(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Most world-famous museums are massively working on digitizing the existing museum heritage by creating databases with online collections. The Met is going even further by creating experiences that engage their audiences during the processes of scanning and digital archival. The emerging technologies are bringing us an incredible opportunity to craft new experiences for the audience, make content more accessible, explore new concepts about archival, design, education, audience engagement, and bring new perspectives on historical collections. We have created an engaging museum experience called Participatory Museum with the intention to make the visitors more familiar with the exhibited collection and possibly make them more interested in exploring it. It can also allow using the collections to support the creative practice of artists, designers, architects and craftsmen, simultaneously. For our research purposes, we chose to exhibit ancient Greek and Roman mythological sculptures in the Participatory Museum and offer an interactive experience for the visitors by personalizing a sculpture from the collection. We scanned people’s bodies and translated them into digital artefacts, extracted their faces from the 3D models, and attached them to a 3D model of an ancient sculpture. For this purpose, several workflows were studied and explored in order to achieve the fastest and best-looking outcome while creating the meta-artefacts, and new insights emerged by bridging the tangible and the intangible artefacts that led to creating a possible novel practice of the future. This project can be summarized in 3 phases: using photogrammetry for scanning visitors’ faces, processing the data obtained and modelling the figures, and finally, creating two exhibitions, one tangible using FDM technology and another digital exhibition using VR concepts. The conduct of this explorative study raises several aspects that are likely to be developed in more detail in future.