Heritage Artefacts in the COVID-19 Era: The Aura and Authenticity of 3D Models

Abstract

Museums have been increasingly investing in their digital presence. This became more pressing during the COVID-19 pandemic since heritage institutions had, on the one hand, to temporarily close their doors to visitors while, on the other, find ways to communicate their collections to the public. Virtual tours, revamped websites, and 3D models of cultural artefacts were only a few of the means that museums devised to create alternative ways of digital engagement and counteract the physical and social distancing measures. Although 3D models and collections provide novel ways to interact, visualise, and comprehend the materiality and sensoriality of physical objects, their mediation in digital forms misses essential elements that contribute to (virtual) visitor/user experience. This article explores three-dimensional digitisations of museum artefacts, particularly problematising their aura and authenticity in comparison to their physical counterparts. Building on several studies that have problematised these two concepts, this article establishes an exploratory framework aimed at evaluating the experience of aura and authenticity in 3D digitisations. This exploration allowed us to conclude that even though some aspects of aura and authenticity are intrinsically related to the physicality and materiality of the original, 3D models can still manifest aura and authenticity, as long as a series of parameters, including multimodal contextualisation, interactivity, and affective experiences are facilitated.

From the cave to the virtual museum: accessibility and democratisation of Franco-Cantabrian Palaeolithic art

“…Virtual museums have many other advantages: creating new cultural services, generating greater tourist attractions, safeguarding heritage, lower economic cost, more efficient use of time, offering new possibilities for interaction and manipulation of the heritage asset, encouraging participation, greater accessibility for people with physical or cognitive difficulties, updating content without major infrastructure changes, disseminating a type of cultural property that is little known, raising awareness of these heritage pieces when the museum is unable to display them due to lack of space or preventing the inappropriate use of pieces that are too fragile (Cardozo & Papadopoulos, 2021;Gutowski & Klos-Adamkiewicz, 2020;Milosz, Skulimowski, Kęsik & Montusiewicz, 2020;Sabbatini, 2004;Tsichritzis & Gibbs, 1991;Wojciechowski, Walczak, White & Cellary, 2004). GARCÍA-BUSTOS et al, 2023 However, other authors point to two fundamental counterparts, known in the literature as "aura" and "authenticity" (e.g.…”

“…GARCÍA-BUSTOS et al, 2023 However, other authors point to two fundamental counterparts, known in the literature as "aura" and "authenticity" (e.g. Cardozo & Papadopoulos, 2021;Jeffrey, 2015;Mintz, 1998). The former refers to the experience and feel that the real piece exhibited in a real museum is able to transmit and create in the visitor, something that for some authors can never supplant in virtual tourism (e.g.…”

“…Dueholm & Smed, 2014;Falk & Dierking, 2000;Tsichritzis & Gibbs, 1991). In turn, authenticity is the quality of an object that is perceived as true and made in the past (Cardozo & Papadopoulos, 2021). In this regard, Kim, Lee & Jung (2020) argue that this drawback is linked to the quality of the technology being used, a circumstance that has improved exponentially over the years.…”

“…The crisis caused by COVID-19 and subsequent social distancing has forced many people to continue visiting heritage sites from their homes, which has increased the demand for virtualised cultural resources (Itani & Hollebeek, 2021). This type of tourism has established itself as an alternative capable of simulating real experiences in a sustainable (Talwar, Kaur, Nunkoo & Dhir, 2022;Verma, Warrier, Boli & Mehta, 2022) and immersive way, thanks to novel and more accessible technologies (Cardozo & Papadopoulos, 2021;El-Said & Aziz, 2021;Zhang, Li, Ruan & Liu, 2022).…”

“…For this reason, more and more institutions have a repository where they host their virtual collections, a modernising process that COVID-19 has accelerated (Gutowski & Klos-Adamkiewicz, 2020;Kim, Lee & Jung, 2020;Vayanou, Katifori, Chrysanthi & Antoniou, 2020). However, this innovative wave is not only the result of the impulse of these institutions, but also thanks to other non-profit organisations, financial support from national governments or large-scale funding such as from the European Union, and individual initiatives or small local projects (Cardozo & Papadopoulos, 2021).…”