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NOTES 1. Michael Ester, "Digital Images in the Context of Visual Collections and Scholarship," Visual Resources, X, 1 (1994), p. 23. In this article, Ester provides the defining formulation for any consideration of the use of digital images for scholarship in the arts. For a previous warning about the complex interface between art historical research and electronic imaging, see Marilyn Schmitt, "Art Historians and the Computer: The Context for Electronic Imaging," Eva '92: Electronic Imaging and the Visual Arts: Conference Proceedings (London: National Gallery, 1992). The best brief introduction to digital imagery, with excellent
glossary and up- to-date bibliography, is Howard Besser and Jennifer
Trant, Introduction to Imaging: Issues in Constructing an Image Database
(Santa Monica, CA: Getty Art History Information Program, 1995); available
also on the internet at: A landmark, special issue of Visual Resources (Vol. X, No. 1, 1994), edited by Christine L. Sundt, was devoted to "Issues in Electronic Imaging"; a previous Special Issue (Vol. VII, No. 4, 1991, edited by Alan B. Newman, Deirdre C. Stam, and Christine L. Sundt, was devoted to "Electronic Visual Imaging in the Museum." 2. This article is heavily dependent on information and ideas already published by others, on notices, images and discussions posted on the computer internet, and on conversations with experts who have already implemented the use of digital imagery at their institutions, a number of whom have been kind enough to demonstrate their systems for me. I have attempted to credit these experts and institutions where appropriate in these endnotes, partly as sources for others pursuing digital image projects. I am especially in debt to the editors and authors of two journals that comprehend the field with professional standards: Computers and the History of Art and Visual Resources. Many, unknowingly, have contributed through the internet - it is difficult to imagine any non-computer subject related to art history on which one could become informed with so little effort. In Oregon, I have benefited from conversations with the growing ranks of computer experts, especially, over the years, from the advice and encouragement of Christine Sundt, Curator of Slides and Photographs in the Architecture and Allied Arts Library at the University of Oregon, and more recently at Reed from the help of Marianne Colgrove, Associate Director, Computing and Information Services. This article originated in a report prepared for Reed College, which has pioneered the integration of computer technology at liberal art colleges and the use of computers for research and teaching. The college has supported my long-term interest in visual images as evidence, most recently with a summer grant from the Dean's Development Fund, which has made this article possible. For this, my special thanks to Dr. Linda Mantel, Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Biology, and to Martin Ringle, Associate Dean and Director of Computing and Information Services. There is no pretension that this article contains anything new for those who regularly work with digital imagery, though I hope the perspective of an interested user may be of value to those involved in crucial decisions about such things as fair use, standards, and internet access. For my art history colleagues and students, for whom some of the potential uses of digital imagery may be new, I have made a special effort to use common language instead of the technical terms rampant in computer literature. The argument of this article is not dependent on the state of digital image technology at any moment or on any particular projects. However, I have attempted to give references in these notes to a variety of persons, projects, publications, and organizations which may help readers in pursuing one or another aspect of digital imagery. These notes are in no way comprehensive but record only those leads that I have come upon, unsystematically, in writing this article, with the unfortunate limitations of my largely North American experience. 3. The Commission on Preservation
and Access, an independent body sponsored by colleges, universities
and related organizations to foster collaboration among libraries and
allied organizations, has funded important studies on standards, copyright
and fair use issues. An impressive list of available report and specialized
studies can be obtained from the Commission on Preservation and Access,
1400 16th St., NW, Suite 740, Washington, DC 20036-2217 (AMathews@cpa.org).
