Bill Wei thinks it's time artworks had a little more to identify them than a sticker on the back and a document declaring provenance. "All that's forgeable," says the conservation scientist. His solution is Fing-Art Print, a technology that gives an object a unique fingerprint. The prototype device uses surface-profiling techniques to measure an artwork's roughness, down to a thousandth of a millimetre. "Roughness pretty much stays the same as it ages," Wei explains, making it ideal for identifying artefacts.
The Fing-Art Print consists of a NanoFocus uSurf confocal profilometer, which enables non-contact surface analysis, on a robotic arm, measuring tiny differences in height across the object to produce a three-dimensional false colour image. But Wei wants to take the technology beyond the museum. "The idea is to also fight illegal trafficking of archaeological objects," he explains. The lack of security at digs in the Middle East, for example, makes objects vulnerable to plundering. If they were fingerprinted immediately on discovery, stolen goods could be easily identified.
By: Victoria Turk, Edited by: David Cornish
Continue reading...
via Wired.co.uk
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/03/play/forge-proof-your-picasso
No comments:
Post a Comment