Scalar Fields. An Introduction to Data-Images

Examining images as data is a starting point for a deeper understanding of computer vision techniques. Images as data surfaces include any digital image, but also measurement tools such as depth fields, heat maps and image segmentations - commonly used in domains as varied as video games, medical imaging and machine learning.

Understanding images as data opens up a space of inquiry about practices where imaging devices are used as gatherers of information from the surfaces of the world. These practices do not only retrieve surfaces as data, but transform them as part of larger circuits of operations. Environmental surfaces such as oceans, agricultural landscapes or even forests are examples of these transformations.

This workshop proposes the concept of scalar fields as a useful entry point to this domain of relations between images and surfaces through data. Through the exploration of a set of cases -including environmental ones- basic image processing techniques will be presented as operations that go beyond the visual domain to become instead part of the contemporary transforming grammar of the surfaces of the planet.

Where and when: Aarhus University, Denmark - 25/09/2024