Many of their reports are available online from the Stanford Conservation
OnLine Resources for Conservation Professionals: Of special note have been the heroic efforts of the Getty Art History Information Program (AHIP), in collaboration with other institutions, to establish international standards and practices in the visual arts and humanities. Without these it would be impossible to document, store, access, and share the increasing overload of textual and visual information in the modern world. These multifaceted initiatives are described on AHIP's world-wide web site: (http://www.ahip.getty.edu/intro_imaging/0-Cover.html). 4. Prominent among these has been Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, who also serves as listowner for the Consortium of Art and Architectural Historians listserv ( CAAH@pucc.Princeton.EDU). Her "Piero Project" and digital image projects of other art historians are cited, where appropriate, in later sections. Archaeologists have been more active in investigating and using digital imagery. See P.M. Dew, et al., "Illuminating Chapters in History: Computer Aided Visualization for Archaeological Reconstruction," Papers Presented at the World Archaeological Congress WAC2, Barquisimeto, Venezuela, September 1990, ed. P. Reilly and S. Rahtz, Science and Archaeology, no. 32, pp. 20-27. See also P. Reilly & S. Rahtz, eds., Archaeology and the Information Age: A Global Perspective (London: Routledge, 1992). Likewise, conservators and conservation scientists have been quick to investigate potential uses of computer imagery. For the most advanced uses in both archaeology and museum conservation, see the forthcoming proceedings of the international conference, "Imaging the Past: Electronic Imaging and Computer Graphics in Museums and Archaeology," held at the British Museum, 3-5 Nov. 1994. For annual summaries of the most technically advanced digital image projects for the visual arts, see the preliminary conference information and Conference Proceedings of EVA (Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts), an annual conference, held each year, beginning in 1990, at the National Gallery, London. 5. In her 1994-95 annual report, Christine Sundt reports that the University of Oregon Slide Library circulated an average of over 200 slides per day for the calendar year, nearly 400 slides per day in peak months during the academic year. 6. For information on new art museum CD-ROMs etc., see ITEM (Image TEchnology in Museums and art galleries database), ed. Isobel Pring, pub. by the International Visual Arts Information Network (IVAIN, ivainjr@gn.apc.org), in assoc. with the International Documentation Committee (CIDOC) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). For reviews of art CD-ROMs see Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, ed. Helene Roberts, sponsored by the Visual Resources Association (VRA), review ed. Elizabeth O'Donnell. An annotated list of CD- ROMs available on art is included in a book scheduled for publication early 1996, Key Guides to Electronic Resources: Art and Art History, by Martin Raish (Medford, NJ: Information Today). Raish is Art Bibliographer, Binghamton University Library, Binghamton, NY ( mraish@bingvmb.cc.binghamton.edu). 7. The two most extensive programs with which I am familiar are at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Hull, and at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. At the CMC, the Executive Director, George F. MacDonald (gmacdona@muse.cmc.doc.ca), reported in May 1994 that, to date, over 200 master Photo CDs had been produced, holding more than 20,000 images, and that half a million analogue images were about to be digitized ("Dynamics of Culture and Identity, and the Potential of Interactive Technologies to Engage Users of Cultural Institutions," paper prepared for a panel session of the Cultural Technologies Convergence conference, Toronto, 27 May 1994). Also in 1994, William Weinstein (billw@amnh.org), Systems Analyst for Research and Databases, AMNH, reported that the Anthropology Department was "halfway through a twenty-five year plan that includes . . . computerizing catalogue records, and the creation of an image database of the department's 1.5 million artifacts" ("Designing an Image Database: A Holistic Approach," Visual Resources, X, 1 [1994], p. 49). He tells me that, as of Sept. 1995, they had completed photographing or rephotographing every Northwest Coast and Eskimo artifact in the ethnographic collection (the archaeology department is separate), totaling 18,000 objects, and digitizing every image on Photo-CDs at 3072x2048 resolution. These can be viewed at 320x240 resolution on the museum's internal network and, if necessary, at full resolution in the department. The museum intends to make these available on the World Wide Web, with the option of ordering a computer print or Photo-CD copy. They have now photographed about 7,000 of the remaining North American ethnographic objects, which will be available in the same way. 8. The Getty Conservation Institute is to be commended for its thorough recording of conservation projects in which it has been involved. The GCI houses an archive of c. 25,000 original 35mm slides of these projects, all carefully labeled and recorded in a database, and stored in over one hundred three-ring looseleaf notebooks. The images are now being scanned so that image and label information for each slide will appear on a single computer screen. Currently, the computer images are too small for anything but identification, but the original slides provide a veritable gold mine for research. 