Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

"Between two such beings as he and I, the one a perfect volcano, the other boiling too, inwardly, a sort of struggle was preparing."

In February of 1888, a decade after Van Gogh found his purpose, he moved to the town of Arles in the South of France. There, he exploded into a period of immense creative fertility, completing more than two hundred paintings, one hundred watercolors and sketches, and his famous Sunflowers series. But he also lived in extreme poverty and endured incessant inner turmoil, much of which related to his preoccupation with enticing Gauguin — whom he admired with unparalleled ardor (“I find my artistic ideas extremely commonplace in comparison with yours,” Van Gogh wrote) and who at the time was living and working in Brittany — to come live and paint with him. This coveted cohabitation, Van Gogh hoped, would be the beginning of a larger art colony that would serve as “a shelter and a refuge” for Post-Impressionist painters as they pioneered an entirely novel, and therefore subject to spirited criticism, aesthetic of art. Van Gogh wrote to Gauguin in early October of 1888:I’d like to see you taking a very large share in this belief that we’ll be relatively successful in founding something lasting.

Despite his destitution, Van Gogh spent whatever money he had on two beds, which he set up in the same small bedroom. Seeking to make his modest sleeping quarters “as nice as possible, like a woman’s boudoir, really artistic,” he resolved to paint a set of giant yellow sunflowers onto its white walls. He wrote beseeching letters to Gauguin, and when the French artist sent him a self-portrait as part of their exchange of canvases, Van Gogh excitedly showed it around town as the likeness of a beloved friend who was about to come visit.Gauguin finally agreed and arrived in Arles in mid-October, where he was to spend about two months, culminating with the dramatic ear incident....

An architect by day and a master of illusion in his offtime, Ukranian Oleg Shuplyak, aka MrOlik, uses his technical skills as a trained architect to paint surreal optical illusions that contain portraits of other artists, authors and historical figures.

3D Street Painting and 3D Pavement Art Illusion

Is it real?! The chalk drawing of London's most popular underground train station looks to have that couple a bit off-balance as the man holds onto the wall.. it must be as good in person as it is digitally! Wait ..is that sign on the far left not real?!

ON FRIDAY EVENING, inside an old-movie-house-cum-art-gallery at the heart of San Francisco's Mission district, Google graphics guru Blaise Agüera y Arcas delivered a speech to an audience of about eight hundred geek hipsters.

He spoke alongside a series of images projected onto the wall that once held a movie screen, and at one point, he showed off a nearly 500-year-old double portrait by German Renaissance painter Hans Holbein. The portrait includes a strangely distorted image of a human skull, and as Agüera y Arcas explained, it's unlikely that Holbein painted this by hand. He almost certainly used mirrors or lenses to project the image of a skull onto a canvas before tracing its outline. "He was using state-of-the-art technologies," Agüera y Arcas told his audience.

Neural networks are not only driving the Google search engine but spitting out art for which some people will pay serious money.His point was that we've been using technology to create art for centuries—that the present isn't all that different from the past. It was his way of introducing the gallery's latest exhibit, in which every work is the product of artificial neural networks—networks of computer hardware and software that approximate the web of neurons in the human brain. Last year, researchers at Google created a new kind of art using neural nets, and this weekend, the tech giant put this machine-generated imagery on display in a two-day exhibit that raised roughly $84,000 for the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, a San Francisco nonprofit devoted to the confluence of art and tech....

There’s no shortage of humor in Benedetto Bufalino’s work.  From playable ping pong tables made from upside down cars, and aquariums built from telephone booths, Bufalino has a knack for turning the ordinary into the absurd.

The French artist’s most recent creative intervention invites pedestrians to a party at a construction site in Lyon, France, Bufalino has created the ‘disco-ball cement mixer’ that glimmers and gleams a radiant spectrum by night. as the mixer rotates, mirrored tiles cladding the truck reflect rays of light across the surrounding site.  ...

A recent project used nuanced imaging technology and classification systems to robotize the process of understanding how famous artists have influenced one another.

Could a computer program influence how we understand art history and the canon? Or, could an artificially intelligent algorithm do the work of art experts for them? A recent researcher project doesn't quite suggest such a reality, but it does demonstrate that machines can highlight subtleties within arts and culture that humans have previously never noticed.In a paper titled "Toward Automated Discovery Of Artistic Influence" by Babak Saleh and a team of computer science researchers at Rutgers, the academics explained how they used nuanced imaging technology and classification systems to robotize the process of understanding how famous artists have influenced and inspired one another.

For their research, the team chose 1,700 paintings by 66 artists, covering the 15th to the late 20th century. Using a technique that analyzes visual concepts called "classemes"—wherein objects, color shades, subjects' movement, and more are marked—the researchers created a list of 3,000 classemes for each painting, data which The Physics arXiv Blog compares to a vector. Then, they used an artificially intelligent algorithm to evaluate the vectors and look for similarities or overlapping qualities among the 1,700 paintings. ArXiv adds, "To create a ground truth against which to measure their results, they also collate expert opinions on which these artists have influenced the others."...

...If you happen to be on a road trip this August, driving down a highway through the middle of nowhere in North Dakota or New Mexico, you may suddenly see a giant modern painting at the side of the road in between fast food ads. In suburban malls, classic photographs will replace posters advertising movies or mobile phones. In cities, art will sprawled across buses and subway posters. All around the country, 50,000 billboards that normally try to sell something will be transformed into art.

Art Everywhere US is the American version of a project that began last summer in the U.K., where 22,000 billboards and poster sites were covered with British art. The event this year will be the largest outdoor art show that has ever happened....