Plenary Sessions

CLOSING PLENARY

Tuesday — 2:15 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Beyond Illustration: New Dimensions of 3D Modeling of Cultural Heritage Sites and Monuments Bernard Frischer Director Virtual World Heritage Laboratory University of Virginia

In this talk, Bernard Frischer will trace the development of humanists’ use of 3D digital technologies over the past twenty years. He will argue that as these new digital tools have been adopted and more widely used to capture and represent 3D data of cultural artifacts on various scales from cylinder seals to entire cities, humanists have come to understand that their true power lies not so much in their ability to illustrate knowledge as to serve as discovery tools for generating new insights. As such, they have the potential to transform the way humanists think about the past.

About the speaker:
Bernard Frischer is a leading digital humanist and the author of six printed books, three e-books, and dozens of articles on virtual heritage, Classics, and the survival of the Classical world. He received his B.A. in Classics from Wesleyan University (CT) in 1971 and his Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Heidelberg in 1975. He taught Classics at UCLA from 1976 to 2004. Since then he has been Professor of Art History and Classics at the University of Virginia, where from 2004-09 he also served as Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. He is currently Director of the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory, whose mission is to apply 3D digital tools to simulating cultural heritage artifacts and sites as heuristic instruments of discovery. He has been a guest professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1993), the University of Bologna (1994), Beijing Normal University (2009) and held the post of Professor-in-Charge of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome (2000-01). He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows, a Fellow and trustee of the American Academy in Rome, and he has won research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (1981, 1996) and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (1997). From 1996 to 2003 he directed the excavations of Horace’s Villa sponsored by the American Academy in Rome, and from 1996 to 2004 he was founding director of the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory. The lab was one of the first in the world to use 3D computer modeling to reconstruct cultural heritage sites. Frischer has overseen many significant modeling projects, including “Rome Reborn,” the virtual recreation of the entire city of ancient Rome within the Aurelian Walls. In 2005 he was given the Pioneer Award of the International Society on Virtual Systems and Multimedia. In 2009, he was the recipient of the Tartessus Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Spanish Society of Virtual Archaeology.

http://vwhl.clas.virginia.edu/
http://www.frischerconsulting.com/frischer/

Presentation