Art:
Category: Research
Greta and I did our undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, or as a commonly-sold T-shirt on campus put it, "where fun goes to die." To say that Chicago didn't emphasize academics over a social life is to deny...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 4:20 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Research
Take another look at this picture of the Rokeby Venus from last week's post on mirrors in art: Now, imagine you're actually in the room with Venus, as depicted in this painting. You suspend your astonishment long enough to conduct...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:26 PM • 14 Comments •
Category: Research
The Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez is a good example of a very common illusion in many paintings: Most viewers would say this picture depicts a woman viewing her own reflection in a mirror. But based on the orientation of...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:13 PM • 23 Comments •
Category: Research
Take a look at these two pictures of the Mona Lisa: They're derived from a series of images of the famous painting that had been obscured by random noise filters (like when your old analog TV wasn't getting a signal),...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 1:31 PM • 9 Comments •
Category: Research
What is so mesmerizing about pointillist paintings like Seurat's Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte? At first, we're impressed by the technical virtuosity of the work. It's an immense painting that Greta and I visited many times when we were...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:28 PM • 12 Comments •
Category: Research
Some of the things psychologists ask their research subjects to do are really rather annoying. I'm not talking about Milgram-esque studies where people confront their inner demons, I'm talking about much more pedestrian stuff. This movie, for example, gives you...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 4:19 PM • 6 Comments •
Category: Research
This is a guest post by Suzie Eckl, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007 Forget color television. Before we had color, we had black and white. Before we had movies, we had photographs. And before photographs we...
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Posted by Aaron Couch at 9:54 AM • 9 Comments •
Category: Research
These two pictures represent the eye motions of two viewers as they scan a work of art with the goal of remembering it later. One of them is a trained artist, and the other is a trained psychologist. Can you...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 11:25 AM • 50 Comments •
Category: Research
Everyone knows the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words." Bound by that axiom, magazines, newspapers, and most of all, TV, bombard us with pictures every day. The latest hot internet properties aren't text-based sites like Google but picture-based...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:57 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Research
[originally posted on March 16, 2005] I've taken only two pictures of the Mona Lisa, and both turned out about the same: they captured the frenzied attempts of dozens of tourists trying to take a picture of the most-recognized image...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 10:01 AM • 1 Comments •