Wow. So I had a really difficult time choosing a topic for my final project.

I began by listing some of my current interests in the hope that it would inspire me, but it didn’t. Then I tried to think about my career path and what I’d like to acheive or put on my resume, but that didn’t really help either. You see, my interests lie in visual art, and specifically fine art, like the kind found in museums. So my frustration was that I could not understand how to computationally analyze physical objects.

Trying to find current research in this area led me to a published paper by Saleh, Abe, Arora, and Elgammal called “Toward Automated Discovery of Artisic Influence” (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.3218v1.pdf). In this paper, they describe a computer program they developed that computationally recognizes patterns in art in order to establish artistic influences. It seems to work very well, and I found the research rather interesting. However, their program is not currently available to the public, and I’m not a programmer, and so that door immediately closed.

A major thing that I find intriguing about art in general is the symbolism. Most works of art have meaning given to them by the artist, and some meanings are universal if you know what to look for. For example, a boat in a painting could refer to a journey, or exploration, apart from its literal pictoral representation.

Sadly, I could not find a way for computers to help me learn more about symbolism in art, except for color. Color can be equally as symbolic as objects. For example, the color red can reference blood, anger, desire, or even life itself. And with computational help from an image color extractor like the one found here, I can total the number of pixels of a certain color or tone, and assign a percentage or heirarchy of colors found in a piece of art.

I intend to use this tool as a way to study color dispersion in selected works of art in order to understand the symbolism of color present during certain periods of time so that we can appreciate art in its rightful historical context. One hypothesis might be that artworks created during World War II should contain more colors that indicate depression, sadness, anger, and frustration, than ones during other more peaceful periods.

As of today, I still need to establish parameters for artworks chosen - meaning the time periods, artists, locations, etc. And once I begin, I intend to use this information to create some kind of visual presentation like an infographic or .pdf book.