ACM SIGGRAPH Blog
SIGGRAPH 2021 Art Papers: "Imaginary Stroke Movement Measurement and Visualization"
This question is very interesting. It involves some contents which are inappropriate in the paper, so I want to be a bit wordy. This project originated from a special painting method I began to explore in 2018. The following is the earliest work:
The following is a work after improving the painting method, which was completed in 2019. It was used as an experimental sample in the project of this paper:
****What are the characteristics of this kind of work? Perhaps you will realize that they all use the Eastern ink style to express modern scientific and technological products. However, this is not its unique feature. It can be compared with the following work, which was completed in about 2015:
Both use ink painting to represent scientific and technological products, but it should be obvious that they still have some key differences. In fact, the fundamental difference is that the former is completed by "continuous brush movement", while the latter is not. Although the stroke of the former is not physically continuous to the end, it does imply a continuous brush moving trace. The following is its brush movement trace:
For the latter, although it is still my own work, I can't "reconstruct" the stroke order. I think there are two reasons to conceive this "continuous stroke painting". First, I trained in calligraphy since I was a child, and one of the basic requirements of calligraphy practice is that I can't "alter", which should be completed at one time. This requires that each stroke should be completed with clear and simple actions, and multiple strokes should be completed with the specified "stroke order". I draw with the same tools as when I write calligraphy, which naturally brings the possibility of "one stroke completion". Second, my working conditions at that time did not allow me to spend a lot of time "elaborately" painting. Therefore, painting is mainly a leisure activity for me. Of course, it's best to finish it Impromptu in a few minutes. Naturally, I have the impulse to "complete it at once with few strokes". The combination of the two naturally produces this "continuous stroke painting". In fact, it is not intentional at all, or this painting method is a natural "integration" of my past practical experience in my subconscious under the constraints of objective conditions, rather than my intentional "conception". Of course, this painting method is very different from "writing". On the one hand, its "stroke order" needs to be designed consciously, while the "stroke order" in calligraphy is usually regarded as a conventional norm without any personalized design. Second, these "strokes" should eventually show some concrete things rather than abstract text symbols.
Of course, I am very excited to create such works. At that time, I found many friends to watch these works and asked them if they could see the characteristics of the works. However, to my disappointment, most of them are unable to realize the feature of "continuous strokes", which can only be realized after at least a slight hint. I'm afraid many artists have to go through a similar dilemma that they think they have made some great artistic innovation but can't resonate. But if I just stay in "disappointment", there will be no subsequent research. When in addition to "disappointment", I also had a question at that time: why is such obvious "continuous strokes" so that almost everyone is not aware of it? This question has become the ideological seed of this study. This may also reflect the different sources of "innovation" in art and research. The former may come from an expression impulse based on personal endowment, while the latter comes from curiosity to find out the "law" and "reason".
What is the meaning of this "continuous strokes" other than to show off the mastery of skills? It actually expands an expression dimension of static works - time. Usually, A static visual art work is "plane". But the artist can express a higher dimension in this two-dimensional space. For example, perspective can be used to express three-dimensional space. In addition, "time" is also a dimension outside the plane, and "time" dimension is almost implicit in various expressions of "motion”. For example, as shown in the following pictures, Leonardo da Vinci expressed the birds “flying” by scribbles, Duchamp used the technique of "ghost shadow" to show the moving human body down the stairs, and in the cartoon, continuous "lenses" and some "moving lines" are used to show the intense movement process over a period of time.
In addition, "time" can also be shown in the operation trace of "brush stroke". For example, the above Leonardo da Vinci manuscript is his famous mirror script, so it is obvious that we can trace the movement process of his writing. While the traditional Eastern Calligraphy is good at expressing this "brush movement process", and its aesthetic activities largely lie in the tracing of his "brush movement", Therefore, calligraphy experts often compare appreciating a masterpiece of calligraphy to appreciating a piece of music, such as the following figure:
In fact, when we continue to use the "brush movement process" to examine past "manual creation" works in different cultural backgrounds, we will find that it is a broad technique, but it is likely that the creators themselves are not clearly aware of it, but use it subconsciously with their own talents:
However, when we can clearly realize the existence of "brushstroke movement", it has become an expression medium that can be further used. In order to explore how to further use this technique, I created a calligraphy work in 2020:
What's special about this work? It is actually trying to use "stroke movement" for encoding information.
It loads two groups of information with my customized "coding rules":
The first group uses the connection relationship between adjacent strokes in time sequence, as shown in the figure below. When we explore the position of "connection" between each stroke and the preceding stroke along the specified stroke order of the character, we will find that there are three types: connection, separation and intersection. They can be translated into a Morse code, corresponding to the English word "bit".
In addition, the concept of "channel reuse" in communication is also integrated here. If you continue to explore the process of starting shape, bending direction and thickness change of strokes, you can decode a 5-bit binary code from each stroke. For example, the following figure is the decoding of two strokes:
Why did I encode the words bit, order and tide? In fact, they were closely related to the theme of a lecture I prepared. In short, they all involve the principle of "information and communication" (I'd like to share the content of the lecture if I have the opportunity).
In order to prepare for the lecture, I reviewed the information theory and communication technology I had learned before. This prompted me to see the phenomenon of "stroke movement" from the perspective of "information and communication" (as shown in the figure below). Of course, it directly inspired our research: that is, a visual art work is no longer an isolated physical entity, but a dynamic process of information transmission. The part outside its physical components - creation and appreciation, should be studied.
Further, I consider applying the ideas of "Mathematics" and "experiment" to study this phenomenon. I should be grateful for my continuous science and engineering education since middle school. After this tortuous ideological journey, I began to consider how to quantify the "feeling of stroke movement" with experimental methods, then use mathematics to answer the previous question: why is it difficult for us to feel the pen movement process from "continuous strokes"? Further, we need to consider how to quantify it and how to design experiments. This part can be introduced in the next question.