the creation of a painting by automatic means any
different, in principle, from what these computer-based tools do?
"Wait a minute!" these artists might cry, "Pollock began with a blank canvas! What he did was truly
original! You (smug smirk) are just taking an existing image and transforming it with a computer.
That's not art, that's just (expression of extreme distaste)filtering ."
"Wipe that smug smirk off your face," I might smirk smugly, "what about the dadaists? They claimed
that art was anything that anyone decided tocall art, and I'm calling these images art." (Fun dadaist
tales: Marcel Duchamp, a dadaist in New York, bought a urinal, signed it "R. Mutt," and called it art.
He claimed that the signature alone made any manufactured item into a work of art. These
"readymades," as he called them, sold quite well. And then there's Kurt Schwitters, a Hanover
dadaist, who made collages from rubbish. Now the dadaist movement, admittedly, was intended to
upset the status quo, rip apart the definition of art, and shock people out of their bourgeois
sensibilities, but their influence is still strongly felt in modern art, and has forever muddied the
definition of what art is. For that I heartily thank them.)
There's another eminently pragmatic definition of art: it's art if someone is willing to buy it. This
one is distasteful in its materialistic slant, but I must admit that it's a useful one, at least to people
who make a living making art. Then there's the Marshall McLuhan stance that "art is anything you
can get away with." I personally love this one for its nebulousness, and I'm willing to leave it at that.
Whatever definition we pick, we still can't conclusively say whether these computer-transformed
images are art. Art is just too slippery a thing to pin down, like trying to put a cloud in a chair. I
think art is primarily a dialog between the creator and the experiencer: if something is
communicated, I'll call it art. But in the final analysis, does it really matter? These tools are just
another kind of computer fun, andeveryone , artist or not, can play.
RECOMMENDED READING
- Beyond Photography: The Digital Darkroom by Gerard J. Holzmann (Prentice-Hall, 1988).
- Paint By Numbers: Abstract Image Representations by Paul Haeberli (in the SIGGRAPH '90 Conference
Proceedings).
- Elbert's Bad Word by Audrey Wood (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988).
DAVE JOHNSON would like to share with you a quote from The Three-Pound Universe by Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi, a wonderful book about the human brain: "Research at Yale
University's Center for Behavioral Medicine turned up the surprising fact that regular 'reading therapy'--that is, reading a
book for half an hour a day--is neurophysiologically equivalent to the practice of TM. (Whether this means the
Maharishi's mantras are comparable to Heidi or merely reflects the crudeness of our measuring devices, we'll let you
decide.)" This finding vindicates Dave's habits in a way no heartfelt argument ever could. *
Dave welcomes feedback on his musings. He can be reached at JOHNSON.DK on AppleLink, dkj@apple.com on the
Internet, or 75300,715 on CompuServe. *