Living City 2013 Workshop

Living City 2013 Workshop, as part of a school term’s design-based curriculum connected to the KGSC/QUT Design Excellence Program and run from 11 February – 1 May, 2013, was essentially a three-day place-based urban design immersion workshop program for 25 Year 11 Visual Art and Design Students and 2 Teachers from Kelvin Grove State College (KGSC) held at both Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Gardens Point Campus and The Edge, State Library of Queensland. Mentored by 4 design professionals, 2 tertiary design academics, 2 public artists, and 12 QUT tertiary design students, the workshop explored youth-inspired public space design solutions for the active Brisbane City Council redevelopment site of Queens Wharf Road precinct. As well as the face-to-face workshops, for Living City 2013, an interactive web environment was introduced to enable students to connect with each other and program mentors throughout the course of the program. The workshop, framed within notions of ecological, economic, social and cultural sustainability, aimed to raise awareness of the layered complexity and perspectives involved in the design of shared city spaces and to encourage young people to voice their own concerns as future citizens about the shape and direction of their city. The program commenced with an introductory student briefing by stakeholders and mentors at KGSC on 11 February, an introduction to site appraisal and site visit held at QUT and Queens Wharf Road on 20 February, and a follow up site analysis session on 6 March. Day 1 Workshop on April 17 at the Edge, State Library of Queensland, as part of the Design Minds partnership (http://designminds.org.au/kelvin-grove-state-college-excellence-in-art-design/), focused on mentoring team development of a concept design for a range of selected sites. Two workshops on April 22 and 23 at QUT, to develop these designs and presentation schemes, followed this. The workshop program culminated in a visual presentation of concept design ideas and discussion with a public audience in the Ideas Gallery on The Deck, King George Square during the Brisbane City Council City Centre Master Plan Ideas Fiesta on 1 May, 2013, as referenced in the Ideas Fiesta Wrap-up Report (http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/planning-building/planning-guidelines-tools/city-centre-master-plan/city-centre-master-plan-ideas-fiesta). Students were introduced to design methodology, team thinking strategies, the scope of design practices and professions, presentation skills and post-secondary pathways, while participating teachers acquired content and design learning strategies transferable in many other contexts. The program was fully documented on the Living City website (http://www.livingcity.net.au/LC2013x/index.html) and has been recognised by the Brisbane City Council Youth Strategy 2014-2019 as a best practice model for making Brisbane a well-designed, subtropical city.

Random Gabor based templates for facial expression recognition in images with facial occlusion

Robust facial expression recognition (FER) under occluded face conditions is challenging. It requires robust algorithms of feature extraction and investigations into the effects of different types of occlusion on the recognition performance to gain insight. Previous FER studies in this area have been limited. They have spanned recovery strategies for loss of local texture information and testing limited to only a few types of occlusion and predominantly a matched train-test strategy. This paper proposes a robust approach that employs a Monte Carlo algorithm to extract a set of Gabor based part-face templates from gallery images and converts these templates into template match distance features. The resulting feature vectors are robust to occlusion because occluded parts are covered by some but not all of the random templates. The method is evaluated using facial images with occluded regions around the eyes and the mouth, randomly placed occlusion patches of different sizes, and near-realistic occlusion of eyes with clear and solid glasses. Both matched and mis-matched train and test strategies are adopted to analyze the effects of such occlusion. Overall recognition performance and the performance for each facial expression are investigated. Experimental results on the Cohn-Kanade and JAFFE databases demonstrate the high robustness and fast processing speed of our approach, and provide useful insight into the effects of occlusion on FER. The results on the parameter sensitivity demonstrate a certain level of robustness of the approach to changes in the orientation and scale of Gabor filters, the size of templates, and occlusions ratios. Performance comparisons with previous approaches show that the proposed method is more robust to occlusion with lower reductions in accuracy from occlusion of eyes or mouth.

