Future Preservation

Brendan Cormier, Christina Riggs and Alexy Karenowska discuss the role of digital fabrication technologies and archeological practice in global heritage preservation. They discuss the future of museums in our transnational and postcolonial world.

Brendan Cormier is a design curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He recently curated A World of Fragile Partsfor the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, which explores the possibilities of new digital fabrication technologies to help in global heritage preservation. He is also concurrently lead curator of a new V&A Gallery in Shenzhen.

Christina Riggs is a Reader at the University of East Anglia, specializing in Egyptology. She has written about ancient Egyptian art, museum collecting, and the colonial history of archaeology. As a curator at the Manchester Museum, she was involved in the Alchemy contemporary art project, featuring Mark Dion’s ’The Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy’ (2005). Christina is working on a book about photography and the 1920s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

Alexy Karenowska is the Director of Technology at The Institute for Digital Archaeology (link is external), an organization dedicated to finding innovative technology-driven options for the documentation and preservation of heritage material. Alexy’s work is particularly focused on the application of 3D printing and machining technologies to the restoration or replication of damaged or destroyed archaeological structures and artefacts.

3d image of Granite head of Amenemhat III by The British Museum and Sketchfab (link is external). Licensed under CC Attribution-NonCommercial