9. The same digitized image viewed on a video monitor, Kodak Photo CD player, or with an affordable digital projector will always be significantly fuzzier, with much less detail, than the same image viewed on almost any computer monitor. This may not matter for many uses, but fuzzy images are unacceptably limiting when one is attempting to study a work of art. 10. As a standard reference for degrees of resolution, it is helpful to use the five standard resolutions in which images are digitized on the widely used Photo CDs. Described in terms of the total number of pixels (a pixel, or picture element, is one dot) that we can see on the screen when we look at a digitized image, the five standard resolutions are 192x128, 384x256, 768x512, 1536x1024, and 3072x2048. A Pro Photo CD includes one higher resolution, 6144x4098. Kodak plans to make available one even higher resolution in the near future. Of course, where the monitor can display the full resolution of the image, the higher the resolution, the more detail we can see. The digital image industry seem to be accepting the middle resolution as its standard. Advertisements for even leading CD-ROMs frequently refer to their images as "high resolution" and "superior quality" when they are only 768x512. An image at this resolution pixelates slightly at the first standard zoom. To be able to examine a digitized image of a work of art in detail, the resolution must be at least 3072x2048. A Pro Photo CD includes the six resolutions listed above. In this article, I refer to the lowest two as "low resolution," to the middle two as "moderate resolution," to the highest on a regular Photo CD as "high resolution," and to the highest on the Pro Photo CD as "extremely high resolution." 11. The classic study was Michael Ester's "Image Quality and Viewer Perception," Leonardo, Supplemental Issue 1990, pp. 51-63; republished in Visual Resources, VII, 4 (1990-1991), pp. 327-352. Ester rightly points out that "decisions about resolution and dynamic range are inseparable from the intended used of an image" (p.58). This being the case, conclusions based on viewing the full image lose relevance once we accept the fact that an important intended use is to examine details. 12. Scholars in other fields who discount art historians' need for high resolution digital images often revise their opinion when they are shown that one cannot read the text in digital images of medieval manuscript pages unless there is high resolution. Many beautiful manuscript pages, with illegible text, have been put on the itnernet. The Vatican and IBM are currently engaged in a joint project to digitize all the manuscripts in the Vatican Library at extremely high resolution. 13. Examples of high quality CD-ROMs are: Great Paintings, Renaissance to Impressionism: The Frick Collection (1994) and other CD-ROMs produced by Digital Collections, Inc., Alameda, CA; The Dresden Collection: Works from the Gallery of Old Masters (1994), Brueghel and Rubens: Paintings in Vienna (1995), and other CD-ROMs produced by Saskia, Portland, OR; and CD-ROMs produced to order by Art on File, Inc., Seattle. On the other hand, paintings on the much heralded Microsoft Art Gallery: The Collection of the National Gallery, London (Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corp., 1993), so well conceived in many ways, pale in comparison with the National Gallery's own superb and reasonably priced 35mm slides. The award winning and otherwise deserving Perseus CD-ROM includes on its disk, in many cases, over 40 views and details of individual Greek vases, but precious few images on the computer screen that one would be willing to assign students for study (Perseus 1.0: Interactive Sources and Studies on Ancient Greece, Gregory Crane, ed. in chief [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992]). A new edition with higher quality images has been promised for some time. 14. The distinction between "higher quality" and "fidelity" has been made by Michael Ester. Understandably, he writes that "Assessment of image quality is a statement about the image's fidelity to the source reproduction from which it is derived" ("Digital Images in the Context of Visual ollections and Scholarship," Visual Resources, 10 [1994], p.16). However, for purposes of art history, we are concerned primarily with fidelity to the appearance of the work of art and would therefore favor correcting the color, etc. of the digital image while viewing the art rather than the image that was digitized. According to this standard, digital images can sometimes be made more "faithful" than the photograph, slide or transparency from which they were digitized. 