Art out of the dark: Arne Flaten's "brave new world" of Art History in the classroom

Pixels, Paint and Pylons: Integrating Research, Technology and Teaching in Art History

A talk by Arne R. Flaten, Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Art History

Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College of Humanities & Fine Arts

Coastal Carolina University

Every spring, ten or so students at Coastal Carolina University get to experience art history in a way few students do.  Rather than sitting in a dark classroom staring at slides for an hour and a half, Arne Flaten's students are experiencing art history first hand, so to speak.

Professor Flaten's project, Ashes2Art (http://www.coastal.edu/ashes2art/), "combines art history, archaeology, graphic and web design, 3D animation and digital photography to recreate monuments of the ancient past online. With faculty guidance, students from Coastal Carolina University and Arkansas State University conduct focused research on specific monuments, visit the locations, shoot high resolution digital panoramas, write essays that summarize scholarly opinions based on published archaeological reports, and document those sources with extended bibliographies. QuickTime digital panoramas and immersive 3D models are built and posted online utilizing technologies including Panoweaver, Tourweaver, Studio Max 3D, Adobe Photoshop, Google Earth, RealViz Stitcher, Mud Box, Dreamweaver and Macromedia Flash." 

The students involved in Ashes2Art are majoring in various fields, including Art History, Studio Art, Business Administration, Communication, Computer Science, Education, English, Graphic Design, History, and Marine Science, each bringing their own talents to the table.  Since 2006, the Ashes2Art course has focused on reconstructing 4th century BCE Delphi, and the resulting models - the Tholos, the Temple of Apollo, and Athenian Treasury, etc. - can be viewed on the website, along with free lesson plans and educational videos aimed at primary and secondary education.

The results, however, may not be as important as the process of learning.  In creating 3D models, the students are forced to engage with the material in a way very different from reading a textbook or looking at 2D images.  Students are forced to ask what kinds of joins, hinges, or roofs would have been used for particular buildings at particular periods of time.  Unfortunately, not all questions can be answered in the course of a semester, or even over several years of work, and there are problems in creating and working with 3D models.  For example, there is no established system of peer review, and models available online may be inaccurate or may offer no documentation for the choices made.  What criteria should the SAVE (Serving and Archiving Virtual Environments) project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, use to determine which projects should be included in its database of 3D models of cultural heritage sites, monuments, and landscapes?  Just as importantly, how much conjecture is acceptable in reconstructions like those attempted by Ashes2Art?

Because of the possibility of misrepresentation, Professor Flaten and his students have not included color (yet) in their reconstructions of the buildings at Delphi, though they certainly would have been painted.  But without the polychromy, the reconstruction is incomplete.  In addition, architectural sculpture, not to mention the scores of sculptural monuments that would have filled the landscape between the buildings, are not included in most reconstructions.  This is no doubt due to the difficulties in modeling sculpture in three dimensions.  Most ancient the sculpture does not survive, and it is often difficult to determine where the sculpture we do have would have been positioned (again we face the problem of conjecture when trying to recontextualize the sculpture).  Laser scanning is the best option for dealing with the surviving pieces, but this process is far from simple and inexpensive, as Professor Flaten has discovered, and the resulting files are so large they are difficult to store.  Still, both the Ashes2Art project and the resulting models, videos, and lesson plans are pedagogically valuable, and the focus thus far has certainly been on education. 

At the end of Professor Flaten's interesting talk, important questions were posed: Where is this going?  How do you get past the wow factor?  What research questions can we answer with these types of projects?

Professor Flaten certainly sees the value of 3D modeling in its accessibility to a wider audience, but the issue of 3D modeling as a research tool (rather than a teaching tool) remains largely unasnwered.  In the end, Professor Flaten admits, "It's a brave new world."