Useless Lab @uselesslab - Tumblr Blog

animatedtext

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nemfrog

The skeleton stretches. Lehrbuch der schwedischen Gymnastik.1908.

nemfrog

Climbing and stretching. Lehrbuch der schwedischen Gymnastik.1908.

leahberman

color me clouds

Pyramid Lake, California

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leahberman

desert spirits

Joshua Tree National Park, California

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1010ll

basiadziadosz

Lavender

keenancummings

9 Masks for Introverts : This series is an exploration of introversion as an outsider identity. Many groups that carry outsider status adopt a uniform as a way of owning their outsider status and reflecting it back on the mainstream that, often, imposed that status on them in the first place. Those uniforms are both symbolic and functional. They reinforce and accommodate the identity for the wearer, and signal that identity to the observer.

I started thinking about masks as a perfectly functional and symbolic uniform of an introvert (I count myself among that “outsider” group), concealing the individual and deflecting the observer. This series of masks explores was of concealing and deflecting.

sandandglass

Mr. Robot s01e01

prostheticknowledge

Example-Based Synthesis of Stylized Facial Animations

Graphics research from Daniel Sýkora et al at DCGI, Czech Republic, presents a method of realtime style transfer focused on human faces, similar to their previous StyLit work.

It should be noted that the video below is a demonstration of results, is silent, and the official paper has not been made public yet:

Results video for the paper: Fišer et al.: Example-Based Synthesis of Stylized Facial Animations, to appear in ACM Transactions on Graphics 36(4):155, SIGGRAPH 2017.

[EDIT: 20 July 2017]

An official video (no audio) and project page has been made public on the project:

We introduce a novel approach to example-based stylization of portrait videos that preserves both the subject’s identity and the visual richness of the input style exemplar. Unlike the current state-of-the-art based on neural style transfer [Selim et al. 2016], our method performs non-parametric texture synthesis that retains more of the local textural details of the artistic exemplar and does not suffer from image warping artifacts caused by aligning the style exemplar with the target face. Our method allows the creation of videos with less than full temporal coherence [Ruder et al. 2016]. By introducing a controllable amount of temporal dynamics, it more closely approximates the appearance of real hand-painted animation in which every frame was created independently. We demonstrate the practical utility of the proposed solution on a variety of style exemplars and target videos.

Link

prostheticknowledge

Reblog for post update, including official supplementary video and link to project page

riddle-of-revenge

pez-uzi-deactivated20160424

Places where reality is a bit altered:

solareveille

playgrounds at night

rest stops on highways

deep in the mountains

ghostfiish

early in the morning wherever it’s just snowed

trails by the highway just out of earshot of traffic

schools during breaks

those little beaches right next to ferry docks

bowling alleys

genesisdoes-moved

unfamiliar mcdonalds on long roadtrips

your friends living room once everybody but you is asleep

laundromats at midnight

• any target • churches in texas • abandoned 7/11’s • your bedroom at 5 am • hospitals at midnight • warehouses that smell like dust • lighthouses with lights that don’t work anymore • empty parking lots • ponds and lakes in suburban neighborhoods • rooftops in the early morning • inside a dark cabinet

ringingofraevolution

galeries in art museums that are empty except for you

the lighting section of home depot

stairwells

doomgeneration1995

•hospital waiting rooms •airports from midnight to 7am • bathrooms in small concert venues

midtownsparker

I just got the weirdest feeling I swear

the-crepes-of-wrath

OK LISTEN THERE ARE REASONS FOR THIS!!!

A lot of these places are called liminal spaces - which means they are throughways from one space to the next. Places like rest stops, stairwells, trains, parking lots, waiting rooms, airports feel weird when you’re in them because their existence is not about themselves, but the things before and after them. They have no definitive place outside of their relationship to the spaces you are coming from and going to. Reality feels altered here because we’re not really supposed to be in them for a long time for think about them as their own entities, and when we do they seem odd and out of place.

The other spaces feel weird because our brains are hard-wired for context - we like things to belong to a certain place and time and when we experience those things outside of the context our brains have developed for them, our brains are like NOPE SHIT THIS ISN’T RIGHT GET OUT ABORT ABORT. Schools not in session, empty museums, being awake when other people are asleep - all these things and spaces feel weird because our brain is like “I already have a context for this space and this is not it so it must be dangerous.” Our rational understanding can sometimes override that immediate “danger” impulse but we’re still left with a feeling of wariness and unease.

Listen I am very passionate about liminal spaces they are fascinating stuff or perhaps I am merely a nerd.