Exploring a Parameterized Portrait Painting Space

We overview our interdisciplinary work building parameterized knowledge domains and their authoring tools that allow for expression systems which move through a space of painterly portraiture. With new computational systems it is possible to conceptually dance, compose and paint in higher level conceptual spaces. We are interested in building art systems that support exploring these spaces and in particular report on our software-based artistic toolkit and resulting experiments using parameter spaces in face based new media portraiture. This system allows us to parameterize the open cognitive and vision-based methodology that human artists have intuitively evolved over centuries into a domain toolkit to explore aesthetic realizations and interdisciplinary questions about the act of portrait painting as well as the general creative process. These experiments and questions can be explored by traditional and new media artists, art historians, cognitive scientists and other scholars.