Dennis Hollingsworth

Robot Vision

Robot readable world from Timo on Vimeo.

I don't blame some of the audience of this blog for thinking that I post items in a random manner, and this one would seem to be a prime example. I rely on my intuition to drive each blogpost, and I can't always explicate them... or at least, I don't want to drive an apologetic along with every apparent-off-the-wall blogpost.

Let this one be an object example for the rest: Robot Vision is about the overlay of computer cognition atop human cognition, and this was exactly the nature of my job so many years ago when I was a fleet sailor stationed aboard the USS Truxtun, working as an operations specialist (swabbie parlance: "scope dope"). At that time, the state of the art in radar technology was the beginning of the merger of radars to computing. We had to tell the computer what was out in the world by constructing a virtual picture in symbolic visual language over a radar picture that was a representation of reflected radio frequency emissions. This picture of the world was shared between the crew and captain and linked to aircraft and other ships in the formation. That was aeons ago, and I can only imagine what the state of the art is today in the fleet, but the point of this post is that like GPS, this technology has long been disseminated to the public. This video is a peek into our near future.

In my paintings shortly after getting out of grad school, I ran a program that was intended to restart painting after several decades of academic proscription against painting proper. I took what I understood to be Ed Ruscha's program (painting as wordplay and wordplay as painting), I interpreted this in the light of the current prohibition against the traditional arts as text as the closed and locked gates to the garden of visuality. By imagining myself as an actor who was reversing this program (Here is an example of a painting from 1992), The textual element was morphing into visual shapes via distortion and formal liberty. As time went on, I drove the textualist foreground into a kind of chameleon creature that sought to blend and merge with the background, a unification of opposing facets (here's an example and a detail too).

I think that I can see in these examples and I hope that you can too, the connection between the merging of computer and human cognition... therefore, the video on Robot Vision.

And what about the previous blogpost, Giorgio singing to a fast food worker? (Check out his site, nice guy with a cool family and friends, a blessed life.) Well, he's an exemplar for this maxim: Kindness requires no theory.