On April 1st, 2017, the CCA Experimental History Project and MAAD in History, Theory Experiments organized a series of free and public workshops on digital technologies used in the preservation and conservation of architecture and works of art. Workshop leaders included Carla Schroer (Cultural Heritage Imaging), Brinker Ferguson (University of California, Santa Cruz), Mia Feuer (CCA), among others.

In the past five years, specialist digital techniques utilized in museum conservation, historic preservation, and library sciences have become significantly easier to use and inexpensive to purchase. With a digital camera it is now possible to create highly accurate and sophisticated three dimensional scans of physical objects and buildings as well as high-quality scans of rare books and other two-dimensional artifacts. In addition to tools used in the three dimensional scanning of objects, such as photogrammetry, infrared and laser scanning, other digital technologies, such as “impulse responses,” enable us to capture and reconstruct more ephemeral aspects of historical spaces such as their acoustics. All of these techniques are “touch free” and suggest a new era of conservation and preservation that leaves physical objects unharmed. However, such techniques also suggest a series of responsibilities and raise debates anew that relate to the politics of how and what we “capture” with powerful reproduction technologies.

Please contact David Gissen  with questions.

All event photos by Irene Cheng.
Special thanks to graduate student assistants: Nicholas Scribner, Fangying Zhu, and Ming-Hsuan Kao