Totentanz

Our paper on Aby Warburg and the Pathosformel, entitled Totentanz, is published in Vol. 107 of the New Left Review: the article is available via the NLR website here (login required). This version is print-friendly.

A slightly revised version for the web, with significantly different (color) illustrations, is published as Pamphlet No.16 of the Stanford Literary Lab, avaliable here.

Significant design credit goes to Rob Lucas of the NLR, and to Jake Coolidge of the Stanford Literary Lab.

A description of the data acquisition and the technical aspects of clustering and visualisation are described in the VISART-ECCV paper by Leonardo Impett and Sabine Susstrunk here.

As a work in progress, this project has been presented a number of times by both authors (separately and jointly), at EPFL, Stanford University, Indiana University, King's College London, the University of Cambridge, the Federico II University of Naples, the University of Basel, and the University of Geneva.

Some of these have been recorded by the hosts, and are available on Youtube; one recent video (from Basel) is available here.

Research code is a messy business; however, the code required to create the figures presented in the paper will be released by the end of 2017.

A longer-term goal is to provide software friendly to those not comfortable with dealing with code directly, which will incorporate recent advances in pose detection: from collections of images directly to charts, maps and diagrams. Watch this space (or contact us).

As we don't own the images, we are unable to release images of the whole Atlas Mnemosyne. Two versions of the original panels are available at the Warburg Institute website here.

We do, however, have hand-annotated skeletons for one-third of the Atlas (on which our study is based), and computer- extracted skeletons for the whole Atlas. These will be released by the end of the year along with the code to replicate the diagrams; if, in the meantime, you would like a copy, please contact us.

Please write to Leonardo Impett at firstname.lastname@epfl.ch.