How will museums of the future look? | Sarah Kenderdine | TEDxGateway 2013

[Music] [Applause] we often hear that to discover something new we must study the old to invent the future we must understand the past the poet TS Eliot helps us reframe these ideas he reminds us that tradition cannot be possessed it must be reinvented and rediscovered by each generation my passion is rediscovering and reinventing tangible and intangible heritage as sensory experiences I do this through a combination of art and new technologies I'm fortunate to work with a team of very talented people and in collaboration with diverse cultural communities together we bring heritage to life in museums across the world this work is propelled by a sense of urgency the cultural landscapes that inspire me are under increasing threat politically motivated destruction of heritage has been with us for thousands of years but climate change catastrophes are increasing at alarming rates looting and theft are equally destructive of our cultural fabric and natural disasters wreak havoc and mass tourism is threatening to engulf those places that we hold most dear in these confronting times we must find strategies not only to preserve our heritage but to let its stories be rediscovered and reinvented this is both an artistic and technical challenge and at the center of the work that I create new imaging technologies allow us to capture the world at unprecedented resolutions laser scanning for example collects billions of points to represent places such as these heads at Mount Rushmore we can create precious objects in 3d and peer inside to see what we could not see before and we can scan artworks at such high resolution that when we zoom in and we're still zooming and still zooming when we zoom in we can see more than the naked eye can see but these new imaging technologies alone and not enough to bring heritage to life in ways that are profound and unforgettable and it's about creating new narratives of engagement that's at the heart of the journey I want to take you on today we begin in the dongwon caves of the Gobi Desert of northern most China at the Nexus of the Silk Road this world heritage contains 492 caves and 45,000 square meters of mural paintings and over 2,400 statues they were crafted by Buddhist monks over a period of a thousand years it's a sublime art Treasury that's like nothing else in the Chinese Buddhist world these caves are under serious threat from tourism and climate change there is a massive preservation effort underway there 60 full-time photographers are working it takes three months to image a single cave pure land inside the Mogao grottoes at dongwon is staged in a 360 degree 3d interactive enclosure it's ten metres across and four meters high and it allows over 30 people a one-to-one scale experience of being inside the caves this work starts with a browser of significant caves we enter cave to 2-0 and simulate what it's like to be there now if you're with a guide he will be using an LED torch and revealing only fragments of the murals to you the virtual world however is very powerful and we can navigate it we created a very high resolution magnifying glass that allows you to examine these murals in great detail here you're looking at the Sutra of the medicine Buddhas on the north wall of the cave using pigments studies at du Moulin Academy we recolored the buddhas to give an impression of what they would have originally been like and we modelled many of the elements in the painting including the instruments of 32 musicians that appear there this is obviously a harp coming from Central Asia and we filmed dancers in 3d in a blue-screen studio and inserted their video into the scene as well cave 2 to 0 is closed to public permanently of the 492 caves at dongwon there are only 30 open to the public this virtual representation of the cave has allowed hundreds of thousands of people to experience it worldwide taking the laser scan the augmented reality version of this work Prince this laser scan on the walls of an exhibition booth at exactly the same dimensions as the real cave this allows people to navigate inside the virtual model at one-to-one scale and examine all the details in extremely high resolution it's like a window on the world this work is particularly appealing for two phenomenon the first is the way that it creates a social dynamic around a single screen and this is at the core of the museum experience the second is the way in which it becomes a place for virtual tourism it's an interface for all ages young children middle-aged ladies grandmother and grandchild grandmother abandons grandchild and takes off of the screen when I was a child I was dyslexic and I lived in a world of images and sound rather than the world of words so it's particularly important to me that the future of interpretation is not constrained to a multitude of text but it's necessarily more democratic and open to multiple readings moving from ancient China to historic India place humpy is an artwork that was commissioned for France India year in 2006 and then toured the world since then humpy is both a monumental world heritage precinct and a vibrant center for contemporary pilgrimage and this artwork recombines 26 square kilometers of this extraordinary terrain in a 3d panoramic imaginary it uses a very rare camera there are only four cameras like this in the world it creates a left and right eye image which are drum scanned to create 3d panoramic worlds it's staged in a 360 degree screen which has a motorized platform at the center this allows visitors to rotate their field of view in 360 degrees it's a work for about 25 or 30 people where one person leads a journey of discovery through the many wonderful locations at heart there's a microphone on the platform and visitors if they speak into it release at Sanskrit text in the world coming from chapter 13 and 37 of the Ramayana to do the gathering of the monkeys at Kish Kindle when they discover a location of interest they go inside some of these are augmented with computer graphics by Indian artists and animators and the music is contributed by dr. L Subramanyam the Carnatic violin superstar but you can hear faint traces life [Music] this work has finally returned to India and it's now located it colored um in a vibrant cultural precinct that has been built there this is both the celebration of humpy and of Carnatic culture so on your next visit it's just 25 kilometers from the site itself so the last two examples talked about ways in which cultural landscapes can be brought to life but an important aspect of my work is related to objects and here you're looking at a small portion of the 18 meter scroll painting pacifying of the South China Sea pirates it's an icon item in the Hong Kong maritime museum and it tells of the bloody encounters between government forces and pirates in the late 1800s in the South China Seas it's again staged in a 360 degrees screen this time the scroll is enlarged over 20 times 55 animated events play out over the 360-degree screen these unfold the scrolls narrative in a series of vignettes as a CMAs open and close the the ability to use animation and magnification are what allow us to change the scrolls my narrative into a compelling action drama so moving from a single object to many objects we know at most major museums in the world there is only a fraction of the collection on display at the British Museum it's only naught point four percent most of the treasures are hidden from view so we need new strategies to be able to access our cultural collective of memory the video that I'm about to show you has never been seen in public before and I believe it's something that could change the nature of museum visitation museum experiences it is a massive data browser for Museum Victoria in Australia and it recombines over 100 thousand objects from the collection it links them together you can examine them at one-to-one scale and you can make connections between indigenous material social history and the Natural Sciences it's staged again in a 360 degree 3d environment it will be installed in the middle of next year on permanent display mumbai completes our journey today and there is a new artwork under development for the Prince of Wales Museum the 20 meter dome of the Prince of Wales museum in this artwork spherical fisheye images of the many wonderful ceilings found in buildings throughout Mumbai will be projected up into the dome actually this ceiling here is awfully good too and they are reflected in a mirror which is located three floors below so linking time and space past and present domes over Mumbai will invite you to rediscover the city with fresh eyes but this is a work that will grow over time and students throughout Mumbai will be invited to contribute images and ceilings that they've found that means that looking up will become a pastime for those with strong neck muscles and a sharp lens if we treat the past is a dynamic entity its future is vital and I believe that sensory social and democratic experiences of heritage allow us to imagine the future better thank you [Applause] you [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 109,766

Keywords: ted talk, tedx talk, heritage, tedx, TEDx, museums, Qatar (Country), professor, ted, innovation, tedx talks, ted x, india, mumbai, project, ted talks, australia, culture, art

Id: VXhtwFCA_Kc

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 11 2014