New Museum in California has new method on displaying digital images

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

Annenberg Space Pioneers Digital Exhibition of Photos

Maybe see this in other museums soon? Wonder if the Carter in Ft Worth would add this to their retenue?

[sldi]

In this age where we are all being walmarted into "good enough", its great to see someone pushing photography on the leading edge of technology.

[jeffkohn]

Well, if they're going to go digital, it's good to see went with a high-quality display option rather than something lame like slapping some flat-screen plasmas on the wall. Still, for me no digital display is as satisfying as a good print.

[Imagebuffet]

As a photographer whose work remains 99.99% digital, a digital photo gallery seems natural to me. Even so, I am wondering about the image quality. A 14 foot wide display is 168 inches, with 4096 pixels spread out over its width. That comes out to about 24 pixels per inch. Admittedly, the gallery does not intend for the viewer to stand within 3 feet of the display. The apparent image resolution, then, would depend on the angle that the pixels subtend. Now, I'm not a mathematician, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how many fractions of a degree each pixel would subtend to a viewer standing 8 feet from the image, nor am I going to look up the limits of human vision. But, simple geometry would tell me that 300 ppi at 1 foot would look the same as about 38 ppi at 8 feet. Or, 24 ppi at 8 feet would look about the same resolution as 192 ppi at 1 foot. I think that's about the lower limit of what would be acceptable, maybe lower, for a static image. It would, however, look great for a moving image.

For comparison, the most advanced digital display system of which I know is the Los Alamos National Laboratory CAVE facility. This system provides 43 MP on a 5-sided, 3D, 15'x12'x10' display, using 33 projectors. It was built a few years ago, around 2006.

The LANL CAVE Facility: Advanced Simulation and Computing Program, ASC: LANL

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

Richard I think they get past some of that with multiple projections of the same image on the screan which overcomes some of that (in theory), would be nice to see something like this up close-any California members here who could check it out?

[Imagebuffet]

Originally Posted by DEMDeepEllumMusic

Richard I think they get past some of that with multiple projections of the same image on the screan which overcomes some of that (in theory), would be nice to see something like this up close-any California members here who could check it out?

This isn't quite the same, but UT Austin does have large, high resolution displays in their "Texas Advanced Computing Center" (TACC).

Texas Advanced Computing Center: Visualization

My understanding of the multiple projectors is that they do not overlap. Each projector covers a small section of the total. That's the only way they could get such a large image built up.

Although the final resolution is not as great as a typical printed page would have, it is still more than double the resolution of a conventional computer monitor. I do wonder how good the color depth, tonal depth and contrast are?

[Dobick]

I would have to see it to believe that it is more spectacular than the printed medium.

Count me among the skeptics.

From the article, it sounds like they went about it in the right way, but for a public already having difficulty recognizing the differences in quality craftsmanship vs poor technique, throwing another possible variable in there makes me skeptical.

[jeffkohn]

Since this is a gallery, one thing I have to wonder about from a photographer's perspective is what hope do you have of actually selling any of the work? If your goal is to sell prints, this seems a rather stupid way to display your work. And I find it hard to believe the art market is ready for truly digital work, these folks are still hung up on limited editions. Plus how would they display it in their private collection?

[Dobick]

because it is the annenberg foundation, it very well may be that the goal of any of the displays could be public awareness and not print sales. someone like Natchwey immediately pops to mind.

edit: the current exhibition is by national geographic - "Water: Our Thirsty World"

[jeffkohn]

OK, but I still see this as a significant hurdle in this type of display catching on in other galleries and exhibits. Even if the exhibit itself is not selling work, I would think many if not most featured photographers sell their work (getting publicity/exposure in a major exhibit is a big deal for a lot of artists), and this type of display would be less likely to generate interest in print sales IMHO.

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

I see this more as a trend in museum displays of work, the Modern in Ft Worth has been running short films now in some of their galleries and it is something that you would probably never be able to buy.

As to a gallery using it I can see that they would sell a Blue Ray DVD that you would display on your own television that would run through a series of images when you are not actually watching TV so you are turning that screen into an artistic display unit.

I re-read the article and as noted above they are using the projectors to each cover a section of he screen so with 4 each covers 1/4 of the screen with software to blend/merge the images.

One cool thing that they note is that they can take out and replace any single image with pretty much ease so with 60 images per second being displayed (kind of like refresh rate) they can probably try the old subliminal message thing by tossing in one randomly every 60th of a second.

[txphotog]

The Cine4K’s ability to play back uncompressed TIFF files at 60fps makes creating the presentations for each show time consuming because it requires rendering the 8 terabytes of data Arclight creates per show. However, one big advantage is that each of the 90,000 TIFF frames that make up a presentation can be dropped in or pulled out of the presentation, making it easy to correct any mistakes

8 terabyes??holy cow... wonder what kinda of computer they have to use to process that much info??