From Pompeii to Athens

I. How to tell the catastrophe

� Pompeii : the paradox of a creative destruction (Bulwer, Gautier, Jenssen)

� B. Virtual reality and romanticism : the literary challenge

II. How to tell the creation

� Parthenon : the cult of representation

� The placeless place : from myth to the self consciousness (V. Woolf, Sigmund Freud )

Definition of myth

� Mircea Eliade : Myths describe breakthroughs of the sacred (or the Supernatural) into the World. They describe a time that is fundamental different from historical time.

� Claude Levi-Strauss: Myth is language, functioning on an especial high level […]

� Roland Barthes : Myth is simply a type of speech demonstrated in our dealings with ordinary things […]

Histories of landscapesPompeii : The paradox of a creative destruction

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii, 1832

� From the ample materials before me, my endeavor has beento select those which would be most attractive to a modernreader: the customs and superstitions least unfamiliar tohim, — the shadows that, when reanimated, would presentto him such images as, while they represented the past,might be least uninteresting to the speculations of thepresent. (1834 edition)

The lion . . . halted abruptly in the arena, raised itself half on end, uttered a baffled howl

Half leading, half carrying Ione, Glaucus followed his guide

F. C. Yohn, 1926/ scan by George Landow

Pompeii:capital of the digital culture

� http://www.zerooneanimation.com/index.php/projects/pompeii

� Virtual Pompeii (Carnegie Mellon University)

http://artscool.cfa.cmu.edu/~hemef/pompeii/project.html(2007)

EPOCH EU Project: Virtual Pompeii Crowd simulation

LIFEPLUS EU Project: Augmented Reality revival of fauna and flora in ancient Pompeii based on frescoes

Pompeii Quadriporticus Project

http://www.umass.edu/classics/Objectives.html

A day in Pompeii I

A day in Pompeii II

A day in Pompeii III

Chapter IX, The Last Days of Pompeii

The despair of the lovers

� Another—and another—and another shower of ashes, far more profuse than before, scattered fresh desolation along the streets. Darkness once more wrapped them as a veil; and Glaucus, his bold heart at last quelled and despairing, sank beneath the cover of an arch, and, clasping Ione to his heart—a bride on that couch of ruin—resigned himself to die.

Pompeii and computer games

� Timescape: Journey to Pompeii (2001)

� Darkest of Days (2009)

� Escape from Pompeii: An Isabel Soto Archaeology Adventure (2011)

ARRIA MARCELLA (1852)

� Indeed nothing dies, but all exists perpetually, that whichwas once, no power can annihilate. Every act, every word,every shape, every thought which has fallen into theuniversal ocean of being forms widening circles that go onexpanding to the far reaches of eternity…Passionate minds,powerful wills, have succeeded in summoning forthostensibly vanished centuries and in resurrecting humanbeings from the dead.

� Théophile Gautier, “Arria Marcella. Souvenir of Pompeii”, 1852

GRADIVA (1905)

“The heavens held the doomed city wrapped in a black mantle of smoke only here and there the flaring masses of flame from the crater made distinguishable something steeped in blood red light.[…] As he stood thus at the edge of the Forum near the Jupiter temple, he suddenly saw Gradiva a short distance in front of him. Until then no thought of her presence there had moved him, but now suddenly it seemed natural to him, as she was, of course, a Pompeiian girl, that she was living in her native city and, without his having any suspicion of it, was his contemporary.”

Wilhelm Jenssen, Gradiva, 1905

Of other spaces : Utopias and Heterotopias

� Places of this kind are outside of all places even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort for mixed joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent : such is the utopia of the mirror.

� Michel Foucault (1967)

LIFEPLUS: Main focus

� Reenact historical scenes by reviving ancient life depicted in frescos in Augmented Reality AR

Foni, A., Papagiannakis, G., and Magnenat-Thalmann, N. 2010. A Taxonomy of Visualization Strategies for Cultural Heritage Applications. ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 3, 1, 1–21.Magnenat-Thalmann, N. and Papagiannakis, G. 2010. Recreating Daily Life in Pompeii. VAR-Virtual Archaeology Review, ISSN 1989-9947, also presented in Arqueologica 2.0 1, 2, 16–20.

LIFEPLUS AR simulation

Papagiannakis, G., Schertenleib, S., O'Kennedy, B., Poizat, M., Magnenat-Thalmann, N., Stoddart, A., Thalmann, D. .2005. Mixing Virtual and Real scenes in the site of ancient Pompeii. Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, John Wiley and Sons Ltd 16, 1, 11–24.

