Digital Twin and Cultural Heritage – The Future of Society Built on History and Art

Abstract

Until 30 years ago, Cultural Heritage studies entailed the use of books as well as the direct viewing of many works of art, from paintings to sculptures, from architectural masterpieces to museums, to entire cities. The material assets forming a country’s Cultural Heritage have a vital and irreplaceable intrinsic value, but due to their very physical nature, they are subject to damages, significant modifications and even loss. A country’s Cultural Heritage has the power to stimulate the emotions of those experiencing it and this is why it has always sparked the universal desire to pass it on by narrating it and reproducing it. Already in the first half of the third century BCE, Callimachus wrote “A Collection of Wonders around the World”, which unfortunately was lost. The first surviving literary work that included a list of world wonders, is an epigram by poet Antipater of Sidon included in the Palatine Anthology (9, 58), “I have gazed on the walls of impregnable Babylon along which chariots may race, and on the Zeus by the banks of the Alpheus, I have seen the hanging gardens, and the Colossus of the Hellos, the great man-made mountains of the lofty pyramids, and the gigantic tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the sacred house of Artemis that towers the clouds, the others were placed in the shade, for the sun himself has never looked upon its equal outside Olympus.” Today, after well over 2000 years, we are still studying the Seven Wonders of the World. Through time, the desire to reproduce Cultural Heritage pieces was fulfilled in different ways: from drawings to casts, from photographs to postcards. Today this desire/need to create twin copies is done digitally, since computers have become the language of our time and are opening a multitude of scenarios and opportunities well beyond the mere reproduction of works of art. Step by step, and with some delays compared to other fields, the latest technologies are being applied to the Cultural Heritage world and today this world is finally acquiring digital twins: exact copies of physical objects and settings resulting from the Internet of Things. Thanks to the Internet of Things in fact, creating digital twins has become more accessible and financially attainable. What does the term digital twin mean in the world of art? The first thought that comes to mind is that a digital twin is just an exact copy of the physical work of art. And this is indeed true; however, it is a lot more, because it has opened innovative scenarios on multiple fronts. Thanks to digital twins, we can replicate lost pieces, enter museum halls, print 3D copies, monitor, and manage the security of works of art, and acquire a large volume of valuable data that can be used to conduct research and create multiple outputs, but digital twins have also become works of art themselves. During the pandemic, the support provided by digital twins has been extremely important, because it has allowed remote viewing when in person viewing had been suspended. The impact of Digital Twins is also expanding the selection offered within the Cultural Tourism sector, a key element for cultural heritage, which is experiencing an increasing involvement by users themselves. Faced with the huge volume of digital cultural heritage data available today, it appears clear that our real challenge is creating a common language based on global standards and inevitably, these standards will also have to include Artificial Intelligence.