ELFT HÍRADÓ

[Biro Tamas <biro.tamas AT wigner.mta.hu>]

Dear Colleagues,

our next Wigner Colloquium will be held on

The history of visual arts through the eyes of physics


by Prof. Matjaz Perc (University of Maribor, Slovenia)

Date: Tuesday 2 Apr 2019, 14:00 → 15:30 Europe/Budapest
Building 1, Meeting room (KFKI campus)

Abstract

The 20th century is often referred to as the century of physics. From 
x-rays to the semiconductor industry, the human society today would 
indeed be very different were it not for the progress made in physics 
laboratories around the world [1,2]. What the past 100 years have been 
for science, the past millennium has been for the arts. From the late 
Byzantine and Islamic art to Renaissance, Realism and Pop art, the past 
1000 years are packed with the most productive periods of our creative 
existence. The availability of digitized visual artworks allows us to 
perform large-scale quantitative analysis of the history of art. We have 
analyzed almost 150,000 visual artworks [3], the majority of which were 
paintings, by more than 2,300 artists created between the years 1031 and 
2016. Based on the complexity and entropy of spatial patterns in the 
artworks, we were able to hierarchically categorize the artworks on a 
scale of order-disorder and simplicity-complexity, ultimately revealing 
a temporal evolution of the artworks that coincides with the main 
historical periods of art. Our research indicates a shift in data 
science, away from semantics [4] towards the quantification of more 
subjective properties of artworks like aesthetics and beauty.

Best regards from the organizers,

   Tamás Biró.