A Deep Look Inside Paintings (2019). Light and space is the origin of everything, the two gametes which engendered the Universe. Likewise, in the painting as a window to the Universe, the space becomes canvas and the light emerges in the form of colorful pigments. Somebody said once that the painting is just that, light and space. And it is still mysterious how a canvas and a bunch of pigments can condense the deepest corners of the human soul. I don’t remember when I started to be deeply fascinated by paintings. Recently, I discovered that a neural network could estimate depth from a single image and instantly dreamed about the idea of having a deep look inside the Meninas’ room.
A Deep Look Inside Paintings is a video artwork which invites to an imagination journey through the hidden third dimension of paintings. The depth embedded in a 2D canvas by means of the conferred painter’s perspective is not only unfolded, but also a 3D space is created here to navigate through, from which a whole new vision of the painting arises. In this process, the rendered inaccuracies only contribute to the drama and the beauty of these paintings. The electronic textures in The Debussy’s Clair de Lune, as magic powders, confers life to the audio-reactive canvases by connecting both classical and actual digital worlds.
One of the evolutionary strategies to understand depth in monocular vision, which means looking through a single eye, has to do with the ability to (visually) remember that size decreases with distance. Actually, size-scaling was one of the first strategies which painters used to give perspective to their paintings. Nowadays, deep neural networks for computer vision have been trained with so many images, that in the end they are also able to learn what should be near and far in the scene. Megadepth, a deep learning-based model trained with thousands of depth maps estimated from manifold tourist pictures of city landscapes, is one of the SoTA methods in generating depth maps out of a single image. It truly fueled this artwork. Everything else is just an emotional flame.
Credits:
– Diego Velázquez, “Las meninas” (1656)- Francisco de Goya, “Los fusilamientos” (1814).- Jean-François Millet, “L’Angélus” (1859).- Edgar Degas, “Répétition de ballet” (1873).- Georges Seurat, “Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte” (1886).- Pablo Picasso, “Mujer en azul” (1901).- Ramon Pujolà, “Salamanca” (2018). Follow him at ramon_pujola.- ROLI: Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” cover.- Rafael Redondo: all the rest (3D renders, audio-reactive animations, additional synthetic sounds, and video editing).
Further details and digital material at A Deep Look Inside Paintings.To render these 3D models check DepthPainter out.
