A new technology with impressive military applications, developed with funding from the Pentagon, is to be put to more scholarly use: to collect data for the conservation of the painted caves of Dunhuang in Gansu Province, China.Smartdust is a collective term for tiny mobile computers with attached sensors and radio transmitters, known individually as motes. Unlike conventional sensors, motes can communicate with each other by radio and exchange information about their location and environment. Because they are tiny computers, they are can perform complex calculations. They consume little energy, because they switch themselves off when they are not gathering information, so they can function for months on the same battery. Finally, they are very, very small. The current prototype is the size of a matchbox, but the final version will resemble a grain of rice.The military applications of Smartdust include the tracking of tank movements by dropping motes from the air onto enemy territory.Smartdust is being developed by Professor Steven Glaser at the University of Berkeley, California. Meanwhile, Professor Chikaosa Tanimoto at the University of Osaka, Japan is exploring the application of Smartdust at the Mogao caves at Dunhuang.

The caves, which were listed as a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1987, are a honeycomb complex of 1,000 grottos hewn into a cliff, 500 of which are completely covered in paintings stretching from the 4th to the 15th centuries. The paintings constitute a 1,000-year chronicle of Chinese art and include extraordinarily sinicized images of the Buddha.

View: Full Article | Source: The Art Newspaper