Technology

Since May 1, the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Garden has been presenting an online exhibition that is part of the Getty Center’s Pacific Standard Time Modern Architecture in LA initiative. Since everyone says we’re going to be having more of them (online exhibitions), I decided to find out how this one was going. It’s called Form and Landscape: Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Basin, 1940-1990, and it had a rich reserve to draw on: an archive of 70,000 photographs donated to the Huntington in 2006 by the Southern California Edison Co.

It’s a corporate archive, with the photographs taken to document the installation of telephone poles, electrification of various streets, equipment, etc. At first, they were all taken by staff photographers, according to William Deverell, a history professor at University of Southern California and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, who co-curated the show, and later by freelancers. Since the gift, they’ve all been digitized, catalogued and made available on the Huntington site, with support from Edison. In the press release for the exhibition, Deverell called it “a gold mine of history.” One look at the photos here shows that it contains some fascinating images — of places that are changed or may no longer exist.

This exhibition came about after Deverell and co-curator, Greg Hise, a history professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, proposed public programs that included an online component in response to the Getty’s request for proposals. “The Getty was most interested in this archive, and it wanted the exhibition to be all online because they were funding a lot of other actual, real exhibits,” Deverall said. “We were entirely happy with that because it was really fun. I’m a traditional scholar with books and print but it was really fun to explore this.”

So the two went back to the Getty with the idea of inviting “an eclectic group” of people (professors, authors, art historians, photographers) to dig into the Edison archive with a theme in mind. Each would choose 20 to 30 photographs from the period 1940-90 and write an essay.

As a result, the online exhibition has 18 sections with themes like “Foodscapes,” “Consumption,” “Light,” “Flora,” “Collisions,” and “Noir.” They’re all great, Deverell said, but he singled out the last one because the curator, D.J. Walde, constructed a murder mystery from the photos and turned them into a film. “Those photos have a quality entirely outside their original intent,” Deverell said.

Speaking about the entire exercise, he noted that it was interesting that some images appear in more than one theme.

“We were really pleased” with the results, he said — and apparently the public is too. The Huntington says that 45, 238 unique visitors have explored the exhibition since May 1, and the site has had 156,210 page views. “That’s what we would hope to get for a brick-and-mortar exhibition, and it’s certainly more people than buy my scholarly books,” Deverall said.

It’s smaller than the Huntington’s website, though. Those numbers for the same period are 1,995,225 page views and 1,118,318 unique visitors.

Deverell said that he realized “how fun” this was as they did it, but more important — they as well as the curators at the Huntington learned more about this archive as the project curators explored it with different perspectives. So everyone’s gaining insight about LA history and architectural spaces. More online exhibits are probable: he can envision projects that track changes in a place at different times. In fact, the photo at right, City lights as seen from Mount Wilson in 1906  by G. Haven Bishop, has a parallel shot from 1911, which is part of Catherine Opie’s project, “Fabrication.”

I would agree with the Getty: this Edison archive was perfect for an online exhibition.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Huntington

 

The Vatican’s first foray into the Venice Biennale this year isn’t its only recent venture in the “contemporary” art world, if you define contemporary as state-of-the art: if you go to the Vatican Museums’s Gregorian Etruscan Museum, you can now enter a digital recreation, sort of, of the Regolini-Galassi Etruscan tomb, a site northwest of Rome that was discovered in 1836 and dates to between 600 and 650 BC. Artifacts from the tomb, which included silver pieces, gold jewelry and bronze cauldrons, eventually were sold to the Vatican, and are now part of its museum collections.

A recent article in ARTNews explained that the project, Etruscanning3D, uses new visualization techniques to “re-create, on a scientific basis, the original context of the Regolini-Galassi tomb as it likely looked more than 2,600 years ago. Motion sensors allow visitors to wander through the site while standing in front of a three-meter-wide, high-resolution screen, and a menu lets them choose nearby artifacts to examine more closely, from Egyptian-style sarcophagi to a black ceramic inkpot to a large golden fibula, or brooch, decorated with lions.”

At the Vatican, the installation has two parts: a non-interactive film in Room II, where the objects from the tomb are on display. The film is a “virtual reconstruction of the tomb with the digitally restored objects integrated in the tomb.  In this way, the objects are shown in their original context in their original state…” according to the project’s blog.

Then visitors proceed to Room XVI. There,

In the interactive application, the visitor navigates through the tomb and selects objects and their related stories through simple, natural gestures (such as right arm forward for moving forward) detected by a Kinect camera. When starting, the visitor can select a language (Italian, English, Dutch) and can practice the navigation and object selection when approaching the virtual tomb.  Once inside, the visitor can explore the entrance, antechamber, cella, left and right niche of the tomb with all its objects in place, select specific objects and listen to the stories connected to the objects.  This video shows how it works in English or Italian.

If you are on the West Coast this month, you can get a taste of that. Etruscanning3D has become part of a project called Italia del Futuro, an “exhibition on some of the most significant Italian scientific and technological excellence,” in the cultural heritage and archaeology division. This exhibition is touring the world this year and soon lands in San Francisco (July 12 – August 23) and Los Angeles (September 5 – October 4) as part of Italy’s Year of Culture.

If not, you can watch a video about it here — though, admittedly, it’s not the  best advertisement for this technology, which we will no doubt be seeing more of in the future.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Vatican Museums