15. See the publications of the Doerner Institute, Munich. 16. See David Saunders and John Cupitt, "Image Processing at the National Gallery: The VASARI Project," National Gallery Technical Bulletin, 14 (1993), pp. 72-85. Forthcoming: David Saunders, John Cupitt, and Helénne Chahine, "Longterm Colour Change Measurements: Some Results after Twenty Years," National Gallery Technical Bulletin, 17 (1996); Helénne Chahine, John Cupitt, Kirk Martinez, and David Saunders, "Investigating and Modeling of Colour Change in Paintings during Conservation Treatment," Imaging the Past (London, British Museum, c.1996). A similar facility, with more recent equipment, has now been set up at the Uffizi, Florence. See Vito Cappellini & Team, Florence University; Bruno Brunelli, Sidac, Italy; and Ron Cox, Time & Precision, UK, "The New Vasari Museum Laboratory System at the Uffizi Gallery & Colour Certification of True Colour Images," EVA'95: Conference Proceedings (London: National Gallery, forthcoming). 17. See Ian N.M. Wainwright, "Rock Painting and Petroglyph Recording Projects in Canada," APT Bulletin, XXII, 1-2 (1990), pp. 56-84; Ian N.M. Wainwright and John M. Taylor, "NRC's Laser Scanner for Recording and Replication," CCI Newsletter, No. 6 (Sept. 1990), pp. 6-9; and R. Baribeau, M. Rioux and G. Godin, "Recent Advances in the Use of a Laser Scanner in the Examination of Painting," Restoration '92, Conservation, Training, Materials and Techniques: Latest Developments, ed. Victoria Todd (Amsterdam, 1992), pp. 69-73. For further information, contact Ian N.M. Wainwright, Acting Chief, Analytical Research Services, Canadian Conservation Institute, Ottawa (ian_wainwright@pch.gc.ca). 18. See Charles S. Rhyne, "A Slide Collection of Constable's Paintings: The Art Historian's Need for Visual Documentation," Visual Resources, IV, 1 (Spring 1987), pp. 51-70, esp. p. 67 and note 2; reprinted with additional illustrations in Art History Through the Camera's Lens (Gordon and Breach, 1995). 19. The most dramatic example is the recent CD-ROM publication Frank Lloyd Wright: Presentation and Conceptual Drawings (Oxford University Press and Luna Imaging, Inc, Venice, CA, 1995). This consists of one CD- ROM with small browsing images and documentation for nearly 5,000 Wright drawings, and three additional CD-ROMs containing higher quality, full-size images of each drawing. Such extensive material on a single artist provides students a visual feast in which they discover their own topics for investigation. 20. For the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project, seven museums are making available digitized images of works in their collections for copying onto seven university file servers. The following description of the project was posted to the Consortium of Art and Architectural Historians list (CAAH), 24 April 1995: "This two-year collaborative initiative, launched in association with MUSE Educational Media, will develop methods and guidelines for the academic use of digitized museum-owned materials at colleges and universities. . . . Participating museums are: the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at the University of California, Los Angeles; The George Eastman House, Rochester; The Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Library of Congress; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.; and The National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC. Participating universities are: American University, Washington, DC.; Columbia University, New York, New York; Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the University of Maryland at College Park; the University of Michigan; and the University of Virginia. . . . Museums participating in this pilot project will make digitized images and information, representing at least 3,000 works (500 from each participating museum), available to educational institutions in standard formats. The educational institutions will install these digitized images and descriptive texts on campus networks for research and education during the academic year 1995-1996. A minimum of 3,000 additional works will be added during academic year 1996-1997. . . . Images and accompanying documentation will be provided without site license or royalty fees during the project. . . . Once the two-year test is completed, images and information will be withdrawn from campus networks, unless subsequent licensing agreements are enacted to allow for continued use. . . . If you are interested in receiving further information about this project, please contact Jennifer Trant, Manager, Imaging Initiative, by phone (310) 451-6382, by fax (310) 451-5570, or by e-mail to jtrant@getty.edu." A few commercial slide companies, such as Art on File and Saskia, provide digital images of their original slides for copying onto institutional file servers, under site licensing agreements. 21. Columbia University is undertaking
