Ausgabe 5/2007

Von Jörg R. J. Schirra

Von Hermann Kalkofen | Mit Groden & Kreiswirth 1997 kann der Kuleschow-Effekt – »the basis of film language« (Mitry 1998/1963) – großzügig aufgefasst werden als »the inherent magic of the film medium itself, the creation of meaning, significance, and emotional impact by relating and juxtaposing individual shots«. An der Realität eines solchen Kuleschow-Effekts sensu lato – »die Bedeutung einer Einstellung hängt vom jeweiligen Kontext ab« und »eine Veränderung der Reihenfolge von Einstellungen in einer Sequenz verändert auch die Bedeutung der einzelnen Einstellungen sowie die der Gesamtsequenz« (Wulff 1993) – ist schlechterdings nicht zu zweifeln.

Von Regula Fankhauser | Eine strenge Grenzziehung zwischen rational-objektivem Wissensbereich und ästhetisch-subjektivem Imaginationsbereich wird zunehmend problematisch. Ein erneuter Blick auf einige Aspekte der vorwissenschaftlichen Bilderwelt der Hermetiker zeigt interessante Parallelen zu aktuellen Diskussionen rund um den epistemologischen Stellenwert des Visuellen. So weiß der Einsatz von visuellen Codes in Bilderschriften als buchstabensprengendes Verfahren die heuristische Kraft des Bildlichen zu nutzen. Das hermetische Diagramm sodann verdeutlicht, wie Hermetiker modellhaftes Denken begreifen und welche Rolle sie hierbei der Bildproduktion zuweisen. Und schliesslich lässt sich an alchemistischen Emblemen nachlesen, wie im Zusammenspiel von visueller und verbaler Sprache das nur Bildmögliche evidenziert und epistemologisch thematisiert wird.

Von Beatrice Nunold | Dalis paranoisch-kritische Methode kann als eine Konsequenz aus Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft verstanden werden. Die Paranoia produziert Wirklichkeit für uns, wie die vernünftige Erkenntnis. Dali greift Theorien der neueren Neurowissenschaft vor, wie der informationellen Geschlossenheit des Gehirns und der Behauptung, dass wir in einer imaginierten Welt leben.

Von Philipp Soldt | Die Überlegungen verstehen sich als konzeptueller Beitrag der Psychoanalyse zur interdisziplinären Bildwissenschaft, insbesondere zur Klärung bildrezeptiver Prozesse. Der Autor geht aus von bestimmten intensiven Bildwahrnehmungen und dem damit zur Frage werden Verhältnis von Realität und Fantasie, das in Zusammenhang gebracht wird mit dem bildphilosophischen Thema der ›ikonischen Differenz‹. Es wird argumentiert, dass der damit angesprochenen theoretischen Differenzierung der Bilderfahrung in ›image‹ und ›tableau‹ intrapsychisch kein ›Entweder-Oder‹ entsprechen kann, sondern vielmehr ein besonderes ›Zugleich‹, das als besonderes Verhältnis von Bewusstsein und Vorbewusstem sowie von Kognition und Emotion erläutert wird. Den Abschluss bilden einige Überlegungen zum Einfluss des dynamisch Unbewussten auf Bildrezeptionen.

Von Jörg R. J. Schirra | Pictures have to be formalized digitally in an adequate manner when computer scientists are to work with them. It is mainly the relevant physical properties of the corresponding picture vehicle that have to be considered in that formalization: that is, the picture syntax. The present special issue of IMAGE deals in particular with morphological questions taking the specific, formalizing perspective of computational visualistics. It is also intended as the attempt to offer a clear and easily understandable summary of the state of the art of research on picture morphology in computational visualistics for picture scientists of the other disciplines. As an introduction, the relations between computer science, general visualistics, syntax studies, and morphology are examined.

