評論
打印
Science and Technology
科技
Art criticism and computers
藝術評論和計算機
Painting by numbers
數字圖畫
Digital analysis is invading the world of the connoisseur
數字分析正侵蝕藝術品鑒賞界
JUDGING artistic styles, and the similarities between them, might be thought one bastion of human skill that machines could never storm.
對藝術風格，跟他們之間的相似之處的評價，可能被認為是一塊機器無法侵犯的人類技藝圣地。
Not so, if Lior Shamir at Lawrence Technological University in Michigan is correct.
并非如此，加入密歇根州老孫死理工大學的Lior Shamir沒錯的話。
A paper he has just published in Leonardo suggests that computers may have just as good an eye for style as humans do-and, in some cases, may see connections between artists that human critics have missed.
他剛剛在李奧納多發表的一篇文章之處電腦的眼力可能不必人類差——而且，某些情況下，電腦甚至能夠發現一些評論家忽略的，藝術家之間的相似之處。
Dr Shamir, a computer scientist, presented 57 images by each of nine painters-Salvador Dali, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Vasily Kandinsky, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mark Rothko and Vincent van Gogh-to a computer, to see what it made of them.
Shamir博士，一位計算機專家，將Salvador Dali, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Vasily Kandinsky, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mark Rothko和 Vincent van Gogh九位畫家的每人57幅作品掃描到計算機中，看看它能得出什么。
The computer broke the images into a number of so-called numerical descriptors.
于是電腦將圖像分解為許多所謂的數字描述符。
These descriptors quantified textures and colours, the statistical distribution of edges across a canvas, the distributions of particular types of shape, the intensity of the colour of individual points on a painting, and also the nature of any fractal-like patterns within it (fractals are features that reproduce similar shapes at different scales; the edges of snowflakes, for example).
這些解析符將質地和顏色量化，帆布的邊緣的統計分布，特定種類的形狀的分布，一幅作品上獨立的點的顏色的深淺，還有任何蕾絲不規則碎片的本質，不規則碎片是指大小不同形狀相似的特質，比如雪花的邊緣。
All told, the computer identified 4,027 different numerical descriptors.
結果，電腦總共確認了4027種不同的解析符。
Once their values had been established for each of the 513 artworks that had been fed into it, it was ready to do the analysis.
一旦它們對于這513件被反哺給電腦的每件藝術品的價值被確立，計算機馬上可以開始分析。
Dr Shamir's aim was to look for quantifiable ways of distinguishing between the work of different artists.
Shamir博士的目的事項尋找區分不同藝術家作品的可量化的方法。
If such things could be established, it might make the task of deciding who painted what a little easier.
如果上述事實能夠被證實成立，區分各個畫家的作品的工作將會簡單一點兒。
Such decisions matter because, even excluding deliberate forgeries, there are many paintings in existence that cannot conclusively be attributed to a master rather than his pupils, or that may be honestly made copies whose provenance is now lost.
這樣的決定對我們很重要，因為即使是在排除有意偽造之后，任然有許多作品不能被確認出自某位畫家，而非他的學生，或是某個出處無可探尋的逼真的復制品。
To look for such distinguishing features, Dr Shamir programmed the computer to use a statistical method that scores the strength of the distance between the values of two or more descriptors for each pair of artists.
為了尋找這種能有助于區分的特質，Shamir博士設法使計算機能利用一個統計學方法來評價用來比較每兩位畫家的兩個以上的描述符的價值之間距離的大小。
As a result, he was able to rank each of the 4,027 descriptors by how useful it was at discriminating between artists.
最后，他就能根據描述符分辨藝術家的能力來給它們打分。
Surprisingly, the values of 19 of the 20 most informative descriptors showed dramatically higher similarities between Van Gogh (left below) and Pollock (right) than between Van Gogh and painters such as Monet and Renoir, who conventional art criticism would think more closely related to Van Gogh's oeuvre than Pollock's is. (Dali and Ernst, by contrast, were farther apart then expected.)
令人吃驚的是，在提供的消息最有用的20種描述符中，有19種顯示出梵高和波洛克作品之間的相似度，要遠遠高于梵高和像莫內和雷諾瓦的畫家之間，而傳統的評論家認為后者的作品與梵高作品更接近。相反地，達利和恩斯特的作品的差距卻比預期要大。
What is interesting, according to Dr Shamir, is that no single feature makes Pollock's artistic style similar to Van Gogh's.
有趣的是，Shamir博士指出，沒有一個特質能單獨證明波洛克的藝術風格與梵高的相似。
Instead, the connection is based on a broad set of image-content descriptors which reflect many aspects of the two artists' styles, including a shared preference for low-level textures and shapes, and similarities in the ways they employed lines and edges.
相反，他們的聯系是在長長的一系列反映了這兩名畫家的許多藝術風格的圖像內容解析符的基礎上形成的，風格中包括，他們都偏愛低檔面料跟外形，他們勾勒線和邊的方式相似。
What was intended, then, as a way of improving the ability to distinguish between different hands has also thrown up a new way of looking for stylistic similarities.
于是，原本用來宜于區分不同畫家的作品的方法，也能用來尋找藝術家的不同風格。
Whether Pollock was actually influenced by Van Gogh, or merely happened upon a similar way of doing things through a similar artistic sensibility, is not clear.
雖然波洛克實際上到底是受到了梵高的影響，還是僅僅是由于在處在相似的藝術風氣下，不得而知。
But it gives art historians a new line of investigation to pursue.
但是它給藝術歷史學家提供了一條新的線索。