such a project for the short art history modules in their core curriculum,
a required course annually taken by 800- 1000 students. The difficulty
in attempting to make suitable images of works of art available to so
many students at the same time, previous to the appearance of digital
imagery, is illustrated by the fact that for this course digital imagery
will be replacing University Prints. Stephen Murray, Professor of Art
History and Director of Columbia's new Media Center for the Arts (currently
within the Art History program), has previously made available hundreds
of images of Amien Cathedral, with accompanying text, on the internet: 22. Peter Huenink, Associate Professor of Art, Vassar College, tells me that he and other art historians in the Department of Art at Vassar have for the past two years been putting some of their own research slides onto Photo CDs which students in their classes can check out at the library circulation desk and view on Kodak Photo-CD players or computer monitors. This use is in addition to the more common image bank ("pictorial reserve" at Vassar) created from the college's slide collection This has been facilitated by a cooperative arrangement with Eastman Kodak in Rochester. This project is budgeted through the library, where Thomas Hill, Art Librarian, has overseen the development of the project and facilitated an on-going dialogue about the pedagogic implications of digital image use in an academic setting (Thhill@vassar,edu). Although her slides are not yet digitized at high resolution, Kathleen Cohen, Professor of Art History, School of Art and Design, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA (cohenka@sjsuvm1.sjsu.edu) has pioneered the use of digital images in both standard introductory art history courses and courses exploring potential uses of multi-media in art history. She tells me that in her art history survey course, ancient-medieval, using c.4000 digitized images of her own slides, each week she puts two groups of slides with her own accompanying text on a controlled institutional server (architectural images on the institutional web) for students to study on 17 inch computer monitors. These are digitized at moderate resolution in 24 bit color and students can zoom in to examine details. In her seminar size "Art History and Multi-Media" course, small teams of art history and technology students use her digitized images to create multimedia presentations on art history topics. Professor Cohen's pioneering use of digital imagery developed naturally out of her previous experience utilizing images on film or video disk. 23. The most advanced, university-wide system with which I am familiar is at the University of Maryland, where every room is wired, and, to date, 12,000 images have been digitized on Photo CDs. These can be viewed anywhere on the campus-wide system at 768x512 resolution, dithered down to 256 colors. Walter Gilbert, Associate Director of the University's Computer Science Center (Walter_Gilbert@umail.umd.edu), tells me that, in past years, teachers in a number of disciplines, but not art history, have used these images in the classroom, projecting directly from the university's image bank. This term, for the first time at Maryland (and perhaps anywhere?), an art historian, Sally Promey, Assistant Professor of American Art, is beginning to use digital projection in a regular art history class. These images are projected at 768x512 resolution and, when the computer is clicked, require only 3-4 second to appear on the screen. Dr. Promey tells me that she is using this system in an upper-level class of 15-20 students, in a classroom ("theatre") equipped not only with digital projector and screen but also with small individual monitors for each student, where the images are a bit clearer than on the screen. All of the digital images Dr. Promey is using are drawn from the images provided under the Museum Educational Site Licensing two-year experimental program. 24. The European Economic Community (EEC) is developing two telecommunications computer networks, one linking libraries, the other linking museums and technical partners. A Visual Arts Network for the Exchange of Cultural Knowledge (VAN-EYCK, www.bbk.ac.uk/Departments/HistoryOfArt/van_eyck.html - now dead link) will provide cross-library access to art history photographic archives and texts. It will link The Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London; The RKD (Rijksbureau Voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie), The Hague; Cruickshank-Glin Archive, Trinity College, Dublin; Birkbeck College, London; Utrecht University & Vasari Ltd. Telecommunications links to be used include EURO ISDN and academic research telecommunications facilities. A Euoprean MuseumsNetwork will provide cross-museum access to images of works in the participating museum collections with accompanying text. It will link museums in Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, The Hague, Bremen, Bremerhaven, Copenhagen, and Hamburg, and provide interactive multimedia access for museum visitors (Achim Lipp, "Towards The Electronic Kunst und Wunderkammer: Spinning on the European MuseumsNetwork EMN," Visual Resources, X, 2 [1994] , pp. 101-118). 25. See the excellent images at
