Tuesday, July 9, 2002

A Computer Scientist Creates Digital Tours of Mexican Artist's Murals By BROCK READ The art of José Clemente Orozco, a Mexican painter whose career peaked in the 1920s and 1930s, has long been ripe for a major exhibition, according to Hany Farid, an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth College. When he saw Orozco's "The Epic of American Civilization," an imposing mural that hangs in Dartmouth's Baker Library, "I was completely blown away," Mr. Farid says. "It's incredibly beautiful and powerful." But Orozco's major American works are all murals, each in a different part of the country -- not exactly the stuff of which traveling shows are made. So Mr. Farid -- along with his university's Hood Museum of Art -- has developed a virtual tour that allows museumgoers to walk through three-dimensional models of Orozco's great American works. Mr. Farid created computerized tours for each of Orozco's three murals in the United States: at Dartmouth; New School University, in New York City; and Pomona College, in Claremont, Calif. The tours are featured in an exhibition about Orozco's life and career organized by the Hood Museum, where it will run until December. The exhibit opened at the San Diego Museum of Art, and will close at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, in Mexico City. At the museums, visitors can sit at computer stations that allow them access to the tours. Each museumgoer uses a mouse to navigate through re-creations of the rooms in which the murals actually hang. The computer stations also feature biographical information on Orozco and exhibit resources. (Copyright issues have kept Mr. Farid from posting the complete tours online, but his digital images of the murals are available at his Web site.) For the Orozco-mural project, Mr. Farid was able to adapt a process that he had developed last year while digitizing frescoes from Egyptian tombs. He worked from pictures of the murals taken by photographers at the Hood Museum -- 35-millimeter slides digitally scanned at high resolutions. According to Mr. Farid, such photographs are flawed in two important ways. They contain geometric distortions related to the angles from which they are taken, and they feature portions that appear excessively light or dark because of inconsistent room lighting. Mr. Farid says his first job is "to make the straight lines on the wall straight in the image," a task he achieves through straightforward mathematics. Fixing the patchy lighting in the photographs is trickier: Mr. Farid has to manipulate the images by hand. For the mural at Dartmouth, he edited images on his laptop while staring at the mural itself; for the others, he had to consult textbooks and speak with photographers and museum officials. When Mr. Farid had perfected the images and removed overlapping sections, he laid them onto computerized room models designed by Jethro Rothe-Kushel, an undergraduate studying religion at Dartmouth. "We take the images and slap them back onto the walls, " says Mr. Farid. "It's completely seamless." The results may be seamless, but the process was not. Mr. Farid and Mr. Rothe-Kushel often had to correct minor errors in the images, many of which resulted from deficiencies in the original photographs. In some cases, Mr. Farid digitally created missing sections of the murals by transplanting similar pieces that appear elsewhere. The digital duplications are unfortunate, but they do not compromise the integrity of the virtual tour, according to Mr. Farid. "We don't want to claim that this is an exact replica. It really is for visualization, not for serious study or documentation," he says. Sharon Reed, a spokeswoman for the Hood Museum, agrees. "You get more of a sense of the significance of these murals when you see them on the virtual tour," she says. "It's an incredible asset." The museum has yet to collect responses to the computerized tour from its own visitors, but it did monitor feedback in San Diego, which was positive, according to Ms. Reed. "People really enjoyed being able to manipulate the program," she says. Background article from The Chronicle: A Mexican Muralist's American Debut (2/8/2002) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

New chancellor at U. of Texas carries a price tag of nearly $800,000 Women in advancement face discrepancy in pay, survey finds Renewal of chancellor's contract revives controversy over his spending MLA president criticizes journal publisher for dismissing Israeli academics Students set fire to English department at university in Nepal 44 universities to share $80-million in biology grants A computer scientist creates digital tours of Mexican artist's murals