Preserving the Physical through Digital Means

Hello again!

For my senior thesis, I am hoping to look at alternate means of preservation. The rapid growth of technology has allowed for many new opportunities in the fields of Public History and Museum Studies. Google has partnered with many historic sites and arts institutions so as to create digital renderings of their buildings and sculptures, all of which are viewable through Google Arts and Culture. Other museums have allowed for open-source renders of their artwork to be placed on the internet so that visitors and any curious person can view an artifact in detail within their home and, for those with the ability to, create their own small models. I feel as if these technologies as well as new ones widely open up the field of digital preservation. Digital preservation (and the use of facsimiles) allows for many artifacts to be kept well beyond their natural life span. The unfortunate nature of physical materials is that, regardless of the sturdiness of the medium through which the artifact was made, they will at some point or another suffer from deterioration and other damages.

I am hoping to be able to work on a project with a nearby museum that would allow me to digitally render and then recreate an artifact or a series of artifacts in their collection. Ideally, the artifact to be rendered would be a functional piece so the durability of the facsimile could be tested as well. The recreation of a damaged artifact would be incredibly interesting to work on as well. 

The topics I am interested would involve research into photogrammetry and 3D modeling. I would need to learn different methods of photographing an object that would keep the depth, the color, and the overall shape consistent with that of the original. After talking with a friend who works in 3D Design and another in Game Design and Development, I have a couple of ideas of software I could use for creating the render as well as several methods that would work well for photographing the artifact(s). There are specialized programs that allow for multiple images to be composited into a single 3D render while there are other programs that I am capable of using that would let me alter the original render to be more accurate to the original. After creating an accurate replica of the artifact in its present state, it would also be possible to create an alternate file that could be used to "restore" any damages to the artifact. Those same programs also allow for the exportation of the file as an object file which would make creation in a fabrication lab incredibly easy. The recreations would most likely occur through several stages as each physical recreation would reveal changes that need to be made to the digital file.