In 2017, CCA HTX faculty David Gissen was invited to be a consultant for the “Reproductions of Art and Cultural Heritage” consortium. The group is led by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London and the Peri Foundation, and its participants include The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, and the Hermitage State Museum in St. Petersburg.
ReACH (Reproduction of Art and Cultural Heritage) was launched at the headquarters of UNESCO in Paris in May 2017, and is devoted to rethinking how we reproduce, store and share works of art and cultural heritage.
In July of 2017, Gissen presented his current research on the “environmental reproduction” of cultural artifacts to the directors of the above museums and related professionals at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Environmental reproduction (a concept developed by Gissen) is one of the techniques being examined by ReACH, and it involves the use of computational tools to create reproductions of cultural artifacts that convey aspects of their historic environments. An early example of the use of environmental reproduction techniques on text-based artifacts can be found here.
Read the Victoria and Albert Museum’s information about the project