the worle wide web site for "A Hundred Digital Highlights: Koninklijke
Bibliothek" (National Library of the Netherlands), The Hague: 26. For example, day-by-day photos and descriptions of the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 17th-25th June 1995, were made available on the Internet (http://www.nbn.com/youcan/christo). 27. For a comprehensive review of the networking of images, see Richard J. Nees, Electronic Image Communications: A Guide to Networking Image Files (Medford, NJ: Learned Information, Inc., 1994). 28. A call for papers has been posted for a special issue of Visual Resources, guest edited by Robert A. Baron, Larchmont, NY (rabaron@pipeline.com) to discuss issues of copyright and fair use pertaining to images and related intellectual property. 29. Henry Gilmer Wilhelm, The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs (Grinnell, Iowa: Preservation Pub. Co., 1993), ch. 1, 6 and 18. 30. For example, the following announcement has recently been posted on the High Performance Computing Select News Bulletin (HPCwire), 23 June 1995: "Los Alamos, N.M. -- Four sets of encyclopedias could fit on an inch-long steel pin using a new information storage technique invented at Los Alamos National Laboratory. And future civilizations should be able to read the information etched onto the pins 5,000 years from now, without interpretive devices that convert computer data into language or pictures. The High-Density Read-Only Memory, or HD-ROM, uses a unique ion beam to inscribe information on pins of stainless steel, iridium or other materials that are built to last. An HD-ROM holds about 180 times more information than a comparably sized Compact Disc Read-Only Memory, or CD-ROM, today's cheapest data storage medium. Storage costs of HD-ROM are roughly one-half percent of CD-ROM costs. The HD-ROM should find immediate application in archival storage and data-intensive supercomputing, said developers Bruce Lamartine, a physical chemist in Los Alamos' Materials Science and Technology Division and Roger Stutz, a database and graphics engineer in the Nonproliferation and International Security Division. . . . 'The HD-ROM marks a complete departure from existing data storage technologies,' Stutz said. 'For the first time, a non-magnetic, non-optical data storage system can be made from truly robust materials.' . . . Since the medium isn't magnetic, electromagnetic fields can't destroy the data on HD-ROMs, unlike computer hard drives. . . . For binary data, the HD-ROM can describe in a human-readable format the instructions needed to read the data. For letters, numbers or graphics, the reader can recover visually apparent characters directly. . . . digital storage media are much more vulnerable than stone tablets or even printed documents. Magnetic fields, oxidation, materials decay and various environmental factors can erase digital information. 'HD-ROM is virtually impervious to the ravages of time whether from material degradation due to thermal or mechanical shock or from the electromagnetic fields that are so destructive to other storage media,' Lamartine said. The high cost of storage forces many organizations to discard valuable data. Stutz said NASA often is forced to get rid of satellite data and images that aren't immediately useful, even though the information might be of great future value. . . . he and Lamartine already have talked to film industry representatives about how to use the ion beam writer to preserve movies from Hollywood's golden age. For more information, contact Jim Danneskiold of Los Alamos National Laboratory at 505/667-1640, 667-7000 (slinger@lanl.gov)." 31. See Janice Mohlhenrich, ed., Preservation of Electronic Formats & Electronic Formats for Preservation (Fort Atkinson, WI: Highsmith Press, 1993); and Jeff Rothenberg, "Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents", Scientific American (Jan. 1995), pp. 42-47, though digital storage experts have objected that Rothenberg severely underestimates the physical lifetime of digital magnetic tape. 32. The QuickTime VR program, recently developed by Apple, allows one to produces a 360° panorama of the inside of a room, blending together in a seamless image individual stills taken from a stationary tripod at the center. The viewer operating the computer can then pan to right or left at her/his own pace, and to some extent up or down. This program requires (if one is using a 28mm lens) that a minimum of 18 stills be taken at regular intervals, with the camera in a vertical ("portrait") position. If one wishes the viewer to be able to see higher or lower portions of the room, the stills must be taken with an even wider-angle, rectilinear lens, such as 15 or 18mm. Computer viewing of a full 360° rotation of sculpture can also be produced by fixing a camera to a stationary tripod and turning the sculpture on a rotating platform. For this, a minimum of 36 stills, taken every 10 degrees are necessary. For higher portions of the sculpture to be viewable on the computer monitor, one must take additional series of 36 stills. 