Assessment of plastics in the National Trust: a case study at Mr Straw's House

The National Trust is a charity that cares for over 300 publically accessible historic buildings and their contents across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. There have been few previous studies on preservation of plastics within National Trust collections, which form a significant part of the more modern collections of objects. This paper describes the design of an assessment system which was successfully trialled at Mr Straws House, a National Trust property in Worksop, UK. This system can now be used for future plastic surveys at other National Trust properties. In addition, the survey gave valuable information about the state of the collection, demonstrating that the plastics that are deteriorating are those that are known to be vulnerable, namely cellulose nitrate/acetate, PVC and rubber. Verifying this knowledge of the most vulnerable plastics enables us to recommend to properties across National Trust that these types should be seen as a priority for correct storage and in-depth recording

Restoration and enhancement of historical stereo photos

Restoration of digital visual media acquired from repositories of historical photographic and cinematographic material is of key importance for the preservation, study and transmission of the legacy of past cultures to the coming generations. In this paper, a fully automatic approach to the digital restoration of historical stereo photographs is proposed, referred to as Stacked Median Restoration plus (SMR+). The approach exploits the content redundancy in stereo pairs for detecting and fixing scratches, dust, dirt spots and many other defects in the original images, as well as improving contrast and illumination. This is done by estimating the optical flow between the images, and using it to register one view onto the other both geometrically and photometrically. Restoration is then accomplished in three steps: (1) image fusion according to the stacked median operator, (2) low-resolution detail enhancement by guided supersampling, and (3) iterative visual consistency checking and refinement. Each step implements an original algorithm specifically designed for this work. The restored image is fully consistent with the original content, thus improving over the methods based on image hallucination. Comparative results on three different datasets of historical stereograms show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, and its superiority over single-image denoising and super-resolution methods. Results also show that the performance of the state-of-the-art single-image deep restoration network Bringing Old Photo Back to Life (BOPBtL) can be strongly improved when the input image is pre-processed by SMR+

Airbrushing and texture

Ankara : The Department of Graphic Design and Institute of Fine Arts of Bilkent Univ, 1994.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 1994.Includes bibliographical refences.By the expianing the airbrushing technique, the texture in airbrushig is shown as examples. In this thesis, it is explained that this techniques can be used by a freehand or by using different materials to create new textures and effects. Airbrush technique can be used with the richness of texture which can be achieved by softer aparts from static forms method.Canko, AkınM.S

Nostalgia and iPhone Camera Apps: An Ethnographic Visual Approach to iPhoneography

The iPhone is the most popular smartphone and camera on social media. iPhoneography, the photography taken or edited with the iPhone, has set the trend of nostalgic photography on social media during the 2010s; thus, the iPhone, a high-tech camera, produces low-tech-looking images. This dissertation attempts to find out why iPhone photographers (iPhoneographers) take, edit, and share images that mimic photographs taken with analog photographic equipment. I argue that nostalgia allows iPhoneographers to use the iPhone as a creative tool and to belong to a community. Based on the arguments of Vilém Flusser—who suggested that photographers are more interested in the camera and the process of taking pictures than in the photographs produced—this work focuses first on the iPhone camera and the camera apps. (This work also considers the writings of Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and W. J. T. Mitchell, as they pertain to photography and iPhoneography.) It traces the beginning of the nostalgic photograph style to 2008, when the Apple App Store offered apps that behaved like toy cameras and rendered images similar to those produced by toy and Polaroid cameras. The Hipstamatic app set the trend in 2009, and Instagram made it mainstream. Nostalgia is more a source of inspiration and creativity than a source of melancholy and longing for the past. The iPhoneography community on Facebook tends to form small groups that share and curate specific topics, such as clouds, portraits, flowers, and images produced with Hipstamatic. A small survey of the iPhoneography community shows that the community considers iPhoneography an art

The Invention of Lying: Ways of Looking at and Believing in Images

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College

Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts. EVA 2012 Florence

The key aim of this Event is to provide a forum for the user, supplier and scientific research communities to meet and exchange experiences, ideas and plans in the wide area of Culture & Technology. Participants receive up to date news on new EC and international arts computing & telecommunications initiatives as well as on Projects in the visual arts field, in archaeology and history. Working Groups and new Projects are promoted. Scientific and technical demonstrations are presented

