Non-equispaced B-spline wavelets

This paper has three main contributions. The first is the construction of wavelet transforms from B-spline scaling functions defined on a grid of non-equispaced knots. The new construction extends the equispaced, biorthogonal, compactly supported Cohen-Daubechies-Feauveau wavelets. The new construction is based on the factorisation of wavelet transforms into lifting steps. The second and third contributions are new insights on how to use these and other wavelets in statistical applications. The second contribution is related to the bias of a wavelet representation. It is investigated how the fine scaling coefficients should be derived from the observations. In the context of equispaced data, it is common practice to simply take the observations as fine scale coefficients. It is argued in this paper that this is not acceptable for non-interpolating wavelets on non-equidistant data. Finally, the third contribution is the study of the variance in a non-orthogonal wavelet transform in a new framework, replacing the numerical condition as a measure for non-orthogonality. By controlling the variances of the reconstruction from the wavelet coefficients, the new framework allows us to design wavelet transforms on irregular point sets with a focus on their use for smoothing or other applications in statistics.Comment: 42 pages, 2 figure

Chiral Perturbation Theory, Non-leptonic Kaon Decays, and the Lattice

In this talk, I first motivate the use of Chiral Perturbation Theory in the context of Lattice QCD. In particular, I explain how partially quenched QCD, which has, in general, unequal valence- and sea-quark masses, can be used to obtain real-world (i.e. unquenched) results for low-energy constants. In the second part, I review how Chiral Perturbation Theory may be used to overcome theoretical difficulties which afflict the computation of non-leptonic kaon decay rates from Lattice QCD. I argue that it should be possible to determine at least the O(p^2) weak low-energy constants reliably from numerical computations of the K to pi and K to vacuum matrix elements of the corresponding weak operators.Comment: 13 pages, invited plenary talk at Chiral 2000, Jefferson Lab., July 17-22, 200

The musealisation of the artist's house as architectural project

Artist’s houses that are opened to the public as museums shift from a private and everyday to a semi-public and institutional functioning. This transformation of an artist’s house into a house-museum might appear as a mere legal issue or as a matter of making previously secluded rooms and collections accessible to the public. But this musealisation of an artist’s house always involves a set of museological and architectural interventions as well. Not only need the house and its content to be displayed as historical documents through a careful mise-en-scène and through the addition of a sub-text of labels or explanatory panels that disclose the meaning of these historical documents; there is also a need for a logic and clear visitor’s route in a house that was not intended for this. Often this already demands architectural design decisions, but it is mainly in the introduction of the supporting museum functions like the necessary office spaces and an entrance hall with reception desk, cloakroom and bathrooms that the musealisation comes down to an architectural design challenge. The proposed paper wants to discuss the artist’s house museum from an architect’s point of view, on the basis of a selection of artist’s houses that were recently transformed into museums, such as the Atelier-Museum Luc Peire in Knokke (B) or the renovations of the Permeke and Rubens house museums. I want to propose the artist’s house museum as an architectural typology by mapping its various typical architectural and spatial characteristics. The first crucial point of interest here is how the spatial division is articulated between the historic interiors, the exhibition spaces and the museum’s service spaces outside of the visitor’s circuit. A second architectural question is how the museum as an active institution can be given an architectural ‘face’ while respecting and presenting the house and its collections as historical documents; how can both the ‘authentic’ private atmosphere and the contemporary public museum be given shape, and is there a place for authorial design in this mediating exercise

Revisiting Roland Barthes's effet de réel : an analysis of the use of insignificant details in artist's monographs and monographic museums

The anti-authorial criticism voiced in La mort de l’Auteur is probably Roland Barthes’ most direct attack on the traditional life-and-work format of the artist’s monograph. The essay has become - together with Foucault’s Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur? – the seminal text for any discussion of authorship. Yet, several other of Barthes’ writings contain just as critical positions throwing the artist’s monograph into suspicion for other reasons, but they are rarely brought to bear on it. In this paper, I would like to discuss Barthes’ concept of the ‘reality effect’ and apply it to the artist’s monograph and to the monographic museum as two instances of art historiography. While La mort de l’Auteur radically questions the author’s authority over the interpretation of a work, the L’effet de réel essay (1968) affects the artist’s monograph because it questions the status of ‘reality’ in realist literature, historiography or biography. Barthes argues that realist literature or historiography achieves a sense of reality not thanks to some heightened degree of objectivity, but thanks to formal characteristics of their texts, namely an employment of over-detailed descriptions. Some of these details obtain a clear significance in the overall narrative but others – Barthes calls them ‘détails inutiles’ – have an apparently contingent presence in the text and merely serve to provide the text with an impression of reality: l’effet de réel. Yet, concrete details occupy a critical position since too much detail can make the narrative, and thus meaningfulness, collapse. The concept of a reality effect thus opens onto the abyss of a contingent material reality which can only be given sense through an imposition of (conventional) narrative structures, such as those of an artist’s biography. To clarify the agency of the reality effect in life-and-work narratives, I will analyze a couple of passages of artist’s monographs and distinguish between significant and insignificant – but reality enhancing – details. A parallel analysis will also be made of different museal stagings of artist studios, a typical situation in which the materiality of the real provides more than a reality effect and might begin to challenge monographic narration