33. For computer-based technology in the fields of building technology and historic preservation," see the excellent recent special issue of the APT Bulletin; the Journal of Preservation Technology, XXVI, 1 (1994). Beginning with this issue, the editor has introduced a regular column on computer based technology. 34. The most impressive of these yet developed is "The Piero Project," recently renamed *ECIT* (Electronic Compendium of Images and Text), developed using a Silicon Graphics IRIS VGX workstation by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University (MALAVIN@pucc.Princeton.EDU) and Kirk D. Alexander, Manager, Interactive Computer Graphics Laboratory, Princeton University (KIRK@Princeton.edu). Based on this database, in 1994 and 1995, Lavin and Alexander taught a one semester, interactive computer course for art history students. They conducted the class in a room in which the teachers and students each have workstations, and in which images were studied and created, texts consulted and written, questions asked, answers given, and discussions carried on entirely with computers. Information about *ECIT* with demonstrations can be viewed on their homepage (http://mondrian.princeton.edu/art430). They now hope to cooperate with other scholars in testing other materials with the system they have developed. For a book now in press, Jeruselem, 600-1100 (Princeton University Press), Professor Oleg Grabar, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, worked with two graduate students to reconstruct three stage in the growth of the city using computer imagery. The book will include plates reproduced from the computer images. Professor Grabar, Muhammad Al-Asad, and Abeer Audeh authored a ten minute video, Jeruselem, 600-1100 (1993, unpublished) demonstrating the use of 3D imaging in their study. The video allows one to see the reconstructed, abstract 3D forms of the city design and of major buildings from continually changing perspectives, with Grabar mentioning a few discoveries revealed by this process. The Montréal Research Group (GRM/MRG) at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, are using digital imagery to study the urban development of 17th to early 19th century Montreal. The results were first presented in an exhibition with accompanying publication, Opening the Gates of Eighteenth-Century Montréal, ed. Phyllis Lambert and Alan Stewart (Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture ; distrib. MIT Press, 1992). The techniques used in mapping the evolving city, incorporating massive quantities of detailed information, is explained in an unpublished paper by Léon Robichaud and Jennifer Waywell, "Mapping the Built Environment of Montréal: Issues for Two and Three-Dimensional Representation," presented at the Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, Calgary, 14 June 1994. "The most innovative feature of our approach, is the ability to reconstruct the town automatically at any point in time. . . . This sequence is not created from a series of static slices but rather, as we move along the time-line, the computer continuously accesses the database to select and display those features that existed on each and every day" (p. 17). Color illustrations of a convincing computer reconstruction, by Victoria I, of the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii, were recently published in an article in The Art Bulletin (Bettina Bergmann, "The Roman House as Memory Theater: The House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii, LXXVI [June 1994], pp. 225-256). Bergmann notes (footnote 64): "'Walk-throughs' of Pompeian houses via computers were offered at the recent show funded by IBM: Rediscovering Pompeii, Exhibition by IBM-ITALIA, exh. cat., ed. B. Conticello, IBM Gallery of Science and Art, New York, 1990". Although the walk-through at the exhibition was a completed demonstration for the public, it was the outgrowth of digital image research, for which see Rediscovering Pompeii, Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, Soprintenza Archeologica di Pompei (L'Erma di Bretschneider, 1990), throughout, but especially pp. 104-127. 