3D heritage visualisation and the negotiation of authenticity: the ACCORD project

Abstract

Abstract:This article examines the question of authenticity in relation to 3D visualisation of historic objects and monuments. Much of the literature locates their authenticity in the accuracy of the data and/or the realism of the resulting models. Yet critics argue that 3D visualisations undermine the experience of authenticity, disrupting people's access to the materiality, biography and aura of their historic counterparts. The ACCORD project takes questions of authenticity and 3D visualisation into a new arena -that of community heritage practice -and uses rapid ethnographic methods to examine whether and how such visualisations acquire authenticity. The results demonstrate that subtle forms of migration and borrowing occur between the original and the digital, creating new forms of authenticity associated with the digital object. Likewise, the creation of digital models mediates the authenticity and status of their original counterparts through the networks of relations in which they are embedded. The current pre-occupation with the binary question of whether 3D digital models are authentic or not obscures the wider work that such objects do in respect to the cultural politics of ownership, attachment, place-making and regeneration. The article both advances theoretical debates and has important implications for heritage visualisation practice.

The Untold Heritage Value and Significance of Replicas

“…The replica was credited with agency, particularly by the HES stewards who shared the refrain of it not trying too hard or pretending to be something it is not. As in other recent studies, the replica contributes to the life of the original (Foster, Blackwell, and Goldberg 2014;Jones et al 2017;Lending 2017, 132-40). It is effectively seen as offering homage to the original and adding to its value, what Cameron (2007, 57) terms 'selective canonisation', when copying enhances the status of the original.…”

“…Latour and Lowe (2011) posit 'migration' of aura from the original to the replica, and that replicas can even 'add originality'. Not surprisingly, the current literature reveals an emphasis on digital copies (Cormier 2018;Garstki 2017;Jeffrey 2015;Jones et al 2017), but we argue that analogue copies also have a past, present, and future.…”

“…The significance of place emerged in the ACCORD project's work with communities to co-design and co-produce digital copies of things. Place both shapes and is shaped by peoples' sense of identity and belonging, so it informed what the participants thought to be significant and selected to copy (Jones et al 2017). The act of getting involved in their heritage in this way was a means of making a connection with the locality and building a relationship with it (Jones et al 2017, 8), while the copies they created acquired symbolic associations relating to the place they came from and the associated identities.…”

“…An interdisciplinary, composite biographical approach that looks at the web of relationships between originals, replicas, people, and places offers a rounded perspective on what happened, and a temporal understanding of changing values and meaning. The sources will vary, and may lend themselves to historical ethnography (Macdonald 2013, 52-78), while rapid ethnographic assessment as practised here can illuminate contemporary attitudes to authenticity and value (see also Jones et al 2017). More commonly practised in America and Australia, rapid ethnographic assessment offers the means of understanding values that are not bound up in the fabric of the place and are not immediately obvious to the observer, and enables a more democratic and unselfconscious 'voice' to emerge from relevant communities of interest (Jones and Leech 2015, §3.5, 5).…”

HMS Falmouth: 3D Visualization of a First World War Shipwreck

“…The personal connections to Falmouth's crew add considerably to the significance of the vessel as well as being a further source of primary evidence. It cannot be claimed that visualization of HMS Falmouth was an exercise in participation and co-production, as encouraged by Jones et al (2018). HMS Falmouth does, however, at least point in the direction that such a project might take in the marine sphere.…”