A true exploration in a digitized version of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, this 360° tour offers the opportunity to discover different modes of representation of exhibited works (paintings from the 15th to the 19th centuries).
By navigating through the space rendered in 360°, you will be able to observe very high resolution images of the paintings, listen to comments in the form of an audio guide and discover the audiovisual study of a work carried out by researchers.
Carried out by the Corpus Audiovisual Engineering unit of the ICAR Laboratory (Sofiane Doulfaquar, Justine Lascar, Julien Thiburce), this course contributes directly to the different dimensions of the AAA project: for example establishing a methodology for analyzing works or even the ergonomic development of the future interface of the device.
Figure 1 – Interactive map of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille – UMR 5191 ICAR
By producing this course, we intend to allow multiple stakeholders to test the potential of digital technology to increase the experience of works at the museum, namely: museum professionals, the public and researchers. A diversity of needs therefore had to be identified and taken into account, both between these three poles and within each of them.
For museum professionals, for example, the relationship with works and the museum space varies depending on whether it is understood from the point of view of conservation professions (linked to the management and promotion of collections) and mediation (linked to the dissemination of knowledge and meeting audiences). On the research side, the main challenge consists of creating a working environment in which to test the two key concepts at the origin of the AAA project between art history, computer science and semiotics: the concept of work of art. augmented art, which involves thinking about the articulation between the works present in the museum space and the data and resources integrated in a digital environment; the concept of a complementary museum, which requires problematizing the articulation between the paintings hung in the museum, their digitization(s), other paintings and other images with which they could dialogue on the screen.
Figure 2 – The Lamentation of Christ by Luca Penni and complementary works – UMR 5191 ICAR
The following four axes constitute, in a way, the specifications which structure the development of the course:
– from the point of view of the reproduction of the museum space and the works exhibited there, the members of the project are attentive to the fact that the digitalization of the experience of the works could coincide with the cultural development strategy of the museum;
– with regard to the enhanced experience of the works, the challenge consists of ensuring that the museum constitutes not only the starting point of the digitalization process, but also an arrival point, by maintaining contact with the materiality of the paintings;
– concerning the notion of a complementary museum, it is a question of transforming the museum into the incarnation of this networking with other works, or rethinking the exhibitions based on the real museum;
– regarding the experimental dimension of the project, the 360° video tour consists of transforming the museum into a space for interpreting the paintings, a study laboratory where the behind-the-scenes aspects of research are highlighted.
These specifications require an engineering process which must strike a balance between scientific engineering dedicated to the practices of researchers and educational engineering serving the transmission of knowledge. In the AAA project, which is centered on the possibility of understanding a painting through other paintings, the whole challenge consists of articulating the choices made by the exhibition curator embodied in and by the museum itself and the points view of researchers on the works through the analyzes they offer.
This journey represents for us the opportunity to question the way in which audiovisual data engineering can take over a media such as the museum, the documents and the resources that it offers both in situ and on its website. , functioning as a sort of antechamber of the visiting experience (to prepare for an upcoming route or to consult images and information on works encountered at the museum). The increase in works is therefore twofold: it concerns both real space and digitalized space.
Figure 3 – Investigation of an unallocated painting – reconfiguration of the interior architecture – UMR 5191 ICAR
The choice of 3D Vista® software also constitutes a major parameter in the editing possibilities. We used 360° photographs rather than videos, for two reasons: on the one hand, to alleviate the potential difficulties of manipulation and orientation in the image and, on the other hand, to considerably reduce the size of the route in byte. These photos constitute the first layer of the device, a sort of “backdrop” called a panorama to which we have added multimedia content. There is a wide variety of data available: works in situ and their paratext (inserts and texts from the rooms), documents from institutional sites (descriptive sheets of the works, digitization of different resolutions, audio guides, etc.), documents from archives (work files including analogies, letters concerning their acquisition, communication documents), audiovisual documents from guided tours and finally researchers’ analyzes of the works and the mediation practices of guides at the museum.
This augmented version of the museum space aims to make the museum the starting point of a screen-mediated experience and the arrival point of an experience facing the paintings, in situ.
Computer version via the following link:
http://icar.cnrs.fr/projets/aaa/popscience/
Smartphone version via QR code: