Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Northumbria at Newcastle
Repentir: Digital exploration beneath the surface of an oil painting
Repentir builds on the concept design of a slow print outlined in Blythe, Briggs, Olivier and Hook's 'Digital Originals: Reproduction as a space for design' (2012).
Repentir is an augmented reality mobile app that enables the gallery visitor to explore the successive stages of an oil painting's development. Users may take a photograph of the painting through the app and then select one of two interaction techniques (slide and rub) to effectively remove layers of paint back to the canvas. The app's technical innovation lies in the novel use of a computer vision algorithm which recognises features of the painting from within a photograph, even if taken from different perspectives, in combination with the interaction technique of revealing layers documented during a painting's production.
Repentir provides a novel way for gallery visitors to experience and interact with art and also represents a radical new approach to generating digital reproductions. It prospectively generates new publics and offers new business models for the visual arts: e.g. through in-app sales of co-created works.
Repentir was exhibited at CHI 2013 in Paris along with collaborating artist Walsh's original painting, TransAmerica. See extended abstract paper, Hook, Briggs, Blythe, Walsh and Olivier's 'Repentir: digital exploration beneath the surface of an oil painting' (2013). The Bernarducci Meisel Gallery in New York is currently promoting Repentir in the gallery and online in preparation for Walsh's solo show in November 2013. Art critic Martin Gayford visited Walsh's studio in York (10.07) to discuss the app with the artist and Blythe for an evaluative study which is reported on in a paper currently under review. There have been 1,518 downloads of the Repentir app and 899 views of the online video to date. More than 20 media articles about Repentir have been published, including in the following: Smithsonian Magazine, India Times, NBC News and Yahoo News (all online) and locally, The Journal.