35. The most impressive virtual reality art environment I have seen is that of the tomb of Nefertari (Valley of the Queens, western Thebes, Egypt; 19th Dynasty, reign of Rameses II, 1290-1224 B.C.). This was "created in 1994 for the exhibition Nefertari: Luce d'Egitto, . . . at the Palazzo Ruspoli in Rome, October 1994-June 1995. Custom software for the application was written by Infobyte [Roma] under the direction of Dr. Francesco Antinucci of the Istituto di Psicologia, Consiglio Nazionale Ricerche. . . . source materials [provided] by the GCI and the Museum Egizio in Torino. Using a joystick, the visitor can travel in the tomb in an interactive, real time mode and experience the site [with stereoscopic vision] both as it appeared at the completion of the GCI Nefertari conservation project (1986-1992), and [to some extent] at the time of the tomb's discovery by Ernesto Schiaparelli in 1904. The visitor can also stop to look at a number of conservation problems and treatment methods, or to listen to recitations of hieroglyphic inscriptions that appear on he walls. . . . A three dimensional computer model of the tomb was produced using solid geometry modeling techniques. Images of the wall paintings were then mosaiced together and incorporated into the model to reproducer the interior surfaces as they appeared in 1904 and 1992 respectively. Virtual lighting sources were then placed inside the computer model" (GCI fact sheet, Feb. 1995). It is important to question what we learn from even this excellent production that cannot be learned from the exemplary publication Art and Eternity: The Nefertari Wall Paintings Conservation Project 1986-1992, ed. Miquel Angel Corzo and Mahasti Afshar (Getty Conservation Institute and Egyptian Atiquities Organization, 1993), which includes full-page color perspective views of the interior of the tomb. An article in the current issue of Archaeology reports on an exhibition, "Virtual Pompeii," to be shown at the de Young Museum from September 15, 1995, through January 7, 1996, followed by showings at other museums. The author of the article, Jane Vadnal, is art director of the "Virtual Pompeii" project. She tells me that each viewer, using a joystick and wearing headphone and goggles, will be able, for ten minutes, to move through Pompeii at her/his own pace, deciding what direction to turn, what buildings to enter, what sculpture or frescoes to view, and which peddlers, tradespeople, or priests to approach. Those of us who have not worked with virtual reality projects will be interested in effects such as changing shadows as the sun moves overhead and the morphing of sound from Latin into English as we approaches the inhabitants. Intriguingly, a decision had to be made about our height as viewer. Because ancient Pompeiians were shorter than 20th century Americans, the designers had to decide whether we were to approach the inhabitants face to face, as their contemporaries, or from slightly above, as 20th century visitors, "The exhibit was created by the Virtual Reality Lab. of the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a group that also created a walk-through of an Egyptian temple shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1994. The production is cosponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America and Silicon Graphics, a maker of computer hardware and software" (Archaeology 48 [Sept.-Oct. 1995], pp. 67, 69-70). Carl Loeffler is Project Director of the Virtual Reality project. 36. At the Art Institute of Chicago, Alan Newman, Executive Director, Imaging & Technical Services, Art Institute of Chicago (anewman@artic.edu) has joined with Frank Zuccari, Executive Director, Conservation (fzuccari@artic.edu), in making use of digital imagery to help in considering alternative treatment of paintings. Newman has produced a 9 1/2 minute video, "Electronic Imaging: Cleopatra; ' With Open Eyes' CD-ROM, Imaging and Conservation" (Art Institute of Chicago, 1994; unpublished), primarily for a lay audience, demonstrating electronic imaging projects carried out at the Art Institute. These include assembling an infrared mosaic, simulating the cleaning of a painting, simulating a drawing's original appearance, previewing framing options for paintings, clarifying x-ray images, and researching the attribution of a painting. Newman and Zuccari have produced an unpublished report, "Digital Imaging Methods in Conservation," on their collaborative project. 37. Following the completion of this article, two volumes of selected papers from an especially informative conference were published, including authoritative reports on the most advanced uses of digital imagery by museums: Multimedia Computing and Museums and Hands on hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums; Selected Papers from the Third International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums (ICHIM '95, MCN '95), San Diego, California, October 9-13, 1995, ed. David Bearman (Pittsburgh: Archives and Museum Informatics, 1995).
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