Gui Oana

The paper discusses materialization of verses into abstract printed artwork. It is an experimental project involving artists and people from IT, where poetry is reinterpreted through the relationship between man and machine. At one end, the artist inputs one verse using his voice and collects a physical form of it at the other end. Between the input and output, the machine analyses the information and creates material evidence of the voice (a 3D printed layer). The final step is made by the artist who assembles all layers into a sculpture. Digital culture. Machine learning. 3D printing.

The paper intends to present the results of an experiment involving undergraduate students from different fields, such as fine arts, architecture and electronics or computers.
The declared objective of the experiment is to create interactive sketches in Processing, which will run in active mode and receive input from the mouse, the keyboard and also from other external sensor systems (systems measuring temperature, acceleration, pressure etc.). The interactive sketches should be able to capture the canvas and to save it as an image file.
By learning how to create these sketches those who have no experience in computer programming will discover the meaning of an algorithm and the philosophy of incremental development. At the same time, those with a technical background will discover the artistic potential of images, sounds and animation. Their technical skills will be used to create different ways of interacting with computers by providing input from external systems to alter different parameters of the interactive sketches.
The undeclared objective of the project is to addresses the question of harnessing individual differences towards improving interdisciplinary teams. We believe that the large amount of effort and time needed to create conditions for individuals to discover themselves through their colleagues’ differences is repaid as the group’s sources of creativity may be unleashed.
Our presumption is based on another experiment done within an EU funded program in the field of web design that gathered together graduates with technical and artistic background. The idea of this research topic also comes from the long time academic experience of the authors who discovered that most of the time the more specialized people are, the bigger the obstacles in their cooperation in interdisciplinary research projects. However, one of the main sources of creativity, so necessary in interdisciplinary teams is the very exploiting of these differences and expertise.
Our intention is to bring more understanding to the problem of personality differences, its consequences and its causes, not to offer solutions; to stimulate the attention and research on how individual differences, that are inherent in experts highly specialized in very different fields, could be harnessed toward creativity.
The sketches, the images and the external sensory systems which will be developed will be used for a demo of our experiment.

The present paper presents the design of a complete system, based on open source software [1], that allows creation of full virtual 3D models of art object and artifacts. The developed system is much affordable to institutes specializing in restoration, conservation and preservation of cultural heritage [2, 3], due to its reduced costs and high flexibility. The paper presents a system immune to perturbations that sweeps a line laser at a constant speed, keeping it at a constant distance from the scanned object. Two H-bridge circuits are used to drive the stepper motor. The winding AA’ is driven by the H-bridge T1p-T4p and the winding BB’ is driven by the H-bridge T1s-T4s. In this way the direction on each winding can be controlled. Also controlling the H-bridges with a PWM signal the value of the current injected in each winding is controlled. A drive logic block is used to control the bridges for the correct speed and direction. Current limiting circuits are also implemented to protect the motor.
Compared to sciences, research in the humanities is under-financed. Attracting scientists into research in the humanities field is thus a way of attracting more funding into this field. But this could be rewarding for both parties involved, research into humanities, and especially into cultural heritage being a development niche for engineering nowadays.

The paper presents a comparison between digital images of mural paintings acquired using High Definition Range Imaging techniques and images that result after the processing of the images of murals taken under spatial and spectral variations of the illumination with the Retinex algorithm. The processing of mural painting images with the Retinex algorithm elevates their quality to a higher status, comparable with the quality of the images acquired with the HDRI technique. We consider that both techniques, Retinex and HDRI, should become part of the modern products, dedicated for cultural heritage domain.

This paper addresses the problem of separating the illumination from the reflectance in images and compensating for non-uniform lighting. Recorded images of mural paintings suffer from significant losses in visual quality, compared to the direct eye observation when there are spatial or spectral variations in illumination. The visibility of detail in shadows is poor for recorded images and therefore an automatic computation is needed to improve them for better optical investigation. Images of medieval mural paintings, taken under very poor illumination conditions, are processed by the biologically inspired Retinex algorithm and by the equalize algorithm and the results are compared.

The main focus of this book is to clarify the current use of 200 terms within different cultures and languages. The goal is to convey the essence and to be accurate, but not to be exhaustive. It addresses a widely diverse range of readers: professionals, to help them with their daily work, especially if their work extends to other European countries; administrative authorities, to give them a tool for communicating their tasks; conservation students in Europe, to provide them with common educational material; individuals, to aid them in understanding deterioration and preservation processes within their built environment.

EwaGlos, which has been developed in eleven languages, highlights the crucial role that professionally developed multilingual vocabularies play in international preservation campaigns. The illustrated glossary stresses the importance of a common language in the conservation field, and the role that international cooperation plays in creating this common terminology.
The core of the glossary comprises approximately 200 def­initions of terms frequently used in specifications in the field of conservation-restoration of wall paintings and architectural surfaces. The forewords and preface of the book introduce professionals, students and decision-makers to complex issues encountered in the development, and use, of such terminologies. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography in this specialised field.