The Futures of our Past - Sikh Artifacts

THE FUTURES OF OUR PASTS: Three-Dimensional Representations of Culturally Significant Objects and their Humanistic Implications - the Case of Sikh Cultural Artifacts
SUMMARY:
Technological innovations have brought about a sea-change in the reproduction, distribution, sharing, and manipulation of music and musical products. These innovations have raised significant social, legal, and ethical questions. New innovations in visual and digital
technologies recently have raised similar challenges that are fraught with broad and significant implications. The collecting of cultural artifacts and visual materials has evolved from physical sites like museums and libraries to digital archives and digital libraries. Emerging digital technologies are quickly making possible new forms of access and use of artifacts including virtual museums (using the CAVE and other immersive visual technology).
This new set of possibilities facing visual materials is leading to less passive viewers and consumers. People will configure things as they wish and not be limited by the experts' visions of what is good, useful, or significant. This raises serious concerns about historical and interpretative accuracy, both concerning replication of materials and in putting them in relation to each other to produce meaningful interpretations. But it also raises possibilities about future artistic developments within a cultural tradition. How might artists engage already existing materials and works within a cultural tradition to offer new interpretations, meanings, and insights? What constitutes expertise? Who will be licensed to judge the outcomes?
INTELLECTUAL MERIT:
This project resolves two significant sets of challenges: the technological difficulties in creating accurate three-dimensional representations of physical objects; and the social-ethical-legal dilemmas facing the fair use of three-dimensional representations of significant art and cultural objects. From the computer science perspective this project will look at three fundamental unsolved problems: automatic 3D data acquisition of arbitrary complex shapes; representation of these complex shapes allowing search algorithms to easily access the right object or a part thereof; and the proper display/visualization of such objects as they serve the user needs depending on the user's questions.
Broader Impact: Once resolved we will be able to collect, collate, display, and distribute the materials for the purposes of advancing art, historical, cultural, and social research and education on particular cultures, and diasporic communities in general. We will be able to assess comparative studies of similar objects (their geometries, materials and functionalities) and their evolution over time. In turn this will enable better explanations of the evolution of societies (their technologies, organization) that produced these artifacts. We will likewise be in possession of the technological expertise and materials as well as the social guidelines to apply readily to other collections of cultural materials for similar purposes. We thus see this project as constituting the cutting edge of the relation between IT and humanities research, to vigorous mutual and social benefit. To anchor this research, we shall focus on the works of Sikh art and cultural artifacts. We choose this area of interest because it supports a larger project to establish a Virtual Museum of 500 years of Sikh art and cultural artifacts.
This is a highly collaborative effort between The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley and the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), at UC Irvine. In addition, the Sikh Foundation, located in Palo Alto, CA will provide financial and in-kind assistance in identifying and enabling access to virtually all major Sikh art and cultural collections in the West. The Worldwide University Network (WUN) located in London will enable participation of scientists from the United Kingdom. Educational outreach will materialize through all the UC campuses, but also through California State University at Los Angeles, Division of Education Foundations, and the Illinois Network of Charter Schools which will serve as test-beds of integration of this material into undergraduate curricula.