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

Computing the Future: Digital encounters in art and science when da Vinci meets Turing

Computing the future, as life and research moves to the Internet, we are engaged increasingly in digital encounters from present to past and into the future with real people, events and documents. This paper focuses on the newly born-digital relationship between Alan Turing, father of computer science, and Leonardo da Vinci, master of Renaissance art and science – both revered as visionary geniuses, prophets of the future. Given the continued growth of digitised materials that are daily entering global consciousness, it is only relatively recently that both da Vinci’s notebooks and paintings, and Turing’s archive, are online and searchable. Thus we are able for the first time to relatively easily juxtapose and compare their work, and see that they have much in common in terms of what it means to human in science, art and the natural world, from da Vinci’s in-depth studies of the mechanisms of the human body, mind, and soul, foundational to his art, and to Turing’s discoveries in Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and morphogenesis. Considering their points of concurrence in the digital world brings into focus our global network of digital places and spaces, where science, art, and nature, including real and artificial life, become unbounded

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

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)

Museum Websites of the First Wave: The rise of the virtual museum

In this paper, we analyse trends of the first wave of museum websites (from the 1990s to the early 2000s) to understand how the characteristics of the Internet (specifically the World Wide Web), of museum staff, and museum audiences shaped the adoption of technology and new forms of participation and what they can tell us about engagement for museums of the future. The early development of online museum resources parallels the development of the EVA conference, which was establishing itself at a similar time

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

Imaging techniques in conservation

New imaging techniques are increasingly being used within cultural heritage. This paper explores potential uses of such technologies within conservation and implications of their use on object preservation and accessibility. Study of their effects on objects is crucial because their employment is becoming irreplaceable; for example, polynomial texture mapping (PTM) has revealed previously undetectable surface features. In such cases, it is necessary to continue to use the technique to monitor object condition. 3D laser scanning, PTM, and CT scanning are investigated. Case studies are explored to investigate their current role in cultural heritage. The appropriateness of this role and whether it should be expanded is addressed by analysing advantages and disadvantages of the techniques, their feasibility, and risks caused to object preservation and accessibility. The results indicate that the technologies present some advantages over standard digital photography; PTM in particular is found to be an extremely useful, affordable technique. A more established role within conservation, especially for condition assessments, could be worthwhile. Use of the imaging techniques to create models for exhibition can also be advantageous; however, care must be taken to ensure that such models are used to enhance accessibility to original objects and not to replace them