Art, Geography/GIScience, and Mathematics: A Surprising Interface. (2nd January 2023)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Griffith, Daniel A.
• Is Part Of: Annals of the American Association of Geographers. Volume 113:Number 1(2023)
• Page Start: 1
• Page End: 12
• Publication Date: 2023-01-02
• Subjects: eigenvector -- geographic visualization -- painting -- spatial autocorrelation -- spatial weights matrix; 特征向量 -- 地理可视化 -- 绘画 -- 空间自相关性 -- 空间权重矩阵。; autocorrelación espacial -- matriz de ponderaciones espaciales -- pintura -- vector propio -- visualización geográfica; Geography -- Periodicals; Environmental sciences -- Periodicals; Geography; Electronic journals; Periodicals; 550
• DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2022.2086101
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2469-4452

Abstract

Abstract : Do any of the known synergies existing between either geography and art or mathematics and art bridge all three of these disciplines? The geo-humanities and the math-humanities literatures describe only these two individual synergies. A new quantitative geography methodology exploits a sophisticated mathematical concept to analyze remotely sensed satellite images, which, when extended to artistic paintings, indeed spans all three disciplines. The organizing concept is spatial autocorrelation, or the tendency for dis/similar colors and their intensities to cluster in paintings. This article summarizes demonstrations of this contention, with specific applications to da Vinci, Monet, and Rembrandt paintings. Its principal contribution is that, for high geographic resolution digital versions of paintings, a replication constructed with judiciously selected and combined spatial autocorrelation components remarkably closely corresponds with a digital copy of its original source, further generalizing certain recent findings reported in the literature.