The Visionary Cross Project

I have always tended to think that any sort of digitalization process necessarily subtracts from the overall value of the piece being digitalized.  Of course, such an opinion doesn’t make any sense. As Sperberg-McQueen makes clear and as professor Galey emphasized on the course blog, digitalizing an artifact doesn’t actually (or at least not usually) change the original nature of that artifact.  However, I still can’t help but think of it in terms of a Benjaminian aura being diluted with each level of representation. Regardless of my bias, there are a few ways in which digital representation can add value to the original, such as the Visionary Cross Project.

One of the main reasons I find this project so incredible is because I really have no idea what is possible in this world anymore. Essentially the project is creating a multimedia dossier of artefacts that belong to the Cult of the Cross: three physical crosses and a text (the Vercelli Book) that links them. 

Because of their age and delicacy, these are artefacts that are no longer able to be experienced in the way that they were meant to be.  By creating 3D scans of these crosses, the Visionary Cross Project aims to allow viewers to “walk around” the artefacts and read the engraved text—as they likely would have been experienced in the 8th - 10th centuries.  Additionally, it is possible to highlight panels on the individual crosses so that an explanation or a translation of the text will show up in a side panel.  Because the crosses can be rotated in multiple ways, it will actually be possible for modern viewers to experience and manipulate these crosses in a way that was not previously possible (the video below shows some of those options)

 

Full disclosure: after failing to upload this video directly from
YouTube, I just recorded it and uploaded it. The user that
posted the video is VisualComputingLaboratory Isti.

Nevertheless, something is still lost in this representation.  Although placing these artefacts in their contextual relationship with one another is one of the primary goals of this project, the viewer must necessarily lose the experience of encountering these artefacts in their original context.  Maybe this is less of an issue because all of these artefacts have been moved and are stored in locations other than where they originally were placed, but there is still something special, for example, about seeing the Mona Lisa in the Louvre rather than online--no matter how well it might be represented digitally.

If anyone is interested in more information, here is a link to the project's page.

A lot of people have already posted for this week's questions, but I'm holding out hope that someone, somewhere will write about that weird Tupac hologram.