by Jeffrey Brown
[The world is in danger of losing important and
irreplaceable pieces of its cultural heritage, some by natural disasters, some by
environmental damage, and others by the most venal of means, deliberate human
destruction. Science and technology is
trying to do something to preserve and protect the endangered artifacts by
creating duplicates based on computer images of the originals. Copies, no matter how precise, can never
replace the ancient art objects created by our forebears, but it can preserve
them for study in some cases, should the originals disappear, and less
vulnerable replicas can be displayed in places were the delicate originals are
in danger of deterioration or damage from human interaction or natural
elements. On 28
April 2017, PBS NewsHour aired
the following report, which I found fascinating even just from a technical
perspective, filed by correspondent Jeffrey Brown.]
Cultural objects
around the world are routinely threatened by war, looting and human impact. But
a kind of modern-day renaissance workshop called Factum Arte outside Madrid is
taking an innovative approach to understanding and preserving the heritage and
integrity of cultural works by copying them. Jeffrey Brown reports from Spain.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Every day, priceless cultural objects
around the world are threatened by war, looting, the impact of humans and the
passage of time.
But one organization
in Spain is taking an innovative approach to understanding and preserving that
heritage, by copying it.
Jeffrey Brown has
that story.
It’s part of our
ongoing series Culture at Risk.
JEFFREY BROWN: The tomb of Seti I, ancient Egyptian
pharaoh, we watched it being milled, printed, and set. But we’re not in Egypt’s
Valley of the Kings, and certainly not in the 13th century B.C.
This is a workshop
called Factum Arte in an eastern suburb of Madrid, Spain, filled with art and
historical works of all kinds, with one unusual thing in common.
Everything in this
large warehouse is a reproduction, a copy. But the work that goes on here
raises profound questions about just what is real, and what it means to
preserve an object.
ADAM LOWE, Founder, Factum Arte: We’re making copies of
copies.
JEFFREY BROWN: The man who leads Factum, with
evangelical fervor, is British artist Adam Lowe.
ADAM LOWE: The state of the art is that we can make
something that is identical to the original, under normal viewing conditions.
JEFFREY BROWN: So, is the idea that you’re creating
something that is, at least for the viewing experience, as real as the
original?
ADAM LOWE: The idea is that you can get someone to
understand the complexity of an object, and you can get them to read it in many
ways through encountering facsimile, yes.
JEFFREY BROWN: Facsimile, an exact copy or
reproduction. Factum calls its work digital mediation, and it operates as a
kind of renaissance workshop of people with different skills: software
designers, technicians, conservators, architects, artists, artisans.
Together, they make
copies with a cause, not to mislead, but to understand and help preserve. One
prominent example, this copy of a winged lion from Nimrud. It was cast from
sculptures now in European museums that were taken from the site in Iraq in the
19 century. Last year, ISIS destroyed much of what’s left at Nimrud itself.
ADAM LOWE: So, in that strange twist of fate,
everything that was removed in the 19th century is the only evidence that’s
left. And we would love to be able to send facsimiles, like this, back to
Nimrud to take up their place again on the site, so that you still keep that
connection between …
JEFFREY BROWN: I mean, that wouldn’t make up for the
destruction, right?
ADAM LOWE: Nothing makes up for destruction.
JEFFREY BROWN: Factum first attracted international
attention in 2007 by creating a replica of a huge painting by Paolo Veronese from
1563, The Wedding at Cana.
The original painting
now hangs in the Louvre museum in Paris, but it got there as a gift of
Napoleon, whose forces ripped it from its original home, a church in Venice.
Factum’s experts studied, scanned, slowly recreated it, and finally put it, the
copy, that is, into its old home.
ADAM LOWE: Many people started to question about
whether the experience of seeing it in its correct setting, with the correct
light, in dialogue with this building that it was painted for, is actually more
authentic than the experience of seeing the original in the Louvre.
JEFFREY BROWN: Lowe had another major win in his
recreation of King Tut’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, built next to the
original site.
ADAM LOWE: It’s a test between one scanning system.
JEFFREY BROWN: In Madrid, we got a tour of some key
parts of the process, which begins far away from this building, with the
scanning of the actual objects in the field.
That team is led by
architect Carlos Bayod, using a laser scanner developed at Factum known as the
Lucida.
CARLOS BAYOD, Lucida Scanner: We are capable now of
recording the surface of a painting, for example, and obtaining data that are
very close, that has very close correspondence to reality.
