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Pictures of the Past
SHUTTERSTOCK.COM (FRAMES); KRÖLLER-MÜLLER MUSEUM/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (VAN GOGH PORTRAIT); HULTON ARCHIVE/ GETTY IMAGES (WASHINGTON); IMAGNO/GETTY IMAGES (QUEEN ELIZABETH PORTRAIT); BAS UTERWIJK PHOTOGRAPHY (REIMAGINED VAN GOGH, WASHINGTON, AND QUEEN ELIZABETH)
(1) VAN GOGH IN DIGITAL RE-CREATION: The Dutch painter never sat for photos. (2) GEORGE WASHINGTON IN DIGITAL RE-CREATION: The first U.S. president’s image was only captured in paintings. (3) QUEEN ELIZABETH IN DIGITAL RE-CREATION: This English queen lived more than 400 years ago.
There are no photos of historical figures like the painter Vincent van Gogh or President George Washington. So Bas Uterwijk, an artist in the Netherlands, decided to create some of his own. He used a computer program called a neural network. It mimics the way a human brain operates to make connections between different pieces of information, like images. Uterwijk supplied this program with photos of actual people, along with images of paintings and statues of people from the past. After combing through these examples, the program was able to produce extremely realistic-looking pictures of dozens of famous individuals.