The Intrinsic Agent: Working with Light

Architecture’s intrinsic natural agent, light, is an elusive and mysterious figure in the process of architectural design. The very phenomenon that reveals to us the contents, materials, and proportions of a space is frequently a passive, incidental occupant. Its potential to affect our perception of architecture and architectural space is clear in religious spaces, where it plays the role of spiritual metaphor, and in artistic installation work, where it is often exposed as a fascinating physical phenomenon. These works have a greater capacity to reveal light’s potential because they utilise it as a primary conceptual tool or catalyst. However, to position light as a necessary overarching conceptual driver of all architectural work because of its pervasiveness is an unreasonable proposition. Instead, The Intrinsic Agent advocates for a greater engagement with light throughout the architectural design process for its communicative power, its ability to reinforce and reveal various larger project concepts and tectonic strategies. The Intrinsic Agent documents the process of finding a methodology of involving light in architectural design. It begins by analysing the positions and tools offered by architectural lighting design and phenomenology and testing the diagrammatic case study, a traditional pedagogical tool, for its effectiveness in revealing an evolvable light strategy. Parametric and computational tools, commonly used to evaluate light, are then introduced as an alternative means by which to physically capture ambient light information and acknowledge its presence. Finding these two avenues lacking as generative methods, knowledge from the fields of architectural lighting design, phenomenology, and optics (the physics of light) is combined and presented in the form of a methodological reference. The reference offers architects and students a loosely structured method of designing with light using three main elements: a system strategy, archetypes of light effect, and optic devices and their parameters. The reference can be used to analyse projects and generate systems of involving light in design using common terms, providing a foundation for discourse and development in this area. For clarity, the reference is then used to study and identify the system strategy of a built project which is then expanded upon and applied in the proposed design of an addition to the building

Multi-Object Detection, Pose Estimation and Tracking in Panoramic Monocular Imagery for Autonomous Vehicle Perception

While active sensing such as radars, laser-based ranging (LiDAR) and ultrasonic sensors are nearly ubiquitous in modern autonomous vehicle prototypes, cameras are more versatile because they are nonetheless essential for tasks such as road marking detection and road sign reading. Active sensing technologies are widely used because active sensors are, by nature, usually more reliable than cameras to detect objects, however they are lower resolution, break in challenging environmental conditions such as rain and heavy reflections, as well as materials such as black paint. Therefore, in this work, we focus primarily on passive sensing technologies. More specifically, we look at monocular imagery and to what extent, it can be used as replacement for more complex sensing systems such as stereo, multi-view cameras and LiDAR. Whilst the main strength of LiDAR is its ability to measure distances and naturally enable 3D reasoning; in contrast, camera-based object detection is typically restricted to the 2D image space. We propose a convolutional neural network extending object detection to estimate the 3D pose and velocity of objects from a single monocular camera. Our approach is based on a siamese neural network able to process pair of video frames to integrate temporal information. While the prior work has focused almost exclusively on the processing of forward-facing rectified rectilinear vehicle mounted cameras, there are no studies of panoramic imagery in the context of autonomous driving. We introduce an approach to adapt existing convolutional neural networks to unseen 360° panoramic imagery using domain adaptation via style transfer. We also introduce a new synthetic evaluation dataset and benchmark for 3D object detection and depth estimation in automotive panoramic imagery. Multi-object tracking-by-detection is often split into two parts: a detector and a tracker. In contrast, we investigate the use of end-to-end recurrent convolutional networks to process automotive video sequences to jointly detect and track objects through time. We present a multitask neural network able to track online the 3D pose of objects in panoramic video sequences. Our work highlights that monocular imagery, in conjunction with the proposed algorithmic approaches, can offer an effective replacement for more expensive active sensors to estimate depth, to estimate and track the 3D pose of objects surrounding the ego-vehicle; thus demonstrating that autonomous driving could be achieved using a limited number of cameras or even a single 360° panoramic camera, akin to a human driver perception

Physical to Virtual: A Model for Future Virtual Classroom Environments

Virtual reality is a technology that has seen unprecedented growth since the turn of the century with increasing applications within business, entertainment, and educational applications. As virtual reality technologies continue to develops and markets expand, the world may see an increased demand for virtual classrooms: virtual environments (VEs) that students may access through immersive virtual reality technologies to receive guided instruction, conduct simulations, or perform tasks typical in a classroom setting. While many studies document how virtual reality is beneficial to educational processes, there is little discussion on how virtual environments should be architecturally designed. Thus one may hypothesize that physical design strategies translated to virtual environments may have similar results. This thesis investigates virtual environments for education by creating several virtual classrooms embedded within a selective digital twin of the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. The design of the virtual classrooms was influenced by current architectural trends in classroom design while capturing unique abilities present within a virtual context. A physical teaching module was also designed to create a platform for educators within the university to deliver instruction within the virtual campus