JEFFREY BROWN: How close?
CARLOS BAYOD: Well, in terms of resolution, we are
talking about 100 microns, so one point of information every 10th of a
millimeter.
JEFFREY BROWN: The data about the surface, even of
something we think of as being flat, is used to create a detailed relief map of
the object, without ever touching and potentially harming it, to understand how
any intervention or restoration might play out.
CARLOS BAYOD: We believe this information should be
very useful for conservators, people who have the duty of taking care of the
works of art.
JEFFREY BROWN: To go further and build a facsimile of
the work, in this case the tomb of Seti I, the data is crunched and fed into
milling machines, computer numeric code routers, or 3-D printers to create the
relief.
In another room,
using a Factum-built printer run by Rafa Rachewsky, the photographed image is
etched onto a custom-created surface known as a skin.
RAFA RACHEWSKY, Factum Arte: And it’s very thin, as you can
see. It stretches enough so you can lay it onto the relief, and then you can
place exactly where you want.
JEFFREY BROWN: Rachewsky carefully aligns the printed
skin with the relief, and using contact glue:
RAFA RACHEWSKY: You want to be sure that you get
everywhere.
JEFFREY BROWN: Because you want it to hold for several
thousand years, right?
(LAUGHTER)
RAFA RACHEWSKY: Exactly.
JEFFREY BROWN: It’s then vacuum-sealed.
RAFA RACHEWSKY: As the air is coming out, these two are
joining together.
JEFFREY BROWN: So, now it’s really fusing into one.
RAFA RACHEWSKY: Exactly.
JEFFREY BROWN: The result, a test panel of the tomb of
Seti I, representing less than 1 percent of what will be a full-scale replica,
to eventually go on display next to the original in Luxor.
And why build a
replica of the tomb? Because, says Adam Lowe, mass tourism, our own need to see
the original in a place never designed for our biological presence, has its
consequences.
ADAM LOWE: But what we’re really asking the
visitors to do is to enter into a new contract for preserving things for the
future, because by going to see something that was designed to last for
eternity, but never to be visited, you’re contributing to its destruction.
JEFFREY BROWN: This is expensive work, developing new
tools and techniques to take on whatever challenges the world of conservation
throws at it.
To finance it, Factum
builds custom pieces for contemporary artists, like this piece for Saudi
Arabian artist Abdulnasser Gharem, which combines the dome of a mosque with a
soldier’s helmet, and will be installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art.
Factum is full of
wonders, not the least of which was getting into a contraption built here
called a Veronica scanner, 12 cameras taking 96 high-resolution photos of all
angles of my head in four seconds. After an hour-and-a-half of 3-D printing, my
very own small bust.
Oh, my goodness.
As technology
advances and laser scans are increasingly replaced by this kind of
photogrammetry, it’s not hard to imagine a world in which anyone can photograph
an object and render their own model in 3-D.
ADAM LOWE: But I can imagine many things, so I can
imagine I can take a photograph, as we’re doing, and I could recreate something
from a photograph.
I can imagine other
people might do it for less noble reasons or for straightforward commercial
reasons, but that’s not a reason for not doing it. The recording critical,
because unless you record it, you don’t know how it’s changing, you don’t know
what people’s presence is going to it, you don’t know the effects of time on the
surface.
JEFFREY BROWN: While Adam Lowe is most focused now on
pushing conservation techniques, he’s also challenging how we think about
copies and their relationship to originals, the very idea of originality.
The classical
sculptures we know, he points out, are almost all copies of an original. And
all those masterpiece paintings we love?
ADAM LOWE: You go to the National Gallery in
London, you go to the National Gallery in Washington, and every single one of
those paintings has a complex history.
It’s probably
restored once or twice. It’s probably had more than that by certain dubious
dealers who’ve tarted it up to sell it. So, there’s a whole history of what
happens on a painting that’s constantly changing.
JEFFREY BROWN: There’s no original when it comes to a
work of art, you’re suggesting.
ADAM LOWE: No, I’m suggesting there is seldom a
very clear notion of conception.
The way we see and
understand cultural heritage changes over time. It always has, and it always
will. And the way we value it, the way we look at it, the way we appreciate it,
the way we display it, the way we collect it, all of these things are
constantly subject to change.
JEFFREY BROWN: A change at Factum Arte’s workshop
happening before our eyes.
For the PBS NewsHour,
I’m Jeffrey Brown in Madrid, Spain.
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