Matching image sets via adaptive multi convex hull

Traditional nearest points methods use all the samples in an image set to construct a single convex or affine hull model for classification. However, strong artificial features and noisy data may be generated from combinations of training samples when significant intra-class variations and/or noise occur in the image set. Existing multi-model approaches extract local models by clustering each image set individually only once, with fixed clusters used for matching with various image sets. This may not be optimal for discrimination, as undesirable environmental conditions (eg. illumination and pose variations) may result in the two closest clusters representing different characteristics of an object (eg. frontal face being compared to non-frontal face). To address the above problem, we propose a novel approach to enhance nearest points based methods by integrating affine/convex hull classification with an adapted multi-model approach. We first extract multiple local convex hulls from a query image set via maximum margin clustering to diminish the artificial variations and constrain the noise in local convex hulls. We then propose adaptive reference clustering (ARC) to constrain the clustering of each gallery image set by forcing the clusters to have resemblance to the clusters in the query image set. By applying ARC, noisy clusters in the query set can be discarded. Experiments on Honda, MoBo and ETH-80 datasets show that the proposed method outperforms single model approaches and other recent techniques, such as Sparse Approximated Nearest Points, Mutual Subspace Method and Manifold Discriminant Analysis.

Improved image set classification via joint sparse approximated nearest subspaces

Existing multi-model approaches for image set classification extract local models by clustering each image set individually only once, with fixed clusters used for matching with other image sets. However, this may result in the two closest clusters to represent different characteristics of an object, due to different undesirable environmental conditions (such as variations in illumination and pose). To address this problem, we propose to constrain the clustering of each query image set by forcing the clusters to have resemblance to the clusters in the gallery image sets. We first define a Frobenius norm distance between subspaces over Grassmann manifolds based on reconstruction error. We then extract local linear subspaces from a gallery image set via sparse representation. For each local linear subspace, we adaptively construct the corresponding closest subspace from the samples of a probe image set by joint sparse representation. We show that by minimising the sparse representation reconstruction error, we approach the nearest point on a Grassmann manifold. Experiments on Honda, ETH-80 and Cambridge-Gesture datasets show that the proposed method consistently outperforms several other recent techniques, such as Affine Hull based Image Set Distance (AHISD), Sparse Approximated Nearest Points (SANP) and Manifold Discriminant Analysis (MDA).

Undulating matter : a topology of the studio

With specific reference to the writing of Dan Graham and the experiences of creative practice, this paper will elaborate an account of studio practice as a topology - a theory drawn from mathematics in which space is understood not as a static field but in terms of properties of connectedness, movement and differentiation. This paper will trace a brief sequence of topological formulations to draw together the expression of topology as form and its structural dimension as a methodology in the specific context of the author’s studio practice. In so doing, this paper seeks to expand the notion of topology in art beyond its association with Conceptual Art of the 1960s and 70s to propose that topology provides a dynamic theoretical model for apprehending the generative ‘logic’ that gives direction and continuity to the art-making process.

Intercalation of dodecylamine into kaolinite and its layering structure investigated by molecular dynamics simulation

Dodecylamine was successfully intercalated into the layer space of kaolinite by utilizing the methanol treated kaolinite–dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) intercalation complex as an intermediate. The basal spacing of kaolinite, measured by X-ray diffraction (XRD), increased from 0.72 nm to 4.29 nm after the intercalation of dodecylamine. Also, the significant variation observed in the Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) spectra of kaolinite when intercalated with dodecylamine verified the feasibility of intercalation of dodecylamine into kaolinite. Isothermal-isobaric (NPT) molecular dynamics simulation with the use of Dreiding force field was performed to probe into the layering behavior and structure of nanoconfined dodecylamine in the kaolinite gallery. The concentration profiles of the nitrogen atom, methyl group and methylene group of intercalated dodecylamine molecules in the direction perpendicular to the kaolinite basal surface indicated that the alkyl chains within the interlayer space of kaolinite exhibited an obvious layering structure. However, the unified bilayer, pseudo-trilayer, or paraffin-type arrangements of alkyl chains deduced based on their chain length combined with the measured basal spacing of organoclays were not found in this study. The alkyl chains aggregated to a mixture of ordered paraffin-type-like structure and disordered gauche conformation in the middle interlayer space of kaolinite, and some alkyl chains arranged in two bilayer structures, in which one was close to the silica tetrahedron surface, and the other was close to the alumina octahedron surface with their alkyl chains parallel to the kaolinite basal surface.