Mobile Mapping

This book argues for a theory of mobile mapping, a situated and spatial approach towards researching how everyday digital mobile media practices are bound up in global systems of knowledge and power. Drawing from literature in media studies and geography - and the work of Michel Foucault and Doreen Massey - it examines how geographical and historical material, social, and cultural conditions are embedded in the way in which contemporary (digital) cartographies are read, deployed, and engaged. This is explored through seventeen walking interviews in Hong Kong and Sydney, as potent discourses like cartographic reason continue to transform and weave through the world in ways that haunt mobile mapping and bring old conflicts into new media. In doing so, Mobile Mapping offers an interdisciplinary rethinking about how multiple translations of spatial knowledges between rational digital epistemologies and tacit ways of understanding space and experience might be conceptualized and researched

A Proximate Remove

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. How might queer theory transform our interpretations of medieval Japanese literature and how might this literature reorient the assumptions, priorities, and critical practices of queer theory? Through a close reading of The Tale of Genji, an eleventh-century text that depicts the lifestyles of aristocrats during the Heian period, A Proximate Remove explores this question by mapping the destabilizing aesthetic, affective, and phenomenological dimensions of experiencing intimacy and loss. The spatiotemporal fissures Reginald Jackson calls "proximate removes" suspend belief in prevailing structures. Beyond issues of sexuality, Genji queers in its reluctance to romanticize or reproduce a flawed social order. An understanding of this hesitation enhances how we engage with premodern texts and how we question contemporary disciplinary stances

Words Matter: The Work of Lawrence Weiner

This dissertation explores the practice of contemporary artist Lawrence Weiner. From 1968 onwards, Weiner has presented his work using language and, as such, the artist is historically regarded as one of the pioneering practitioners of Conceptual art. The artist himself categorically refuses that designation, preferring to focus on the material aspects of his work. Nevertheless, his oeuvre has been largely received in terms of a predominantly linguistic intervention. Craig Dworkin encapsulates this position, when in discussing the Conceptual wager of Weiner's statements he writes: "Having tested the propositions that the art object might be nominal, linguistic, invisible, and on a par with its abstract initial description, the next step was to venture that it could be dispensed with altogether." By focusing equally on the linguistic and material aspects of Weiner's practice, this dissertation argues, conversely, that Weiner's work is primarily an object strategy, and not a dematerialized linguistic presentation. The first part of this discussion deals with Weiner's ground-breaking work from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s, analyzing the full implications of Weiner's extraordinary decision to present materials through language. Close comparisons are drawn with the profoundly materialist practices of contemporary artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Carl Andre, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson. Weiner's use of language is also distinguished from the text-based works of Conceptual artists Joseph Kosuth and Douglas Huebler, problematizing the degree to which Weiner's statements can stand as an exemplar of postmodern textuality, inasmuch as their referential content remains of primary consequence. Several chapters of the dissertation focus on drawings, and in particular the artist's notebooks, an aspect of Weiner's practice that has remained largely unstudied. Crucially, the notebooks present a model of thinking which is wholly corporeal as opposed to purely analytical. Furthermore, they raise the problem of the visual in relation to a body of work that has been credited with the suppression of a traditional (optical) aesthetic. In being conceived by the artist as "maps," Weiner's drawings also invite an analysis of spatial considerations, and are thus linked to the artist's own designation of his work, not as art in general, but specifically as sculpture. Finally, the notebooks, like Weiner's films, practically dissolve the categories of reality and fiction. Indeed, Weiner himself would insist that every presentation of his essentially "realist" work is nonetheless inherently "theatrical." One of the long-standing criticisms of Conceptual art was that while it made aspects of circulation and distribution part of the work - thereby testing the limits of institutional constraint and expanding art's potential to engage in collective reception - it failed to achieve truly democratic access, in large part by neglecting issues of desire. Thus, Conceptual art's promise of collective accessibility was purportedly foreclosed by an art whose theoretical propositions lacked a democratic content. In closely considering the generic content of Weiner's work, this dissertation develops a picture not only of the concrete relationship between word and thing, but of the ways in which Weiner uses signs (drawings, text, films) to "objectify" desire, demonstrating that his "sculptures" must be seen as both conceptual and sensual, fully immersed in politicized questions of imaginary and bodily experience

LIPIcs, Volume 277, GIScience 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 277, GIScience 2023, Complete Volum