Retrieving an archive: Brook Andrew and William Blandowski's Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen

Much of the critical response to Brook Andrew’s reinterpretation of images from a colonial archive in his 2008 series The Island situated the work in a tradition of post-colonial critique of documentary images. But is this an adequate account of either Andrew’s work or the archive in question, William Blandowski’s Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen (1862)? This essay looks at practices involving copying and their impact on understandings of authenticity, the role of art in science, the nature of the observer and visual communication in relation to the broad scope of Blandowski’s archive, but particularly with regard to Andrew’s intervention in it. By examining the way that the past is brought into the present in the Island series, this essay seeks to facilitate a more richly nuanced understanding of these works that is cognizant of the historical issues involved

Out of the frying pan: Voyaging to Queensland in 1863 on board the Fiery Star

A picture, even a triptych such as that painted by McCubbin can only tell part of any complex story, but my research underlines the narrowness of the portrait of the pioneer emigrant propounded in Australian mythology. The pioneers in this study, the Waltons and the Hanlons did not simply cope with the adversities sent their way. Their various oceanic passages were a step towards personal transformation. In their decision to migrate, and their subsequent life choices, they reveal themselves to be canny agents of their own destiny who were resilient in the face of hardship, but also able to take advantage of opportunities that presented themselves in urban as well as rural areas

MIME: A Gesture-Driven Computer Interface

MIME (Mime Is Manual Expression) is a computationally efficient computer vision system for recognizing hand gestures. The system is intended to replace the mouse interface on a standard personal computer to control application in a more intuitive manner. The system is implemented in C code with no hardware-acceleration and tracks hand motion at 30 fps on a standard PC. Using a simple two-dimensional model of the human hand, MIME employs a highly-efficient, single-pass algorithm to segment the hand and extract its model parameters from each frame in the video input. The hand is tracked from one frame to the next using a constant-acceleration Kalman filter. Tracking and feature extraction is remarkably fast and robust even when the hand is placed above difficult backdrops such as a typical cluttered desktop environment. Because of the efficient coding of the gesture tracking, adequate CPU power remains to run standard applications such as web browsers and presentations

Nanotrapping and the thermodynamics of optical tweezers

Particles that can be trapped in optical tweezers range from tens of microns down to tens of nanometres in size. Interestingly, this size range includes large macromolecules. We show experimentally, in agreement with theoretical expectations, that optical tweezers can be used to manipulate single molecules of polyethylene oxide suspended in water. The trapped molecules accumulate without aggregating, so this provides optical control of the concentration of macromolecules in solution. Apart from possible applications such as the micromanipulation of nanoparticles, nanoassembly, microchemistry, and the study of biological macromolecules, our results also provide insight into the thermodynamics of optical tweezers.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, presented at 17th AIP Congress, Brisbane, 200

J. J. Hilder and the languages of art

Writing in a book published in 1918 in honour of Jesse Jewhurst Hilder (1881–1916), shortly after the artist's tragic early death from tuberculosis, Bertram Stevens declared: Australia may well be proud of Jesse Hilder, for he is entirely her own by birth and training. His art was intuitive; what instruction he received, and the inspiration he got from other men's work, helped him but little towards self-development. His water-colours show the strong individual note of the true romantic artist; they are not like anything done previously in Australia or elsewhere.</jats:p

Low-Cost Real-Time Gesture Recognition

A major impediment to developing real-time computer vision systems has been the computational power and level of skill required to process video streams in real-time. This has meant that many researchers have either analysed video streams off-line or used expensive dedicated hardware acceleration techniques. Recent software and hardware developments have greatly eased the development burden of realtime image analysis leading to the development of portable systems using cheap PC hardware and software exploiting the Multimedia Extension (MMX) instruction set of the Intel Pentium chip. This paper describes the implementation of a computationally efficient computer vision system for recognizing hand gestures using efficient coding and MMX-acceleration to achieve real-time performance on low cost hardware

Forces from highly focused laser beams: modeling, measurement and application to refractive index measurements

The optical forces in optical tweezers can be robustly modeled over a broad range of parameters using generalsed Lorenz-Mie theory. We describe the procedure, and show how the combination of experimental measurement of properties of the trap coupled with computational modeling, can allow unknown parameters of the particle - in this case, the refractive index - to be determined.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, presented at 17th AIP Congress, Brisbane, 200