Von Yuri Engelhardt | Building upon the existing literature, we are suggesting to regard the building blocks of all graphics as falling into three main categories: a) the graphic objects that are shown (e.g. a dot, a pictogram, an arrow), b) the meaningful graphic spaces into which these objects are arranged (e.g. a geographic coordinate system, a timeline), and c) the graphic properties of these objects (e.g. their colors, their sizes). We suggest that graphic objects come in different syntactic categories, such as nodes, labels, frames, links, etc.

By Stefano Borgo, Roberta Ferrario, Claudio Masolo and Alessandro Oltramari | The paper reviews geometrical approaches in the area of qualitative space representation by discussing formal systems of geometry based on the notion of extended regions (mereogeometries). The focus is on primitives that are cognitively motivated and that capture different notions of naive geometry. The paper then moves to consider the role of mereogeometries (and in particular of the concepts they rely upon) in the domain of picture morphology in two ways: it discusses some primitives that are motivated from the cognitive perspective, and it considers the issue of granularity and refinement.

By Winfried Kurth | Among the techniques for the creation of photorealistic virtual organisms, particularly plants, and in scientific models of vegetation structure, rule-based specifications (formal grammars) play a prominent role. Lindenmayer systems (L-systems) are the most widespread formalism of this sort, but certain types of graph grammars, combined with standard object-oriented programming, offer even more possibilities to specify rule-driven developments of 3-dimensional arrangements, morphology of virtual organisms and underlying processes like, e.g., metabolic reactions. Examples of grammar rules and the virtual geometrical structures generated from them, all realizable with the open-source software GroIMP (www.grogra.de), are shown. This grammar-based approach is often not immediately used for the direct specification of a picture as a pattern of graphical elements in a plane, but for virtual 3-D scenes, which are then rendered visible using standard techniques of geometry-based computer graphics.

By Tobias Isenberg | This paper presents an overview of the image-morphologic primitives used commonly in non-photorealistic rendering (NPR), a subdomain of computer graphics that is inspired by a long tradition of artistic and illustrative depiction. In particular, we survey NPR shading, stroke-based rendering, sparse line drawings, graftals, and area primitives. Such primitives usually cover larger regions on the canvas and often carry a meaning beyond the color of the image region they represent. This distinguishes them from the pixel as a primitive used in photorealistic rendering, which does not have any meaning aside from sampling the color of the image section it represents. We give examples to illustrate the individual techniques and briefly mention how they are tracked though the rendering process as well as represented in the final image.

By Hans Du Buf and Joao Rodrigues | A complete image ontology can be obtained by formalising a top-down meta-language which must address all possibilities, from global message and composition to objects and local surface properties. In computer vision, where one general goal is image understanding, one starts with a bunch of pixels. The latter is a typical example of bottom-up processing, from pixels to objects to layout and gist. Both top-down and bottom-up approaches are possible, but can these be unified? As it turns out, the answer is yes, because our visual system does it all the time. This follows from our progress in developing models of the visual system, and using the models in re-creating an input image in the form of a painting.

By The SVP Group | With the advances in digital audio and video analysis, automatic movie summarization has become an important field of research. Much of the work has been put into movie abstracting for large media databases. Looking at the topic from a different side, the movie industry has long since perfected the art of summarization in their advertising trailers to attract an audience. In this paper we introduce the approach of automatically generating entertaining Hollywood-like trailers based on a trailer grammar, enhanced by an ontology. The extraction of features from movies using state-of-the-art image and audio processing techniques builds the foundation for the selection of meaningful and usable material, which is re-assembled according to the defined rules. User testing of our automatically produced trailers shows that they are well accepted and in many ways comparable to professionally composed trailers.

By Jörg R. J. Schirra | As the thematic issue of IMAGE on computational image morphology attempts in particular to mediate between computational visualistics and other disciplines investigating pictures and their uses, the following remarks broaden the perspective again and relate the computational argumentations of the preceding papers to the more general discussion of image science. The two fundamental categories of picture syntax, the geometric base structure and the marker value dimension, are described. They are applied to the questions whether pictures with ill-formed syntax may exist at all, and if so, whether computers can deal with them as well. The overview finally extends the discussion to the limits of pictorial syntax studies.