Sacred Spain will be at the IMA in the fall/ winter of 2009. So why are we shooting video now? We need to make arrangements to permit our presence (cameras and all) at Holy Week events in the spring. Since the subject matter of the exhibition inherently includes religious contexts, filming events related to them is more complicated than the traditional b-roll we shoot of museum facades or ancient monuments. Under curatorial advisement and with the help of Ilenia Colon-Mendoza, an Indianapolis expert in this subject matter, we have met with a variety of people already to convey our intentions and secure local permissions. So far, so good.

We hope the result of our work will shed some insight on the art featured in the exhibition which include a variety of works from the Baroque era. I must resist the temptation to name drop here as I do not have curatorial permission to do so, and I would not want to steal any insitutional thunder. Maybe if you ask for more, our curator (Ronda Kasl) will respond to your inquiries…In the meantime, you can see photos documenting our trip on IMA’s Flickr page. Enjoy!

Photosynth screen capture showing the Asian Gallery at the IMA

As you read on, you’ll probably discover that I had way too much fun with this tool, and I hope you will as well.

I tried three separate experiments.

#1: Staged Photography

First, I asked Mike Rippy, from our photography department, to shoot a variety of overview and detail shots of a portion of our Asian Galleries.  These images all have consistent lighting and were shot using a tripod, so they are extremely sharp.  The image above shows a case of works, and the faint white box is indicating that a more detailed image was shot at that point.  Photosynth does the best it can to “automagically” stitch together photographs of the same region even if they were shot at different angles.  For the most part it did an amazing job.

Zoom Detail Example

In the image above I am showing two captures of the same view in Photosynth.  On the left half you see the overview of a hanging scroll.  As you zoom in with your mousewheel, more and more detail comes to life as seen the in right half.  This ability to see pristine detail on works of art is very seldom seen.

Automatic Object VR

Another reason I see this tool as taking panoramic tools to the next level is its automatic object vr detection.  When taking pictures of a 3D work from multiple angles, Photosynth displays the “donut” control above.  You can grab and turn the object, and new images page in and out to give the feeling that you are spinning the work in space.

#2: The Mob

As a second test I asked a group of people to help me raid the European Galleries.  About a dozen people took 30 minutes to shoot over 1400 images of the space.  The point of this test was to see if Photosynth could handle photographs from a wide variety of cameras.  They ranged from your $100 point-and-shoot to your $1000 digital SLR.  For the most part it handled the task fairly well.  The final product, which I link to below, consisted of about half of the images due to the large amount of time it took to create.

#3: Nature

Finally I shot a more traditional panorama in the 100 Acres.  Photosynth did a really good job stitching these photos together as well.  I thought the complexity of nature might pose a difficult task.

100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park

The Results:

You can see all three of the Photosynth’s I created at these links:

• Asian Galleries
• European Gallery
• 100 Acres

Did I mention they are embeddable?

Though we’re constantly doing projects that are engaging and important to the museum and to the community, not much about what we do is out there on the IMA’s web site (yet!). Well that is to say except for the two projects that have excellent companion web components: Sebastiano Mainardi: The Science of Art and Bellini: Creating & Re-creating. As an objects conservator I work on a wide variety of art: from ethnographic objects, to outdoor sculpture, to contemporary and time-based media, to the Lilly House Collections (and many things in between). I work with Hélène Gillette-Woodard, who is the senior conservator of objects and also works on the same variety of objects. Here’s a couple pictures of our lab as it is today. I would prefer if you didn’t call it “cluttered,” it’s just that we often have a lot of projects going on at once.

The two small angels you see are on Hélène’s table. She’s currently researching and cleaning them.

On my work table you’ll see a variety of objects I’m either actively working on or researching. The elaborately decorated African sculpture is a Songye power figure that I recently radiographed as part of an ongoing research project (there are two smaller ones in those boxes there, and you can see two others on view in the African galleries). There’s also an Igbira head piece in one of those storage boxes, and beyond that are two, 19^th century French opaline vases that will soon be on display at the Lilly House. In case you’re wondering, the blue tubes are not our tribute to Mr. Snuffleupagus , but are a type of vacuum hose that evacuates noxious chemicals that we occasionally work with while treating objects.

Here’s another picture of one of those opaline vases that I dissembled so that I could clean the glass vase and clean and polish the gilt coppery-alloy support structure. For this project, I documented the condition of the vases as they were before I began working. I took a number of pictures of them and then wrote a report that describes their structure and condition. In this report I then wrote a treatment proposal of how I planned to clean them and then discussed this report with the curator of that collection, Bradley Brooks. When I’m finished with the “treatment” of these objects I will write a report of how I did the work and then take more pictures of how they look after I’m done. And then they’ll be transported over to the Lilly House to be put on view in the Great Hall.