PERCEIVE aims at creating a new way to perceive, preserve, curate, exhibit, understand and access colored Cultural Heritage collections and Digital Artworks, promoting their re-appropriation.

These collections are, in fact, a priority because of their high fragility that requires shared methods to preserve and exhibit them (i.e. textiles fade within only 10 years, while only minute traces of the original polychromy on classical statues remains), because of the complexity of their study (especially with the attempts of reconstructing their original appearance), and because of the significance of being able to properly communicate these to future generations.

This will support the shaping of an European common identity around the concepts of “care” and “diversity” and at the same time strengthen the digital market for the creative industries. The PERCEIVE project starts from the twofold needs of better preserving and communicating colored artworks and, at the same time, improving and speeding up scientific process results, which could be employed to maximize visitors’ experience with a variety of digital colored collections including those for paintings, antique sculptures, tapestries and garments as well as for born digital artworks.

Following the coronavirus emergency, museums proved to lack the needed digital policy that would guarantee more sustainability through remote access for visitors. PERCEIVE aims at advancing the digital capability of scientists and cultural institutions, through a service-based AI architecture and toolkit; and by developing a new design theory for on-site and remote VR/AR/MR experiences, based on “Care” “Accessibility” and “Authenticity” concepts, with and for the creative industries, expanding the access to Cultural Heritage and Art outside museums for a wider integration with the society.

Our expected outcomes include new services, tools and prototypes, including: a PERCEIVE Tool Kit bridged to an online, easy-to-use Service; PERCEIVE Experience Prototypes for visitors; and a PERCEIVE Design Tool Kit for designers, arts professionals and educators. The project methodology will be focused on i) reconstructing the original perception of the colored artworks obtaining new images (also taking into consideration the original environmental information and lighting, when this is possible) to be applied to the digital artworks, ii) predicting the future development of color changes, iii) using the results of the reconstruction and prediction in interactive (onsite and online) prototypes (the experience solutions) and also in the definition of methodological guidelines for exhibiting the colored collections.

Our objectives

PERCEIVE will transform the way color in Digital Cultural Heritage and Digital Art is communicated, through a ground‐breaking interdisciplinary approach to appearance and quality, defining a novel comprehensive framework for capturing, processing, assessing, representing, communicating, and reproducing color images, to serve the current and future needs of stakeholders and individual users.

  1. Make heritage science results accessible for immediate use and further development to Creative Industry sectors, including Computer Graphics specialists, Exhibition and Light Designers, Game companies.
  2. Improve museums curatorial approaches to the study of colored collection through digital shared methodology and to the use of digital practices to exhibit them (making conservation science results accessible so that the can be used for purposes of curation, preservation, and exhibition by developing a common and shareable protocol for investigation and reconstruction, leading to a new digital empowerment in museums
  3. Improve color reconstruction and prediction methodologies and workflow (reliable natural perception, color reconstruction, light transfer and color change prediction)
  4. Widen the access and explore the use of colored collections and digital artworks, involving visitors and citizens (inside but also outside museums), improving their understanding and at the same time increasing their engagement with experiences that could be perceived as “authentic”
  5. European Citizens re-appropriation of Colored Collections, increasing awareness of their fragility and importance, through the development of “sense of care”, based on the sense of wonder, emotion and embodiment.

Scenarios

The PERCEIVE project is built from a set of concrete starting scenarios dedicated to: [S1] disappearing colors (polychromy on statues), [S2] color changes in painted objects (paintings and works on paper), [S3] fading of textiles (dresses and embroidery), [S4] collections of photographs, [S5] immersive color use in born digital AR artworks (with the importance of transparency issues in AR) and their long term preservation for future exhibitions.


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