Fine Art Pattern Extraction and Recognition

This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Journal of Imaging (ISSN 2313-433X) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/jimaging/special issues/faper2020)

The Photographic Effect: Making Pictures After Photography, 1860-1895

This dissertation examines the effects of photography and photographic concepts of picturing on painterly practice and theory in late-nineteenth century Europe. It argues that the permeation of photography into the material production and critical interpretation of pictorial art impelled painters, art photographers, and their critics to differentiate more sharply the qualities of creative labor from those of unthinking imitation. Focusing on case studies in France and England, the two countries with the longest histories of photographic practice and discourse, I consider methods of making that challenged the framework of medium, and the standards of “art” and “truth” on which distinctions between media were based. Subjects of analysis include the art criticism of British painter Walter Sickert (1860-1942); a libel trial initiated by Belgian painter Jan Van Beers (1852-1927); the plein-air painting practice of French naturalist Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884); composite photographs and theories of pictorial art by British photographer Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901); the “photographic” characteristics of paintings by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894); and the painterly realism of French artist Edgar Degas (1834-1917), which was set apart from photography in the nineteenth century and came to be aligned with it in the twentieth. I distinguish my approach from traditional narratives of cross-media exchange, which emphasize artists’ visual responses to paintings and photographs, by showing that photography’s influence was felt most palpably in the invisible realms of pictorial production and its theoretical conception. Photography provoked no single stylistic response from painters, nor was its presence in a picture substantiated by any fixed set of criteria. By the 1890s photography had destabilized “medium” as a secure category of classification, as paintings were designated “colored photographs” and photographers employed the term “picture” to classify their images as art. I examine the radical reconfiguration of the hierarchy of pictorial art that took place in the late nineteenth century, showing that photographic methods of making and paradigms of picturing undermined the visual surface as a reliable source of meaning. As a result, these hybrid pictorial practices intensified anxieties about the terms of truthful depiction, and how an authentic sense of the real might be conveyed through material means. Rather than being settled by the turn of the century, as modern theories of medium specificity would have it, I maintain that photography catalyzed tensions between the manual and intellectual aspects of art-making that trigger debates and fuel artistic experimentation to this day.PHDHistory of ArtUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140978/1/emtalbot_1.pd

A critical practice-based exploration of interactive panoramas' role in helping to preserve cultural memory

I am enclosing the content of two DVDs which are integral part of the practice-based thesis.The rapid development of digital communication technologies in the 20th and 21st centuries has affected the way researchers look at ways memory – especially cultural memory – can be preserved and enhanced. State-of-the-art communication technologies such as the Internet or immersive environments support participation and interaction and transform memory into ‘prosthetic’ experience, where digital technologies could enable 'implantation' of events that have not actually been experienced. While there is a wealth of research on the preservation of public memory and cultural heritage sites using digital media, more can be explored on how these media can contribute to the cultivation of cultural memory. One of the most interesting phenomena related to this issue is how panoramas, which are immersive and have a well-established tradition in preserving memories, can be enhanced by recent digital technologies and image spaces. The emergence of digital panoramic video cameras and panoramic environments has opened up new opportunities for exploring the role of interactive panoramas not only as a documentary tool for visiting sites but mainly as a more complex technique for telling non-linear interactive narratives through the application of panoramic photography and panoramic videography which, when presented in a wrap-around environment, could enhance recalling. This thesis attempts to explore a way of preserving inspirational environments and memory sites in a way that combines panoramic interactive film and traversing the panoramic environment with viewing the photo-realistic panoramic content rather than computer-generated environment. This research is based on two case studies. The case study of Charles Church in Plymouth represents the topical approach to narrative and focuses on the preservation of the memory of the Blitz in Plymouth and the ruin of Charles Church which stands as a silent reminder of this event. The case study of Charles Causley reflects topographical approach where, through traversing the town of Launceston, viewers learn about Causley’s life and places that provided inspirations for his poems. The thesis explores through practice what can be done and reflects on positive and less positive aspects of preserving cultural memory in these case studies in a critical way. Therefore, the results and recommendations from this thesis can be seen as valuable contribution to the study of intermedia and cultural memory in general