A Personal View of EVA London: Past, Present, Future

I first encountered EVA London in 1995 through my establishment of the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp), part of the World Wide Web Virtual Library. In 2003, I was invited back as a keynote speaker on the subject of website accessibility for cultural heritage resources. Since then I have been involved with every EVA London conference either as an author or since 2007 as a proceedings editor. This paper summarises the developments of the EVA London conference over the past 25 years from a personal viewpoint and celebrates the 30th anniversary of EVA London and the whole family of international EVA conferences. The development of the community around EVA (Electronic Visualisation and the Arts) is evaluated in the context of a Community of Practice. The paper also considers possible future directions for EVA

Early virtual science museums: when the technology is not mature

This paper discusses three case studies of early science museum-related websites in the 1990s and early 2000s, when web technology was still relatively new and evolving. The Virtual Museum of Computing (VMoC) was a completely virtual museum, originally produced in 1995 as part of the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp), an international online museum directory within the WWW Virtual Library, adopted by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The Science Museum in London was one of the first museums in the United Kingdom to have its own web server. The museum hosted an early meeting on web service provision by and for museums, concurrently with an exhibition on the Information Superhighway at the museum in 1995. Exhiblets were launched online in 1998. Ingenious was a multi-site digital collections transformation project, launched as a website in 2003. Virtual Leonardo and Leonardo’s Ideal City were two experiments conducted by the digital team of the Science and Technology Museum of Milan, between 1999 and 2001. The experiment consisted of the creation of a shared online 3D world, namely a reconstruction of the real museum in the first case and a completely imaginary world in the second case. This paper describes the above three case studies from the early World Wide Web and then draws some conclusions, from first-hand experience of developments at the time. We cover both the advantages and the challenges encountered by the various projects and illustrate why they did not necessarily become established, despite promising early results

Turing’s Sunflowers: Public research and the role of museums

In recent years, public engagement in museums is increasingly being influenced by the paradigm of “citizen science”, that is, active participation in research teams by members of the general public with no formal training in the field of research concerned. This paper provides an overview of citizen science approaches which museums can deploy using online platforms, digital tools and apps. It also aims to highlight challenges and innovations, as well as possible opportunities for cultural organisations to include public participation in research and knowledge creation

Time machines.

The chapter is concerned with the use of computers to represent historical time visually, typically as ‘timelines’. Research into the sophisticated practice and theory of early modern paper timelines in the eighteenth century reveals the weakness of current practice, especially on the Web. Behind the work of the early pioneers lay a vision of mechanising knowledge. At that time, this proved a productive metaphor, but in our own time the mechanistic properties of computers have tended to encourage an approach to visualising history that excludes all but the crudest aspects. Solutions are needed which use computing in ways that do justice to the demands of historiography

Augmented Reality Experience for Inaccessible Areas in Museums

In recent years, new innovations have been introduced into the cultural heritage sector, aimed at offering more engaging and accessible tours to the public. The article discusses the development process of the VirgilTell project, for the visit of inaccessible places in the Racconigi Castle, one of the Savoy residences in Piedmont (Italy), by the UXD Team of Politecnico di Torino. The places assigned to the project are being restored and therefore excluded from the tour. The VirgilTell experience aims to include and make them accessible to visitors, through a virtual tour including multimedia content for the entertainment and involvement of the users. The visit has been realised through mixed techniques between VR and AR for the narration of the spaces in which the user takes part in a journey made of narratives by characters from the past and objects that no longer exist. The VirgilTell visit was also created with the aim of anticipating, in promotional terms, the physical visit to the museum spaces undergoing restoration, so as to attract visitors back inside once the work is finished

Roman portraiture and biometric identification

This project utilised three-dimensional scanning technology in the study of ancient Roman art and archaeology: Roman representations of faces executed in marble. In the cultural heritage sector, three-dimensional (3D) scanning finds its primary application in documenting and reconstructing objects and structures mostly of simple geometry: bones, pottery, architecture or the imprint of whole archaeological sites (Adolf 2011). In forensic science, the face is interesting from investigative and probative perspectives, including both recognition and identification. Biometric methods of facial recognition have been part of a plethora of computer science-based applications used in the verification of identity (Davy et al. 2005, Goodwin, Evison and Schofield 2010). The aim of this initial project is to provide objective relevant measurements of key facial features from the two ancient Roman portrait statue three-dimensional scans, which will allow the delineation of relationships between individual portraits including formal and stylistics aspects. The work described in this paper proposal is truly multidisciplinary, it touches on many fields including : Classical archaeologies (specifically ancient art history in the period of the Roman Empire 31BC - AD400), Forensic Anthropology (specifically physical anthropology and human osteology, Facial Biometrics (specifically uniquely recognising humans based upon their intrinsic physical traits and features) and Computer Science and Statistics (specifically the analysis of large complex multi-dimensional data sets)

