Workshop on cultural heritage and graphics in Graz

To view images which our ancestors carved into rock thousands of years ago in the smallest detail and, next moment, to roam for many kilometres through the landscape in which the prehistoric art works are located is a tempting thing to do for those interested in culture and also for researchers. Today’s methods of visualisation, digitalisation and the analysis of image and shape data make this possible and at the same time pose great challenges for scientists and scholars. In the “3D Pitoti Project”, an interdisciplinary team comprising more than 30 researchers from all over Europe occupied itself with reproducing prehistoric rock carvings from Valcamonica, in Lombardy, Italy, which are part of the UNESCO World Heritage, in the finest detail and also in the bigger context of the wider geographical environment – scalable from kilometres to micrometres – in other words, to a millionth of a metre. What problems they had to solve in order to do this is just one of the exciting topics at the 15th EUROGRAPHICS Workshop “Graphics & Cultural Heritage” (GCH’17) at which European experts from the fields of information and communication technology and cultural studies will rub shoulders.

Digitalised culture

In general, the demand for new methods by which cultural information can be digitalised, processed and conveyed to a broad public has increased. Another contribution to the conference is dedicated to how digitalised art works, on the one hand, enrich the experience of visitors and, on the other hand, how they support experts in their cultural analysis. Both require different approaches for different disciplines – which include machine vision, computer graphics and visualisation as well as interactive systems. Another workshop tutorial is dedicated to present challenge and approaches for 3D mass digitization of large numbers of art works.
The Graphics & Cultural Heritage workshop is meant to encourage dialogue between experts from technology and cultural studies, thus contributing to future digital solutions. The organisers of the event are TU Graz’s Institute of Computer Graphics and Knowledge Visualisation, Fraunhofer Austria and the Museumsakademie of Universalmuseum Joanneum. Click here for the whole Workshop programme.