I’ve collected a fair number of interesting links this week from a number of blogs, as well as some forwards from my friends. These days, I can’t imagine living without my evening blog roundup!

Amongst these are a couple of videos, the first of which is from the 2007 SIGGRAPH conference. Seb Chan has already blogged about it here at the Fresh + New(er) blog, but I thought a repost here was in order. Content Aware Image Resizing is a method for analyzing and weighing the active space in an image, so that when an image is being resized in a browser environment, it essentially cuts out the “empty” space, leaving the main content intact. Although Seb’s take on it is that it would useful for formulating thumbnails, I have my hesitation about using this method in a museum context, especially with modern art and artworks where there is still a non-museum copyright-holder. It’s still an interesting application nonetheless (and I could see some digital artists using this to great effect).

high-quality video here, paper here, and nifty online demo here (you can try this on your own photographs!)

There’s been some buzz this weekend about a supposed 13.4 Gigapixel camera. However, while the video is pretty cool, I can neither find a source nor any commentary about it, beyond one comment which suggests that the video is of a panoramic composite of photographs that, when combined, makes one 13 billion-pixel photograph of Harlem, New York. Looking back and finding references to 10 billion pixel photograph composites in 2002, I’m inclined to believe that this is a composite and the blogosphere has run away with itself again. And that makes me feel a whole lot better about 1) my privacy and 2) my nice little 6.1 megapixel Nikon D70 I use at work.

Anyway, you be the judge!

13.4 Gigapixel Camera

And finally, it’s not digital, and they didn’t even have monitors or computers as we think of them today, but Stalin used to edit from photographs people he (or his staff) didn’t like any longer. A book published in 1997, The Commissar Vanishes – the Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia, illustrates how Stalin regularly edited photographs and artworks to control and manipulate the populace during his time in power. The New York Times has the introductory chapter here, and Newseum has an online exhibition here, with illustrations of some of the “retouching”.

From the introductory chapter:

Like their counterparts in Hollywood, photographic retouchers in Soviet Russia spent long hours smoothing out the blemishes of imperfect complexions, helping the camera to falsify reality. Joseph Stalin’s pockmarked face, in particular, demanded exceptional skills with the airbrush. But it was during the Great Purges, which raged in the late 1930s, that a new form of falsification emerged. The physical eradication of Stalin’s political opponents at the hands of the secret police was swiftly followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence.

Photographs for publication were retouched and restructured with airbrush and scalpel to make once famous personalities vanish. Paintings, too, were often withdrawn from museums and art galleries so that compromising faces could be blocked out of group portraits. Entire editions of works by denounced politicians and writers were banished to the closed sections of the state libraries and archives or simply destroyed.