Augmented Heritage
Lectures by Stefanie De Winter (UAntwerpen) and Willemijn Elkhuizen (TU Delft)
25th February, 2025 – 19:00
Stadscampus, s.C.1.03
Prinsstraat 13 – Antwerpen
Towards an Augmented Heritage by Stefanie de Winter
The transition to 'augmented heritage' offers exciting opportunities to make art and cultural heritage more accessible, but it also introduces complex challenges. This lecture delves into the intersection of an artist's original intentions, curatorial decisions, and conservation practices within the digital domain. It focuses on the difficulties of reproducing specific materials and translating them into virtual representations. How much of the ‘authenticity’ and material experience can be preserved in a digital reconstruction? Through case studies and multidisciplinary insights, Stefanie De Winter presents a critical perspective on this transformation and its implications for the future of art conservation and heritage engagement.
Designing cultural heritage experiences that move you
What thoughts and emotions arise when you stand in front of a piece of art? How can you interact with a fragile, precious museum artifact? For most of us, the experience is limited to viewing the artifact in the here and now—often behind glass—while reading a brief 200-word description. But what if you could peer into the artifact’s past and see what it looked like when it was first created? What if your experience of cultural heritage could be enriched through additional senses, such as touch, sound, or even smell, inspired by the artifact’s material qualities? How might that transform your interpretation of the artwork?
Willemijn Elkhuizen will present her research on capturing and characterizing the material experiences of cultural heritage artifacts. Through compelling examples, she will demonstrate how these characterizations can inspire innovative, digitally mediated interactions with these artifacts, offering a richer and more immersive connection to our shared cultural heritage.
About the speakers
Stefanie De Winter is an art historian with a background in painting conservation. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Leuven, supported by the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO). Her interdisciplinary research integrates art history, vision science, conservation studies, and emerging technologies such as AR and VR. Affiliated with the art history department and the Palettes research group at KU Leuven, her work explores the intersections of materiality, perception, and art historical analysis.
Her current project, the Interdisciplinary Reconstruction of Art (IRECONA), investigates the aging of Color Field paintings and develops new conservation methods using AR and VR, in collaboration with the University of Antwerp and TU Delft. Since 2010, she has specialized in the study of fluorescent colors, with a focus on the art of Frank Stella. This research bridges empirical methods with art historical critique, resulting in a novel methodology for empirically informed art history.
As a research-curator, she curated exhibitions such as Tracking Frank Stella (Van Abbemuseum, 2019) and Flattened Intensities – Intensified Flatness (BAC Art Lab, 2022), incorporating eye-tracking studies to examine perception and materiality in abstract art.
Willemijn Elkhuizen is teacher and researcher at Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft. Her work revolves around the use of digital technologies to enhance the experience of cultural heritage. In her most recent work she takes the lens materials experiences, where she characterises the materials experience of cultural heritage artefacts (how we sense and interact with artefacts, and how they evoke emotions and meanings), and explores this can inspire novel interaction with these artefacts, using technologies such as 3D printing, and virtual/mixed reality.
Willemijn holds an PhD and MSc in Industrial Design engineering, and prior work focused on the creation of life-like reproduction of paintings, using 3D scanning and full-color 3D printing. Besides her research, Willemijn teaches courses and creates open-access educational materials on prototyping, 3D scanning, 3D printing, and VR development, and is co-director of the Museum Futures Lab at TU Delft.