Invisible watermarks

We’ve been doing a lot of image manipulation in this course, so I figured this might be interesting: a French startup has been working on a system that invisibly watermarks pictures by modifying pixels so subtly that it’s almost impossible to tell with the naked eye. Their software then lets you identify the original source…

Folding@Home

Not specifically related to this class, but I feel like I have to share this for those who don’t know about it. Essentially, Folding@Home is a protein-folding computing project that lets anyone contribute their spare computing power by just downloading a program and running it in the background. Historically they’ve worked on Ebola and Cancer…

Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million Images Into Public Domain

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/smithsonian-releases-28-million-images-public-domain-180974263/ This is really cool–the Smithsonian just released almost 3 million high quality 2- and 3-D images into the public domain through their website as part of an effort to digitize their collections. It’s not the first museum to do so, but apparently the scale of this drop is unprecedented. You can access the images…

Alexander Calder Museum coming to Philly

A new museum is coming to the Parkway! Feels oddly fitting that they would announce the construction of an Alexander Calder museum just as we start exploring animation—what is a mobile but an analog gif? https://www.phillyvoice.com/alexander-calder-museum-philadelphia-benjamin-franklin-parkway-scultptor-mobiles-lawnton/

Gothic Calligraphy Tutorial

Thought this was a cool little tutorial on calligraphy in Illustrator. I found it really interesting how this combined a lot of the tools that we’ve learned about, specifically how the artist uses the pen tool first and then changes the stroke to calligraphic brushes after laying everything out instead of just using the brushes…

Wacom tablets track every app you open

This is an interesting little piece of drama surrounding the Wacom tablets that are hooked up to our computers in the lab. Apparently, by default they track which applications you open while they’re in use, which has understandably raised concerns about privacy. Wacom says the data is only collected in bulk and can’t be used…

Recreating lost ecosystems in virtual reality

I’m a huge fan of VR and I found this article really interesting. It’s about an artist who creates lost environments in VR, recently creating an exhibition where viewers could witness a kind of Hawaiian bird that went extinct in 1987. At one point he talks about how VR is a uniquely corporal medium, which…

Boolean Game

A cool little game to learn how to make shapes in Illustrator. Can even save it as an app on your phone for learning on the go!