2. Expanding an Island

Concept

My tribute is to pixel art and content-aware scaling or seam carving. My idea was to create a work of art using colour on a grid, similar to the set up of pixel art. The plan was then to slightly inverse the process of a seam carving algorithm manually. A seam carving algorithm starts at a point on an edge, and then pixel by adjacent pixel adds or subtracts information from areas that have the least significant information. The slight inverse, in this case, is because I added significantly different information across this seam instead of only adding nonsignificant details.

Motivation

One of the advantages of digital art over physical art is the ability to add details at a later time without losing on previous details, as is the difference between writing on paper and using a word processing software. In this project, I wanted to explore one way to add information to an image. 

I am fascinated by how different the world looks to my eyes than how it does in a static image of the same scene. In nature, it seems easier to ignore blank spaces and non-significant details- like the expanse of the sky beneath where the colours split during a sunset, or the length of a straight road when you can see your destination. With the help of rapid eye movements and fixation on more important details, our systems for perception focus on the significant. For this project, I wanted to see how easy it would be to not just add physical space, but also distinctly different information to an image.

Implementation

To make this piece I used Microsoft Excel, changed the cell size to 0.2” * 0.2”. The image I tried to recreate was based on an abstract painting I had made earlier. I picked it for the number of layers and details it had within a limited set of colours. After creating a basic structure on excel, I started manually seam carving to add details by inserting a cell and shifting all previous information down or to the right.

This gif illustrates the insertion of a seam.

The left half of the image before seam carving-