The Factum Foundation: Re-materializing cultural heritage through technologyWe recently had the plea

The Factum Foundation: Re-materializing cultural heritage through technologyWe recently had the pleasure of interviewing Adam Lowe, founder of the Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Conservation and director of Factum Arte. Founded in 2009, the Factum Foundation is a non-profit organisation changing the role facsimiles play in cultural heritage preservation and promotion through groundbreaking digital techniques. Based in Madrid, the Factum Foundation has created facsimiles of some of the world’s greatest cultural treasures, including Tutankhamun’s burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings. Learn more about the foundation, its work and Lowe’s vision for facsimiles and cultural preservation in our three-part series featuring the Factum Foundation.About the Factum FoundationThe Factum Foundation was established to demonstrate the importance of documenting, monitoring, studying, recreating and disseminating the world’s cultural heritage through the development of high-resolution recording and re-materialization techniques. The Foundation’s activities include but are not limited to: building digital archives for preservation and further study, creating and organising touring exhibitions of the Foundation’s work, setting up training centres for locals to learn the different technologies developed by the Foundation to record their own cultural heritage, and producing exact facsimiles as part of a new approach to conservation and restoration. The Foundation’s promotes the public’s access to cultural heritage and ensures that future generations can inherit the past in a condition in which it can be studied in depth and emotionally engaged with.The Foundation’s sister company, Factum Arte, is dedicated to digital mediation. They work both in the production of works for contemporary artists and in the production of facsimiles. Some of their successful innovations include the development of the 3D Lucida Scanner; the writing of a 3D retouching software for use in the tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt; the development of a flatbed scanning system to record colour used on Veronese’s Wedding at Cana; a flatbed digital printer that can repeatedly overprint in perfect registration; a 3D printer that prints in cement from STL files; and the development of a system to record fragile manuscripts and books when they are open at an angle of less than 90 degrees  (used in the Biblioteca Nacional Madrid) to record El Beato de Liebana. “Factum is keen to work alongside Iconem in many ways and in many complementary things. While most of Iconem’s work tends to be for visualization, most of our work tends to be focused on recollecting the data needed to re-materialize things.” The Factum Foundation founder, Adam Lowe. Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation Virgin and Annuciation Angel were recorded with the Lucida 3D Scanner by the Factum Foundation in 2012. Credit: The Factum Foundation Does the nature of a non-authentic piece of art affect the comprehension of or transmission of its cultural value?The question is a very difficult one. I think we’re living in a time when the relation between originality and authenticity needs to be examined with an intellectual rigor and a forensic accuracy. First of all, the idea of an original object is not as fixed as people imagine. Think of an object just discovered, dating back to 3000 years ago: it will change and age depending on the conditions of temperature and humidity as it is exposed. You’re looking at an object which is very articulate: it contains the evidence of many acts and intentions. But with many objects we’re looking at that have been in the public domain, they have been restored, in different times, in different places, by different people. We know that every act of restoration changes the nature of an object, so in this case you’re looking not only at the original object but also at all the different levels of things that have happened to it in its life. I think that this awareness is very important in terms of ideas of originality and authenticity. Where the thing is different is the technology that is now available, allows us to record the surface, the colour and what lies under the surface: using 3D recording technologies and multispectral composigotography we can now build extraordinarily accurate maps that work as a time slice, as a record of an object in a specific moment of time. And that allows us to understand what occurred to that object, to really look at it and study it with forensic accuracy. This is the first time in history when accurate surface recording technology is coming into the equation. Recording the surface immediately tells many things about the nature of an object.The recreation of the Hall of Beauties in the exhibition ‘Scanning Seti: the Regeneration of a Pharaonic Tomb’ at the Antikenmuseum Basel, on view now. Credit: The Factum FoundationFactum’s original intention was to build a scanning system. We designed and built the Lucida scanner which is able to record the surface of an object with a very close correspondence. At the moment we measure with a resolution of 100 micron, you have a hundred million points per square meter. That measure allows you to inspect the data very very closely. This is very complementary, I think, to other methods as photogrammetry and white light scanning. Most of those techniques record the shape or something more than the surface. Once you know the surface and the shape and all these other aspects, then you’re in a territory where you can study and really understand an object.If your question is whether I lose something in studying the copy and not the original, what I can say is that all the copies will be only partial copies of the original object. What we’re looking at is how data changes, what data changes and how best we can preserve them for future generations.Be sure to check back next week to read part two of this interview. To learn more about the Factum Foundation, visit their website, follow them on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, or watch videos of their team and technology at work on Vimeo.Main photo: Adam Lowe, Factum Foundation founder. All photos courtesy of the Factum Foundation. -- source link

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