The Lives of Objects beyond Ownership

Provenance history sheds light on the relationship between works of art and the social, political, and economic conditions of their biographies. Engaging with the provenance of objects establishes a cultural conversation across time and space with previous owners. For artworks in museums, the public has now entered into that conversation. Museums, as custodians of art and educators of the public, can play a significant role in going beyond the question of ownership to get to the heart of what provenance reveals about the meanings of art: the ways people bring art into their lives, and the ways that objects are loved and studied. This essay delves into these human aspects of provenance, which are too often absent from museum displays, and argues in favor of making this information more visible to the public. Finally, works by contemporary artists Hans Haacke and Maria Eichhorn are discussed as examples of projects that successfully expose complicated object histories and provenance within museum installations.

PERSPECTIVE TRENDS OF ACCOMMODATING SPSTL SB RAS COLLECTIONS

The library stock is a very complicated object, which key characteristic is a strict order of documents it consists of. The quality of library activities and effectiveness of library functioning as a whole depend on how it is organized. The stock arranging – as the process of its organization – presupposes search and taking decisions on the optimal regulating of documents in the stock. Rational stock arranging considerably increases operativeness of servicing readers thanks to reduction of time wastes for searching and delivering the documents asked, that, undoubtedly, is an important factor in the sphere of services provision, taking into account the speed of today life. Due to the active growth of documents’ quantity, that is characteristic for depository libraries, the need in vacant space increases yearly, selection and search for sources in the stock are getting more complicated. Besides, the problem of lack of space for stocks accommodation is connected with substantial widening of functions and changing the libraries growth, taking place under exterior conditions influence. The urgent necessity for searching modern and effective ways to solve this problem has become the basic reason for specialists of the State Public Scientific Technological Library of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPSTL SB RAS) to pay attention to, determined the principle task: to work out the complex of measures for optimal arrangement of the Library stocks. Based on the materials, gained in the course of work from all departments that hold collections, and with their direct collaboration the document “Strategy of accommodating SPSTL SB RAS collections for the period of 2020–2030” has been created. The object of the article is to give the notion about the current situation and possible decisions of the abovementioned problem in the largest library in Siberia and the Russian Far East.

Randomly Multiplexed Diffractive Lens and Axicon for Spatial and Spectral Imaging

A new hybrid diffractive optical element (HDOE) was designed by randomly multiplexing an axicon and a Fresnel zone lens. The HDOE generates two mutually coherent waves, namely a conical wave and a spherical wave, for every on-axis point object in the object space. The resulting self-interference intensity distribution is recorded as the point spread function. A library of point spread functions are recorded in terms of the different locations and wavelengths of the on-axis point objects in the object space. A complicated object illuminated by a spatially incoherent multi-wavelength source generated an intensity pattern that was the sum of the shifted and scaled point spread intensity distributions corresponding to every spatially incoherent point and wavelength in the complicated object. The four-dimensional image of the object was reconstructed using computer processing of the object intensity distribution and the point spread function library.

Computing the T-matrix of a scattering object with multiple plane wave illuminations

Given an arbitrarily complicated object, it is often difficult to say immediately how it interacts with a specific illumination. Optically small objects, e.g., spheres, can often be modeled as electric dipoles, but which multipole moments are excited for larger particles possessing a much more complicated shape? The T-matrix answers this question, as it contains the entire information about how an object interacts with any electromagnetic illumination. Moreover, a multitude of interesting properties can be derived from the T-matrix such as the scattering cross section for a specific illumination and information about symmetries of the object. Here, we present a method to calculate the T-matrix of an arbitrary object numerically, solely by illuminating it with multiple plane waves and analyzing the scattered fields. Calculating these fields is readily done by widely available tools. The finite element method is particularly advantageous, because it is fast and efficient. We demonstrate the T-matrix calculation at four examples of relevant optical nanostructures currently at the focus of research interest. We show the advantages of the method to obtain useful information, which is hard to access when relying solely on full wave solvers.

Object Tracking Based on Online Semi-Supervised SVM and Adaptive-Fused Feature

In order to improve the performance of tracking, we propose a new online tracking method based on classification and adaptive fused feature. We first label a few positive and negative samples, train the classifier by the online SSSM (Semi-Supervised Support Vector Machine) learning and these labelled samples, and then locate the position of the object from the next frame according to the trained classifier. In order to adapt more of the new samples, we need to update the classifier by finding new samples with high confident value obtained by the trained classifier and add them into the online SSSM. Finally we also update the object model by the online incremental PCA (Principal Component Analysis) because of background clutter, heavy occlusion and complicated object appearance changes. Compared with the basic mean shift tracking and the ensemble tracking method, experimental results show that our tracking method is able to effectively handle heavy occlusion and background clutter in some challenge videos including some thermal videos.

Multi-index, multi-object content-based retrieval with spatial summarization

In recent years we have seen the development of several novel content-based retrieval (CBR) systems that have had success by focusing on a specific domain and exploiting domain-speci c information. CBR systems allow users to query a media database using item content as opposed submitting a text-based query. In many CBR applications, the input to the search process is a complicated object that may be composed of several constituent parts. The proposed approach performs CBR queries by decomposing a complex query into several heterogeneous queries. We have developed a multi-index, multi-object CBR framework for geospatial imagery retrieval that extracts features specifically developed for high-resolution commercial satellite imagery. The results of these queries will be spatially summarized for a user based on both retrieval score and spatial distance. This allows results to be presented in a logical manner to allow for more efficient interpretation by the user. Further, we propose to develop an additional search capability that allows for multi-object searches by spatial configuration rather than simply by object-to-object correspondence. Additionally, to confront situations where a user has determined that certain search results are not relevant, we will provide online and memory-based relevance feedback algorithms for use with multi-index, multi-object CBR systems. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed methods; moreover, through the fusion of multi-index and multi-object search techniques, we are able to construct new, sophisticated query mechanisms.