Absent interiors

Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha theorise in their work on cities and flooding that it is not the floodwaters that threaten lives and homes, the real cause of danger in natural disaster is the fixity of modern civilisation. Their work traces the fluidity of the boundaries between 'dry' and 'wet' land challenging the deficiencies of traditional cartography in representing the extents of bodies of water. Mathur and da Cunha propose a process of unthinking to address the redevelopment of communities in the aftermath of natural disaster. By documenting the path of floodwaters in non-Euclidean space they propose a more appropriate response to flooding. This research focuses on the documentation of flooding in the interior of dwellings, which is an extreme condition of damage by external conditions in an environment designed to protect from these very elements. Because the floodwaters don't discriminate between the interior and the exterior, they move between structures with disregard for the systems of space we have in place. With the rapid clean up that follows flood damage, little material evidence is left for post mortem examination. This is especially the case for the flood damaged interior, piles of materials susceptible to the elements, furniture, joinery and personal objects line curbsides awaiting disposal. There is a missed opportunity in examining the interior in the after math of flood, in the way that Mathur and Dilip investigate floods and the design of cities, the flooded interior proffers an undersigned interior to study. In the absence of intact flood damaged interior, this research relies on two artists' documentation of the flooded interior. The first case study is the mimetic scenographic interiors of a flood-damaged office exhibited in the Bangkok art gallery by the group _Proxy in 2011. The second case study is Robert Polidori's photographic exhibition in New Orleans, described by Julianna Preston as, 'a series of interiors undetected by satellite imaging or storm radar. More telling, more dramatic, more unnerving, more alarming, they force a disturbance of what is familiar'.

+-now

Interactive art system +-now has a tangible interface augmented and real-time computer graphics elements. It concerns creative audience experiences facilitated through perceptual emergence.

World peace for video art

A single channel video projection with image, text and sound components. It was projected so as entirely fill a 3 x 3.5 wall in a 6 x 3.5 metre gallery space. The work deals with the role of humour and the fictocritical in exploring the relationship between politics and art.

We need to talk (denim workshop)

A collaborative, participatory denim craft station installed by the LEVEL feminist collective in the Q[ARI] Project - Artist-Run Initiatives exhibition, at the Griffith University Art Gallery in 2013. The exhibition was funded by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, and featured seven artist-run-initiatives from Brisbane.

The impact of litigation risk on the strategic timing of management earnings forecasts

This paper examines whether managers strategically time their earnings forecasts (MEFs) as litigation risk increases. We find as litigation risk increases, the propensity to release a delayed forecast until after the market is closed (AMC) or a Friday decreases but not proportionally more for bad news than for good news. Host costly this behaviour is to investors is questionable as share price returns do not reveal any under-reaction to strategically timed bad news MEF released AMC. We also find evidence consistent with managers timing their MEFs during a natural no-trading period to better disseminate information.

Family tree

Artist's Statement: These suspended shipping floats symbolise the artist's grandfather's home on Keriri (Hammond Island), where the trees are decorated with floats of all colours that have washed up on the beach. Across the entire Torres Strait, these floats, often from Asia, wash ashore and become decorative objects, strung from trees and hung from island shacks. Their vivid colours, and sometimes reflective glass surfaces, play against the lush tropical setting, while their re-use reflects the innovative character of island life. This arrangement of the floats represents the artist's family tree, which he has traced back six generations to Mer (Murray Island) and Keriri. The strings of orange floats represent his immediate family and direct lineage, each member of which is named on a float, with the totem of the family painted on the base. The remaining floats trace additional ancestry and spread further back through time and space, spanning the Torres Strait from west to east.

Learning from Eames : six lessons

"Eventually everything connects—people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key toquality per se.” (Charles Eames) On 8 November, 2007, in a moment charged with serendipity, an Exhibition titled ‘The Gifted Eye of Charles Eames—A Portfolio of 100 images’ was opened exclusively to Brisbane. The Artisan Gallery in Fortitude Valley became the launch point for an international orbit of Fringe locations hosting one of 18 sets of 100 images each...

We need to talk : feminism and food (GOMA Harvest Picnic)

This collaborative, participatory work by feminist collective LEVEL took place at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) as part of the official program of activities surrounding the exhibition 'Harvest', 2014. It took the form of a public picnic, where women and their friends were invited to share cooking recipes while also discussing the possible recipe for a gender revolution. Groups discussed their ideas, before a public reading of potential 'ingredients' and 'methods' outside the museum on the Maiwar Green.

Silver palace

Silver palace is a multi-channel screen-based installation that explores the part that the landscape and narration play in cinematic constructions of gendered identity. The exhibition examines the ways in which our experience as a viewer of cinematic imagery can be both constructed and expanded within a gallery context.