FULL PDF
Abstract
Two early modern prints that represent Venice—Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice, ca. 1500, and Ludovico Ughi’s Iconographica rappresentatione della inclita città di Venezia, 1729— were the focal points of two interactive, multimedia exhibitions at Duke University in 2017 and 2019. The overall intention of these exhibitions was to enhance visitors’ engagement with, and understanding of, the value of historic representations of places and spaces, while expanding cultural understandings of Venice, past and present. Placed in conversation with augmented reality (AR) technology, the novelty of the prints mirrored the methodological innovations of digital art history. The AR installations in each exhibition connected viewers with historic and present-day representations of Venice through virtual layers of information that encouraged them to return to the original objects for close engagement. This article describes the AR displays within the 2017 and 2019 exhibitions at Duke and presents the results of visitor interaction based on anonymous data and observation. It also documents AR installation strategies and methods, and it anticipates AR’s applications and expansions for public-facing art historical scholarship. Finally, it shares these processes and findings in an effort to assist colleagues in the advancement of future installations at academic, museum, and cultural heritage institutions.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.11588/dah.2021.6.84501
Authors
Kristin LOVE Huffman
is an art and architectural historian of early modern Italy. Her scholarship focuses on the material and visual culture of Renaissance Venice, and she is known for her work on architectural spaces and urban systems, prints, cartographic representations of Venice, and the digital humanities. She currently serves as Associate Director of Visualizing Venice/Visualizing Cities and as a member of the Digital Advisory Board of the Society of Architectural Historians. As part of the Visualizing Venice/Visualizing Cities initiative, she has curated original, interactive exhibitions at Duke and Venice. These include a future installation at the Museo Correr in Venice, Italy centered on Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View and the original wooden matrices used to print the iconic image in 1500.
Hannah L. Jacobs
is the Digital Humanities Specialist for the Digital Art History and Visual Culture Research Lab (formerly known as the Wired! Lab) at Duke University. She is also pursuing a Master’s in Information Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds a Master’s in Digital Humanities from King’s College London (2014) and a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre/English from Warren Wilson College (2011).
David J. Zielinski
is currently a staff technology specialist (VR/AR) for the Duke University Office of Information Technology Innovation Co-Lab. He previously held roles as a staff technology specialist for the Duke University Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies and as the Research and Development Engineer for the Duke Engineering “DiVE” virtual reality lab. He is known as a software developer, researcher, and educator in the field of VR/AR.