Roman portraiture and biometric identification

This project utilised three-dimensional scanning technology in the study of ancient Roman art and archaeology: Roman representations of faces executed in marble. In the cultural heritage sector, three-dimensional (3D) scanning finds its primary application in documenting and reconstructing objects and structures mostly of simple geometry: bones, pottery, architecture or the imprint of whole archaeological sites (Adolf 2011). In forensic science, the face is interesting from investigative and probative perspectives, including both recognition and identification. Biometric methods of facial recognition have been part of a plethora of computer science-based applications used in the verification of identity (Davy et al. 2005, Goodwin, Evison and Schofield 2010). The aim of this initial project is to provide objective relevant measurements of key facial features from the two ancient Roman portrait statue three-dimensional scans, which will allow the delineation of relationships between individual portraits including formal and stylistics aspects. The work described in this paper proposal is truly multidisciplinary, it touches on many fields including : Classical archaeologies (specifically ancient art history in the period of the Roman Empire 31BC - AD400), Forensic Anthropology (specifically physical anthropology and human osteology, Facial Biometrics (specifically uniquely recognising humans based upon their intrinsic physical traits and features) and Computer Science and Statistics (specifically the analysis of large complex multi-dimensional data sets)

Digital Art, Culture and Heritage: New constructs and consciousness

Invited presentation for special symposium at EVA London 2019. This half-day Symposium explores themes of digital art, culture, and heritage, bringing together speakers from a range of disciplines to consider technology with respect to artistic and academic practice. As we increasingly see ourselves and life through a digital lens and the world communicated on digital screens, we experience altered states of being and consciousness in ways that blur the lines between digital and physical reality, while our ways of thinking and seeing become a digital stream of consciousness that flows between place and cyberspace. We have entered the postdigital world and are living, working, and thinking with machines as our computational culture driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning embeds itself in everyday life and threads across art, culture, and heritage, juxtaposing them in the digital profusion of human creativity on the Internet

EVA London 2022: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts

The Electronic Visualisation and the Arts London 2022 Conference (EVA London 2022) is co-sponsored by the Computer Arts Society (CAS) and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, of which the CAS is a Specialist Group. Of course, this has been a difficult time for all conferences, with the Covid-19 pandemic. For the first time since 2019, the EVA London 2022 Conference is a physical conference. It is also an online conference, as it was in the previous two years. We continue with publishing the proceedings, both online, with open access via ScienceOpen, and also in our traditional printed form, for the second year in full colour. Over recent decades, the EVA London Conference on Electronic Visualisation and the Arts has established itself as one of the United Kingdom’s most innovative and interdisciplinary conferences. It brings together a wide range of research domains to celebrate a diverse set of interests, with a specialised focus on visualisation. The long and short papers in this volume cover varied topics concerning the arts, visualisations, and IT, including 3D graphics, animation, artificial intelligence, creativity, culture, design, digital art, ethics, heritage, literature, museums, music, philosophy, politics, publishing, social media, and virtual reality, as well as other related interdisciplinary areas. The EVA London 2022 proceedings presents a wide spectrum of papers, demonstrations, Research Workshop contributions, other workshops, and for the seventh year, the EVA London Symposium, in the form of an opening morning session, with three invited contributors. The conference includes a number of other associated evening events including ones organised by the Computer Arts Society, Art in Flux, and EVA International. As in previous years, there are Research Workshop contributions in this volume, aimed at encouraging participation by postgraduate students and early-career artists, accepted either through the peer-review process or directly by the Research Workshop chair. The Research Workshop contributors are offered bursaries to aid participation. In particular, EVA London liaises with Art in Flux, a London-based group of digital artists. The EVA London 2022 proceedings includes long papers and short “poster” papers from international researchers inside and outside academia, from graduate artists, PhD students, industry professionals, established scholars, and senior researchers, who value EVA London for its interdisciplinary community. The conference also features keynote talks. A special feature this year is support for Ukrainian culture after its invasion earlier in the year. This publication has resulted from a selective peer review process, fitting as many excellent submissions as possible into the proceedings. This year, submission numbers were lower than previous years, mostly likely due to the pandemic and a new requirement to submit drafts of long papers for review as well as abstracts. It is still pleasing to have so many good proposals from which to select the papers that have been included. EVA London is part of a larger network of EVA international conferences. EVA events have been held in Athens, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, California, Cambridge (both UK and USA), Canberra, Copenhagen, Dallas, Delhi, Edinburgh, Florence, Gifu (Japan), Glasgow, Harvard, Jerusalem, Kiev, Laval, London, Madrid, Montreal, Moscow, New York, Paris, Prague, St Petersburg, Thessaloniki, and Warsaw. Further venues for EVA conferences are very much encouraged by the EVA community. As noted earlier, this volume is a record of accepted submissions to EVA London 2022. Associated online presentations are in general recorded and made available online after the conference