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posted by martyb on Thursday January 20 2022, @08:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the fine-art dept.

AI turned a Rembrandt masterpiece into 5.6 terabytes of data:

A high-resolution image of Rembrandt's Nightwatch is now online. 717 gigapixels (yes, giga) to a claimed resolution of .0005-millimeters.

Last week the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam posted an AI-constructed, ultra-high-res image of "The Night Watch" by Rembrandt. The original piece is nearly 15 feet long and more than 12 feet high and has been under intensive restoration since the early 1900s.

They've actually reconstructed some parts that had been destroyed over the ages, based on historical records.

Is a pixel size finer than the hairs on Rembrandt's brush enough detail for you?

Previously:
(2020-05-23) Revelations About Rembrandt's Masterpiece Captured on Camera


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by acid andy on Thursday January 20 2022, @08:59PM (5 children)

    by acid andy (1683) on Thursday January 20 2022, @08:59PM (#1214336) Homepage Journal

    Is a pixel size finer than the hairs on Rembrandt's brush enough detail for you?

    No. I will not be satisfied until someone builds a Star Trek style replicator (possibly incorporating transporter technology as well) that can make an atom by atom copy, and then copies the painting and puts the painting and its clone together and shuffles them many times such that no-one can determine which is the real painting. Take that provenance!

    I would then be fascinated to observe what such an act does to the value of each of these two paintings, relative to the prior value of the original. Will the two combined be worth more, or less, than the original alone? Would an art collector be happy to purchase just one of them, or would they insist on the complete set?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 20 2022, @09:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 20 2022, @09:14PM (#1214340)

    You've just described NFT creations!

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 20 2022, @09:17PM (3 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 20 2022, @09:17PM (#1214343)

    Your replicator copy is the same as a mechanical print, but much like digital music and movies, the print is indistinguishable from the original.

    This is where NFTs actually have a place: they become your provenance for digital or otherwise indistinguishable copy works. Some will adopt them, some will not. The high priced art world has always been the domain of a very small minority of the general population anyway.

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    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by crafoo on Friday January 21 2022, @06:12AM (2 children)

      by crafoo (6639) on Friday January 21 2022, @06:12AM (#1214460)

      Art is becoming a commodity, and that is not a bad deal. Technology will continue forward making it possible to create more accurate copies of all works of art. NFTs try to put that back in the bottle - to distinguish the original from copies. It won't work. It's pointless.

      I don't need NFTs of oranges, salmon, a shovel. They all have inherent value. I don't need to convince someone I possess the "original" shovel. Any shovel will do. Trying to artificially attach value to something with no inherent value is a fun experiment I guess. I don't think it will work out but let's watch and see.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 21 2022, @03:51PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 21 2022, @03:51PM (#1214514)

        i agree.
        however i suspect that some NFT like technology is involved in teleportation.
        it might be that teleportation is super simple and the hard part is really finding a NFT creation technic that the greater universe excepts.
        once you have a object NFT-fied, move it to a new place, the re-materilisation of the object might be as simple as asking the universe to confirm the NFT status of the data and ... *poof*, the universe noded?

      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 21 2022, @05:35PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday January 21 2022, @05:35PM (#1214544)

        I don't know that NFTs are entirely pointless - I will say that they are mostly pointless for the majority of people, and even people that find value in NFTs won't need or want NFTs for the majority of what they do.

        For people who are proud of their patronization of the arts, NFTs make a lot of sense. It makes me throw up a little at the thought, but NFTs are also a potential way to implement DRM.

        On the happy side: if a local indie band puts out a song that gets really popular, they might issue a million copy NFT of the song for $0.99 per copy (NFTs aren't restricted to 1:1 you can have 1 of N like limited edition prints). If the NFT happens to sell out, they've made a million bucks - less commissions - and everybody knows it. Those million NFTs aren't terribly useful, unless: the band offers NFT holders concert ticket discounts, or early / backstage access, free downloads of future music, etc. If you bought this NFT for 0.99 and you get sick of the band / song, you might be able to resell it on the open market. You'd get maybe 90% of the proceeds paid by the buyer and the band / NFT hosting site would skim the remaining 10% off the transaction, future income, and the buyer gets the rights that come with owning the NFT that you just gave up. The value of the NFT floats on the market, when the song is popular and the associated rights are in demand, like for early access to better seats at concerts, you might resell for a profit, other times it's probably worth little or nothing - much like a used CD.

        On the dark side: DRM interests legislate away people's rights to hold copies of copyrighted works and demand that all legally protected content be streamed, and the NFT is your key to streaming access. Right this moment I'm listening to mp3 files from my 50GB collection, NOT streaming anything. The rise and success of streaming is the resurgence of the copyrighted works industry that they swore would never happen when digital copying started. Hopefully Mickey Mouse remains tame and doesn't start going after individual ownership of locally held data.

        Oh, and there's no reason the content owners can't issue multiple "limited edition" NFTs for a single work, tweaking supply and demand like Disney putting films "in and out of the vault". Every NFT individually trackable, individually revokable for whatever fine-print terms they come up with. It can get worse from there, but only if consumers put up with it. I'm hoping they don't.

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