Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

ON FRIDAY EVENING, inside an old-movie-house-cum-art-gallery at the heart of San Francisco's Mission district, Google graphics guru Blaise Agüera y Arcas delivered a speech to an audience of about eight hundred geek hipsters.

He spoke alongside a series of images projected onto the wall that once held a movie screen, and at one point, he showed off a nearly 500-year-old double portrait by German Renaissance painter Hans Holbein. The portrait includes a strangely distorted image of a human skull, and as Agüera y Arcas explained, it's unlikely that Holbein painted this by hand. He almost certainly used mirrors or lenses to project the image of a skull onto a canvas before tracing its outline. "He was using state-of-the-art technologies," Agüera y Arcas told his audience.

Neural networks are not only driving the Google search engine but spitting out art for which some people will pay serious money.His point was that we've been using technology to create art for centuries—that the present isn't all that different from the past. It was his way of introducing the gallery's latest exhibit, in which every work is the product of artificial neural networks—networks of computer hardware and software that approximate the web of neurons in the human brain. Last year, researchers at Google created a new kind of art using neural nets, and this weekend, the tech giant put this machine-generated imagery on display in a two-day exhibit that raised roughly $84,000 for the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, a San Francisco nonprofit devoted to the confluence of art and tech....

No taste? No problem. Google's got you covered.

By now, we’ve all heard of Google’s enticing pitch on Material Design—their design language that re-imagines the pieces of user interface as real, physical objects. But while Google offers tools for any Android developer to build an app that adheres to Material Design standards, what if you just want to make a snazzy, Material Design website?

Now, Google has released a tool to make the process simple. It’s calledMaterial Design Lite, and it’s a site filled with copy-and-pasteable code that you can use to create Material Design websites in CSS, HTML and JavaScript....

Google Shopping is offering a virtual tour of New York’s renowned holiday windows, Winter Wonderland, which allows consumers to use a smartphone or computer to see windows from 18 stores, including Lord & Taylor’s Enchanted Forest, as well as Barney’s — in which artist Nick Cave tackles race and gender — and Saks 5th Avenue, which features couture gowns from designers that were inspired by holiday treats.

“We’ve taken hundreds of high-resolution photos of each window and stitched them together with a new technique that creates a rich, life-like panorama — you’ll feel like you’re standing on the streets of Manhattan during the holidays, gazing at the windows as if you were walking next to them,” Aman Govil, Google's head of art, copy and code projects, wrote in a blog post.

What’s more, users with virtual reality headsets like Google Cardboard or Daydream can also hear surrounding sounds and sights, Google said....