Explorations in Virtual Conservation

Over the past eight years, I have made a transition from restoring very real, fragile works of art to developing interactive virtual solutions to the problems and challenges that contemporary conservators face.

This presentation is an overview of two research projects exploring very different conservation problems. The first, which is where my journey into the virtual began, sought to provide an alternative to the physical restoration of damaged painted sculptures. So many possible original appearances can exist for damaged artefacts, can we really presume to impose one fixed restoration on an object? As I addressed this question, gradually the true potential of using virtual environments as a way of displaying “restored” appearance became evident and new questions about the integration of such an approach with our experience of cultural heritage began to emerge.

The second project, currently in progress, is concerned with the potential of touch-enabled virtual environments to train conservators in highly skilled practical tasks. In conservation training there is very little time to acquire many exacting haptic skills. Practice makes perfect, but accidents may happen along the way. Can virtual haptic interaction offer a way of accelerating training and avoiding the “inevitable” on-the-job mistakes of the conservation student?

Angie Geary is Senior Research Fellow at Camberwell College of Arts, London, where she is pursuing research applications in conservation and fine art practice using virtual environments and multi-sensory computer interfaces. Angie also co-directs VEMDis Ltd., founded this year to develop innovative museum display systems. For more information see: http://www.arts.ac.uk/research/ciria/haptec/

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