Technologies, Geographies, & Temporalities: Cultural Heritage & Digital Imaging Symposium, April 6

A Florida State University Department of Art History Symposium

April 6, 2019, 10am-5pm
2004 WJB

Digital technologies have greatly enhanced the documentation, research, and discussion of cultural heritage. Likewise, new media and visualization techniques have fundamentally changed the depth and scope of how information is disseminated and raised ethical and philosophical issues concerning authenticity, representation, reproducibility, preservation, and education that impact policy, stakeholders, and popular knowledge. This symposium explores relationships between time, space, and technology in cultural heritage today and how new technologies are and can be used in the diffusion of research and the presentation of cultural heritage and its context.

We will examine how digital technologies can be used to develop novel ways of sharing cultural heritage, tangible and intangible, with a broader public via museums, websites, and 3D printing, among other avenues of dissemination. We are interested to see how these new forms of representation impact cultural heritage education and affect basic research, as these representations become the matrix through which new questions and models are constructed. We hope to query how we must think about the contextualization of this information so that it does not merely feed into a kind of artifactual or technological fetishism of the past, but rather enhances people’s engagement with cultural heritage.

Schedule

10:00am

Land Acknowledgement
Kristin Dowell, Florida State University

Welcome and Introductory Remarks
Paul Niell, Florida State University

Session I

10:15-10:45am
“Re-Presenting the Past for the Future”
Sheila Bonde, Brown University and Clark Maines, Wesleyan University
Sheila Bonde received her BA from Cornell and her MA and PhD from Harvard. She has taught at Brown since 1984, and has served as Dean of the Graduate School and Chair of her department. Clark Maines received his BA from Bucknell and his MA and Ph degrees from the Pennsylvania State University. He is Professor emeritus at Wesleyan University.

Sheila Bonde and Clark Maines have co-directed excavations on five monastic sites, and have engaged not only with the architecture of the church, but with the domestic and industrial buildings within the complexes, and aspects of the landscape (such as hydraulics). They are interested in the ways in which texts, buildings, pottery, pipes and bones sometimes tell conflicting stories.  Their research uses architectural history, archival research, archaeology, social anthropological approaches and digital humanities to study medieval built and non-built spaces.

Bonde and Maines are currently exploring new CAD and graphic strategies for presenting and analyzing the monastic site of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes through a Mellon-supported Digital Initiatives project on the Sensory Monastery. Each of the monasteries they have excavated was attached to a different order and their work aims to refocus monastic art history from its preoccupation with Cluny and the Cistercians to other orders from among the more than 500 congregations that existed in the medieval and early modern periods. Their forthcoming edited volume titled Other Monasticisms will help to redress the narrowness of previous scholarship.

10:45-11:15am
“A Portrait of a City: Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice (1500)”
Kristin Huffman, Duke University
Kristin L. Huffman is a Lecturing Fellow in Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. Her research focuses on the deliberate uses and configurations of space in Renaissance Venice, and her interest in ephemeral experiences and transformed urban phenomena led her to join Visualizing Venice and curate A Portrait of Venice.

11:15-11:45am
“Two Places at Once: Virtual Reality and the Extension of Spatial and Temporal Access to Cultural Heritage”
Andrea De Giorgi, Florida State University and Matthew Brennan, Indiana University, Bloomington
Andrea U. De Giorgi is associate professor of Classics at the Florida State University. He specializes in Roman urbanism from the Republic to the Late Empire, particularly on the Italian peninsula and the east Mediterranean provinces. He has directed excavations in Italy, field surveys in Turkey, and has participated in various projects in Syria, Jordan, Georgia, and UAE. Since 2013 he co-directs the new Cosa Excavations and studies the 1930s Antioch collections at the Princeton University Art Museum. He is the author of Ancient Antioch: from the Seleucid Era to the Islamic Conquest, Antioch: a History, co-written with A. Eger, and editor of Cosa and the Colonial Landscape of Republican Italy.

Matthew Brennan is a PhD candidate in the School of Informatics at Indiana University; he expects to earn his Ph.D. during the 2019-20 academic year. Matt earned his Bachelors degree in Architecture at the University of Virginia. Since 2010 he has been associated with the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory with primary responsibilities for its Digital Hadrian’s Villa Project, the Virtual Meridian of Augustus Project, and the Uffizi 3D Digitization Project. He has had extensive archaeological fieldwork experience, notably at the Florida State-Bryn Mawr excavations at Cosa in Tuscany, where he directs the ‘Digital Cosa’ project. His current interests lie in the application of technologies, particularly virtual reality, to humanities fields such as Art and Architectural History, and archaeology.   

Session II

2:30pm-3:00pm
“Meghann O’Brien’s ‘Wrapped in the Cloud’: Working Together at the Interface”
Kate Hennessy, Simon Fraser University
Kate Hennessy is an Associate Professor specializing in Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology, where she leads the Making Culture Lab. Her research explores the role of digital technology in the documentation and safeguarding of cultural heritage, and the mediation of culture, history, objects, and subjects in new forms. Her video and multimedia works investigate documentary, archival, and computational practices to address histories of place and space. Her work has been published in journals such as Leonardo, American Indian Quarterly, and Cultural Anthropology. She has co-curated and produced award-winning online exhibits for the Virtual Museum of Canada. She is one of the cofounders of the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective.

3:00-3:30pm
“My Life As An Avatar”
Skawennati, Independent artist
Skawennati makes art that addresses history, the future, and change from her perspective as an urban Mohawk woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. She is Co-Director of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, a research network based at Concordia University in Montreal and Partnership Coordinator of the Initiative for Indigenous Futures.

3:30-4:00pm
“The Benefits of Lidar and Large-Scale Collaborative Research in the Maya Lowlands”
Francisco Estrada-Belli, Tulane University
Francisco Estrada-Belli (Ph.D. 1998, Boston University) specializes in Maya archaeology, Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems. He is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and a National Geographic Explorer.   His research in the Holmul region of Guatemala focuses on human-environment dynamics and political organization  from 1000 BCE to 1000 CE.   He is the author of The First Maya Civilization. Ritual and Power before the Classic Period and co-founder of the Maya Archaeology Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to protecting and promoting ancient Maya heritage.

4:00-4:30pm

“Digital Ecologies: Representation and Authenticity from Olmec Art to the Nefertiti Hack”
Michael Carrasco and Joshua Englehardt, Florida State University