Last October, artists Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles either made or covertly acquired a high-resolution 3D scan of the Berlin Neues Museum’s famous bust of Nefertiti. Data from the scan is now for the first time freely available online for others to use.
Such subterfuge seems strange when museums everywhere are falling over themselves to publicly release digital images and data about their collections. The museum’s reluctance to make the data about the bust public is, of course, related to a dispute over ownership. It was removed from Egypt by German archaeologists in the 1910s – and Egypt has demanded its return. The artists plan to display an ultra-precise polymer reproduction in Cairo later this year, symbolically returning the bust to its country of origin and provoking debate about the role of colonial history in museum collections.
Contested objects in museum collections are nothing new, but the role of digital representations of objects has only recently come to the fore. “Virtual repatriation” – sharing digital surrogates with the source communities of objects – remains controversial. It allows some knowledge sharing between museum and community, but not only do objects usually remain with the museum, so does the complex and costly infrastructure supporting digitisation.
But the Nefertiti hack shows that the use of digital technology doesn’t have to start with the museum. Digital representations might yet become a new frontline in the battlefield of contested cultural heritage.
Danny Birchall is digital manager at the Wellcome Collection, London
Such subterfuge seems strange when museums everywhere are falling over themselves to publicly release digital images and data about their collections. The museum’s reluctance to make the data about the bust public is, of course, related to a dispute over ownership. It was removed from Egypt by German archaeologists in the 1910s – and Egypt has demanded its return. The artists plan to display an ultra-precise polymer reproduction in Cairo later this year, symbolically returning the bust to its country of origin and provoking debate about the role of colonial history in museum collections.
Contested objects in museum collections are nothing new, but the role of digital representations of objects has only recently come to the fore. “Virtual repatriation” – sharing digital surrogates with the source communities of objects – remains controversial. It allows some knowledge sharing between museum and community, but not only do objects usually remain with the museum, so does the complex and costly infrastructure supporting digitisation.
But the Nefertiti hack shows that the use of digital technology doesn’t have to start with the museum. Digital representations might yet become a new frontline in the battlefield of contested cultural heritage.
Danny Birchall is digital manager at the Wellcome Collection, London