upper Austria

23. September 2024

++ HANDOUT ++ The Parisian landmark can be viewed up close in Linz © APA/Ars Electronica/NOTRE DAME 3D DATA FROM ANDREW TALLON/YANN ARTHUS BERTRAND AND TSVP

On December 8, 2024, the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral, which burned down in 2019, will reopen – you can already immerse yourself in the Gothic building in an immersive way in the Deep Space 8K of the Ars Electronica Center in Linz. Together with the French start-ups Iconem and Histovery, the Ars Electronica Futurelab created a huge three-dimensional model of the cathedral in which details can be explored up close thanks to gigapixels and a special application.

“We had a great opening during the Ars Electronica Festival and also received many inquiries internationally,” said Michaela Wimplinger, responsible for special projects at Ars Electronica, in an interview with APA. There was a waiting list for the screenings in Deep Space, so she was “happy that we can show Notre-Dame over a longer period of time,” until the end of 2025, currently on Saturdays and Sundays at 1 p.m. An “extended program” is being worked on for the reopening of the cathedral in Paris. Schools are incorporating the “visit” to the cathedral into their lessons and other special screenings are also offered.

Laser scans by Belgian art historian Andrew Tallon were used for the presentation of Notre-Dame. Material that also helped architects reconstruct the cathedral. “Our Futurelab has generated an application that allows you to look closely at details and also control and ‘fly through’ them,” says Wimplinger. This allows you to gain insights that would not otherwise be possible. The Cultural Heritage project was funded by the Dorotheum, the Upper Austrian Cultural Region, supported by the Austrian Foreign Ministry and the Institut français d’Autriche as part of the strategy for the international dissemination of the cultural and creative industries.

You can delve deeply into the art of restoration with the second object from this year’s festival program: “Young Knight in a Landscape” (ca. 1505) by the Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio. The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid provided videos of the restoration process, allowing an exclusive look at the before and after pictures of Carpaccio’s knight in Deep Space 8K. This presentation can be seen repeatedly until September 2025 and was supported by the Spanish Embassy in Vienna. For Wimplinger, it is also about sustainability, because sensitive works of art are often not readily sent and “we are bringing a piece of cultural heritage into Deep Space.”

The Cultural Heritage series has been around since 2018, starting with a collaboration between the Belgian Embassy and the Kunsthistorisches Museum on the Renaissance painter Bruegel the Elder. At that time, some of his works were presented in gigapixel images. Since then, there have been projects with the Vatican Museum and the Austrian Embassy of the Holy See, the Spanish Reina Sofia and numerous embassies and cultural institutes. Michaela Wimplinger is in constant contact with the various institutes and organizations. The aim is to give more people access to cultural heritage.

For Wimplinger, these are “nice synergies”; experts and curators are invited, projects are presented, and the Futurelab provides the technical implementation. “Ars Electronica has a say in the content; many museums do not yet have digital copies of their works, but this will increase, and transport of sensitive works of art will be less,” she says. They are always looking for new forms of presentation, such as in 2023 when Pablo Picasso’s “Lady in Blue” will be compared with “One World” by the Spanish artist Angeles Santos from the Museo Reina Sofia from a gender perspective. There is more and more cooperation with the Viennese institutions, but of course the production is expensive because the digital copies need to be high-resolution and in a specific format for the Deep Space 8K. When presenting Notre-Dame, they want to make it possible to show it outside of the Deep Space on a 4K screen. There are already “ideas and good discussions” for the coming years, Wimplinger looks ahead.

More information and program at ars.electronica.art