Lusciousness - flora and the crafted image in a digital environment

The development of digital imaging within science has been as swift as it is impressive, as the images of outer space developed from data sent back from the Hubble Telescope bear witness. However, in a climate where programmes are constantly being developed to facilitate the production of visual spectacle, the ability to retain the trace of the artist's hand within the field of science imaging is a challenging task. Through my collaborations with botanical scientists at Kew over the past eight years I have been keen to move the artistic nature of depicting microscopic plant imagery to a more sophisticated level. Just as the original plant employs colour coded messages to attract an audience of insect collaborators. Through artistic intervention and interpretation I have sought to create mesmeric images and symbolic objects that carry many messages, markers with which we retain contact with the natural world

Single-picture reconstruction and rendering of trees for plausible vegetation synthesis

State-of-the-art approaches for tree reconstruction either put limiting constraints on the input side (requiring multiple photographs, a scanned point cloud or intensive user input) or provide a representation only suitable for front views of the tree. In this paper we present a complete pipeline for synthesizing and rendering detailed trees from a single photograph with minimal user effort. Since the overall shape and appearance of each tree is recovered from a single photograph of the tree crown, artists can benefit from georeferenced images to populate landscapes with native tree species. A key element of our approach is a compact representation of dense tree crowns through a radial distance map. Our first contribution is an automatic algorithm for generating such representations from a single exemplar image of a tree. We create a rough estimate of the crown shape by solving a thin-plate energy minimization problem, and then add detail through a simplified shape-from-shading approach. The use of seamless texture synthesis results in an image-based representation that can be rendered from arbitrary view directions at different levels of detail. Distant trees benefit from an output-sensitive algorithm inspired on relief mapping. For close-up trees we use a billboard cloud where leaflets are distributed inside the crown shape through a space colonization algorithm. In both cases our representation ensures efficient preservation of the crown shape. Major benefits of our approach include: it recovers the overall shape from a single tree image, involves no tree modeling knowledge and minimal authoring effort, and the associated image-based representation is easy to compress and thus suitable for network streaming.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

An Investigation into Animating Plant Structures within Real-time Constraints

This paper is an analysis of current developments in rendering botanical structures for scientic and entertainment purposes with a focus on visualising growth. The choices of practical investigations produce a novel approach for parallel parsing of difficult bracketed L-Systems, based upon the work of Lipp, Wonka and Wimmer (2010). Alongside this is a general overview of the issues involved when looking at growing systems, technical details involving programming for the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and other possible solutions for further work that also could achieve the project's goals

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717): Pioneering Naturalist, Artist, and Inspiration for Catesby

Book Summary: While accessible to the interested general reader, it is a technical standard that is usable academically. Containing significant new information, this work is the most comprehensive and accurate book written about Catesby and is the legacy of the Catesby Commemorative Trust’s Mark Catesby Tercentennial symposium held in 2012. Chapter Summary: Merian\u27s books on European and Surinamese insects and plants provided new models for representing nature that were echoed in the work of artists and naturalists working in the eighteenth century and beyond. This chapter discusses how Mark Catesby, the subject of the book, was particularly influenced by Merian

Katherine Mansfield and anima mundi

This presentation proposes a reading of Katherine Mansfield’s work that will begin with the medieval theories of anima mundi or world soul, the concept of an animistic universe in which the earth can be revivified through a spiritus mundi. It will refer to the French theological scholars of the 12th century who were influential in promoting the Pythagoraean-Platonic doctrine of anima mundi through allegories of ‘Dame Nature’: Bernard de Sylvestris of Tours (De Universitate Mundi) and Alanus of Insulis (De Planctu Naturae and Anticlaudianus), Jean de Meun’s continuation of Guillaume de Lorris’s Le Roman de la Rose. This strand of medieval culture and cosmology - often considered as tangential to mainstream European intellectual and Christian religious belief — was popular throughout the Renaissance and has survived in various literary forms in modernist writing, often as a vigorous rebuttal of modernization from an environmental perspective. Although no direct connection with the anima mundi tradition can be traced in Mansfield’s work, her close identification with nature and the non-human is undeniable, and some familiarity with popular survivals of the tradition of nature personified appear, for example, in her interest in the Greek god, Pan. Her creation of transitive, linking relations between herself and the natural world recalls the close participation between man and the rest of creation characteristic of the medieval world view. Certainly anthropomorphic thinking and the perception of human subjectivity as rooted in non-human nature underpin the sense of wonder and the marvellous found in her representations of the created world and her emphasis on its mystery and splendour. This Arcadian, pastoral orientation also appears in her empathy with living creatures, flowers, plants and trees, while cultivated gardens and wild outdoor spaces are settings for epiphanies, sites of revelation and transformation. Yet, I will argue, Mansfield also introduced her own modernist, gendered critique of the tropes and images associated with nature worship. The talk will refer to the traditions associated with anima mundi in relation to stories like ‘Epilogue II’, ‘In the Botanical Gardens’, ‘The Escape’, ‘See-Saw’ and ‘Prelude’, read as modernist adaptations of classical/medieval topoi of the locus amoenus (pleasant place), the hortus conclusus (enclosed garden), and the sacred tree

Simple identification tools in FishBase

Simple identification tools for fish species were included in the FishBase information system from its inception. Early tools made use of the relational model and characters like fin ray meristics. Soon pictures and drawings were added as a further help, similar to a field guide. Later came the computerization of existing dichotomous keys, again in combination with pictures and other information, and the ability to restrict possible species by country, area, or taxonomic group. Today, www.FishBase.org offers four different ways to identify species. This paper describes these tools with their advantages and disadvantages, and suggests various options for further development. It explores the possibility of a holistic and integrated computeraided strategy

From Models to Simulations

This book analyses the impact computerization has had on contemporary science and explains the origins, technical nature and epistemological consequences of the current decisive interplay between technology and science: an intertwining of formalism, computation, data acquisition, data and visualization and how these factors have led to the spread of simulation models since the 1950s. Using historical, comparative and interpretative case studies from a range of disciplines, with a particular emphasis on the case of plant studies, the author shows how and why computers, data treatment devices and programming languages have occasioned a gradual but irresistible and massive shift from mathematical models to computer simulations

Soft set theory based decision support system for mining electronic government dataset

Electronic government (e-gov) is applied to support performance and create more efficient and effective public services. Grouping data in soft-set theory can be considered as a decision-making technique for determining the maturity level of e-government use. So far, the uncertainty of the data obtained through the questionnaire has not been maximally used as an appropriate reference for the government in determining the direction of future e-gov development policy. This study presents the maximum attribute relative (MAR) based on soft set theory to classify attribute options. The results show that facilitation conditions (FC) are the highest variable in influencing people to use e-government, followed by performance expectancy (PE) and system quality (SQ). The results provide useful information for decision makers to make policies about their citizens and potentially provide recommendations on how to design and develop e-government systems in improving public services