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Comment by stepvhen | Hacker News Reader

I have two opinions: 1) I don't think cubism transfers well into a motion picture format, 2) I think these experiments, as they are currently, attempt to merge two styles and end up with neither, and nothing novel in its place; there is little Kubrick or Picasso in the final piece.

I think it's superficial and doesn't do either source justice.

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This is a fair comment and does not deserve to be down-voted. In fact I would go further, this is the most honest critique here and not derisory to the CPUs that put together this video.

It is also okay to pay homage to a great work of art, to sample it, to parody it, to outright copy it, to even forge it or pass it off as one's own so long as that is artistically done. However I feel this video is more like passing something through an electronic mangle than art. It is craft rather than art, even if it is hi-tech craft.

Had this technique been applied to an original short film that had its own footage and own way of telling an actual story then we could have had a winner.

Specifically, what the algorithm seems to have done is leave the shapes of objects (furniture, hallways, etc) alone and decorate any blank space with random, Picasso-ish noise. It's chaotic, but isn't really Cubist. To be cubist it'd have to figure out some way to fuck with the rules of perspective much more than it does at the moment.

I think the motion aspect, at least what we see in the clip, forces a perspective that can't be avoided, breaking the style. Even if somebody did make a true cubist film it would be difficult to balance between intelligible and un-cubist or chaotic and true to style. Maybe. Hasn't been done yet so I don't know.

"It looks cool" is sufficient excuse for experimentation.

Yes, but it is no excuse to call it "in the style of Picasso" when it clearly isn't.

This is technical gripe. If you showed it to people with no explanation, and asked them whose style it was, a high percentage would say "Picasso."

And we can't see any face in the demo video, maybe the very signature of Picasso's style if you're not an expert.

this is such a quintessentially HN comment

"I am well informed and unimpressed."

Also, for fairness, do the same with my comment:

"Unlike this status oriented nerd, I can relate to you and the author on a human level."

Personally I'll just say the video's pretty fucking cool.

Referring to stepvhen's comment. I find it comical in all seriousness.

Even the must leisurely, casual or mundane topic, intended to be a refreshing change in colour (pun not intended considering the article but I'll take it) and\or conversation on Hacker News is subject to ridicule, assessment and biopsy.

It's why I like it here. Some of us are completely incapable of /not/ peer reviewing the shit out of everything. :)

Edit: words fail me, also spelt Stepvhen's handle wrong (sincerest apologies).

Really I was just trying to be polite in what I expected to be dissent. The video looks cool, but I don't believe the network used has any understanding (however you define it) of Picasso's style, as another commenter has stated. It's a little misleading, especially since there's a lot more going on in Picasso than geometric shapes and crazy colors.

Then again I might take things too seriously. There was only one other comment when I posted, I didn't know what the tone would end up being.

Incidentally, I chose this handle because others always spelled my name "Steven", when it's "Stephen".

Hacker News' as an audience is quite critical, of critics and their criticisms when the criticism is seen to be facultative

I never took your comment to not be polite. As mentioned, as a community. We're all quite guilty of being overly logical and serious. It's part of the charm.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to start collecting down votes for mentioning the Phteven meme (we don't like meme's here, do we?). But I had suspected that might be the basis for the spelling of your handle!

I'll down vote my own comments and see myself out...

> It's a little misleading, especially since there's a lot more going on in Picasso than geometric shapes and crazy colors.

> Then again I might take things too seriously.

if anything, too many people in this thread don't seem to be taking cubism and Picasso's style seriously either (signature faces? what ..?)

of course a deeplearning net can't actually do cubism.

if someone wrote a program to generate blocks of primary colours in pleasing ratios, really cleverly, it may look like Mondriaan to someone that has seen a couple of Mondriaan paintings. but everybody who knows what Mondriaan was trying to do, will instantly know that there's really no way today's computers could really perform the same process.

Picasso didn't invent one style - he invented lots of styles. So it's nonsense to say this video is "in the style of" Picasso.

It's more like an insta-Picasso plug-in for one particular form of abstraction.

It's interesting and unusual, and yes, it would be better with constraints.

I'm not sure I'd want to look at it on a big screen though.

>of course a deeplearning net can't actually do cubism.

One of the interesting things to fall out of this research is the realisation that a lot of art - even figurative art - is based on abstraction of visual invariants.

There's no reason that creative abstraction can't be automated to create new styles.

The difference when humans do it is the level of psychological insight and feel for what's visually important and interesting in a scene.

That can probably be automated too, but it's a very much harder problem.

The challenge for most developers in this space is that they have a much more superficial understanding of art (and music, and writing) than they believe they do, so a lot of content and detail that's important to experienced viewers gets ignored. The result is superficial lookalike output - pastiche.

Technically, the superficial output is an achievement in itself, but it's still a way short of being artistically innovative in its own right.

I agree that style of Picasso is cubism and this process isn't able to replicate that. But I assume it's an early experiment to show what's possible now.

I thought that was awesome, then I came here to see about half of the comments full of people criticizing and dismissing it. This is a really neat experiment, just appreciate it. The author didn't claim that this is some groundbreaking, perfect piece of art or technology.

1. I think cubism can benefit from an explicit time dimension, though exactly how it should be done, I don't know.

2. I agree, as they are in this video, but I think cubism could be used to capture the experience of entering the monolith even better than Kubrick captured it.

Cubism is entirely about working with the time dimension not against it though. In early Cubist works the group took still life as their choice of subject. You could set it up, hack out some geometric forms, move the easel/rearange the subject, add another layer/try reconciling forms, move the easel/rearrange again and so on until the painting was finished. The Futurists/Vorticists were trying to work at the same goal, representing motion using what had been a medium for subjects that moved fairly slowly/not at all. If you look at Picassos "The Weeping Woman" the perspective mis-match comes from moving.

I think the folly of the Cubists was to embrace the still life after the methods had been fleshed out. Most Cubist works are created from a handful of discrete images, this destroys the aspect of motion in my opinion. I've been working to capture proper motion using GoPro POV footage from various sources, rather then pausing the video I let the colours wing by and try and place them on the canvas. What I am choosing to perceive at the moment ends up represented (I avoid faces, thus I have floating forms without heads!), loose marks capture a door frame which has half of a tree-roadway. It's abstracted, but still based on a concrete sequence. The most effective are when a part of the frame is static throughout (a mounting bracket, bike, wiper blade, etc) because that imagery comes through only modified by changing light which provides a contrast against the jumble of forms and colours elsewhere.

The first step towards a Cubist film will involve multiple cameras shooting the same scene from multiple angles and recording the absolute time of the shot. [b]An algorithm that takes n images as an input and applies a deterministic transform to them (weighting certain images)[/b] trying to reconcile the overlaps, looking for prominent forms, picking/merging a colour to use, etc eventually mapping down to a single image. Assuming this could be developed the director would compose the scene from these multiple sources, perhaps giving a effect similar to [1]. The face of a lover is modified woven with images of a child and the image of meal prep on a sunny day. The conversation uses the word cheating in an innocent way and the focus snaps sharply back to the lover where scenes of cheating with the other/secretive behaviours/worry and paranoia are gently woven overtop eventually leaving the lovers voice as the only signifier of this conversation taking place.

But proper cubist imagery cannot come from a simple mapping of styles.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4LLVIUh6ZM

I agree that neural style transfer doesn't mean much in terms of art, but it sure makes some cool looking stuff!

Also, as I've mentioned in my top-level comment, it's a great way to explore GPU programming and deep learning.

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