The UAB to digitalise and print museum sculptures in 3D

The UAB has begun the process of digitalisation and 3D printing of the most important sculptures found in three museums of the Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Occitania. This process forms part of the Intermedit project of the Euroregion Pyrenees Mediterranean. The sculptures will be exhibited in an itinerant exhibition which will allow to “handle” them and study how they can make heritage more accessible.

27/09/2019

The Intermedit project aims to show the strong commercial and cultural exchanges existing in antiquity among these three regions: Balearci Islands, Catalonia and Occitania, and how the concept of Mediterraneity was formed some 25 centuries ago.

The UAB participates through its CORE in Cultural Heritage and the Digital Lab of the UABOpenLabs by contributing with technical aspects for the digitalisation and 3D printing of 9 of the most important pieces from three museums involved in this initiative: the Archaeological Museum of Eivissa and Formentera (Balearic Islands), the MAC-Empúries (Catalonia) and the Museum of Enserun (Occitania).

A total of three pieces from each museum will be on display and available for visitors to touch and observe in an itinerant exhibition at each of the three museums during the following two years. This will be the first time that the pieces are digitalised, printed in 3D and then treated.

The initiative will also serve to study the ways in which to bring cultural heritage closer to society. "Through this project we will further discover how these printed sculptures can make heritage accessible to people with reduced vision or other peculiarities, given that they can be "handled", in which aspects will be observed that are too difficult to see when they are simpley exhibited. Moreover, being able to touch and pick them up helps to understand them better and have a different view of the same sculpture”, says Oriol Vicente, head of the CORE in Cutural Heritage at the UAB.

The digitalisation and printing proicess, which will include more pieces than those displayed for the public, will finalise in the spring of 2020. The first exhition will take place at the Archaeological Museum of Eivissa and Formentera (MAEF) and is scheduled to occur in autumn of 2020.

The Intermedit project also includes the participation of civil society (through the Friends of the Museum associations of the MAEG and the Museum of Empúries-Untikesken.