Thecult ofrepresentation

� Parthenon : the phantasmatic experience of continuity

� The ceremonial reference to the past

� The tactile memory of the material traces

� The cultural memory discourse

Virginia Woolf, Journal (1897-1909)

� When the day broke, we headedto our windows and saw a hugeboulder that was emerging fromthe darkness in fawn and stripedshadows, in which were plantedtwo groups of columns, one of the color of the rock and the other white and fragile. Othersstood on the rock, but we knewthat the darker were the Crown and the King of the house, the Parthenon itself.

Virginia Woolf, Journal (1897-1909)

� the light was of such violence that we had all thetrouble to look up to the frieze also because of themarble mounds scattered at our feet - all these plates,these drums of columns and these pieces marbleplanned on us a jet of light that seemed to emanatefrom the ground.

Freud,Adisturbance ofMemoryontheAcropolis

� When, finally, on the afternoon of our arrival I stoodon the Acropolis and cast my eyes upon the landscape,a surprising thought suddenly entered my mind: 'So allthis really does exist, just as we learnt it at school!'

� . . . the whole psychical situation, which seems soconfused and is so difficult to describe, can besatisfactorily cleared up assuming that at the time I had(or might have had) a momentary feeling: 'What I seehere is not real.' Such a feeling is known as 'a feeling of derealization' ['Enfremdungsgefühl' ]

Derrida, Athens still remains, 1966

� We owe ourselves to death. It wasthis past July 3, right aroundnoon, close to Athens. It was thenthat this sentence took me by surprise, in the light—“we oweourselves to death”—and the desire immediately overcame me to engrave it in stone, withoutdelay: a snapshot [un instantané], I said to myself, without anyfurther delay

Patricia Highsmith, The two faces of January, 1964

Computer graphics modelling, animation and rendering technology tools demo, Whiskytree.com, ACM SIGGRAPH 2013

Acropolis Computer Graphics Simulation

Paul Debevec’s Parthenon � "The Parthenon" is a short computer-generated animation which

visually reunites the Parthenon and its sculptural decorations, separated since the early 1800s.

� The film used combinations of � time-of-flight laser scanning,

� structured light scanning,

� photometric stereo,

� inverse global illumination,

� photogrammetric modeling,

� image-based rendering, BRDF measurement, and

� Monte-Carlo global illumination

� in order to create the twenty-some shots used in the film.

� http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Films/Parthenon/

http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Films/Parthenon/

Acropolis Mixed Reality Storytelling

Conclusions

� Without the original experience of writing or the authenticity oftext, basically without the notion of literature, the dream ofhybrid information proves a mire technological achievement, acondensed fantasy of imagination and material reality, whichhowever doesn’t really lead the imaginary into a sharp and clearform.

� “Ontologies of the present demand archeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past”

� Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 2002

Thank you!

Bibliography I

� Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins, Rodopi B.V. Amsterdam-NY, 2004.

� William St Clair and Annika Bautz, “Imperial Decadence: The making of myths in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days in Pompeii”, Victorian Literature and Culture (2012), 40, 359-396.

� Nothing changes under the sun: Authenticity in The Last Days of Pompeii, www. victorian.web.org

� Simmons, James C., Bulwer and Vesuvius: The Topicality of The Last Days of Pompeii. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24.1 (1969): 103-105.

� Victoria C. Gardner Coates, Kenneth Lapatin, Jon L. Seydl, The Last Days of Pompei. Decadence, Apocalypse, Ressurection, J. P. Getty, LA 2012

� Sasha Colby, "The Literary Archaeologies of The ́ophile Gautier" , CLCWeb Volume 8 Issue 2 (June 2006) Article 7

� Annelisa Stephan, “Apocalypse Then : Buwer-Lyttons’s “ The Last Days of Pompeii”, http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/apocalypse-then-bulwer-lyttons-the-last-days-of-pompeii/

� A day in Pompeii, Full length animation, zero one, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY_3ggKg0Bc

Bibliography II

� Ian Hodder and Scott Hutson, Reading the Past. Current approaches to Interpretation in Archeology, Cambridge University Press, 2003

� Joan Kessler, Demons of night. Tales of the fantastic, Madness and the Supernatural, University of Chicago Press, 1995

� Michel Foucault, “Of other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”, Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, October 1984 (“Des espaces autres”, March 1967. Translated from the french by Jay Miskowiec)

� Roland Barthes, "La Gradiva", Fragments d'un discours amoureux [1977], Œuvrescomplètes (éd. É. Marty), Paris, Le Seuil, t. III, 1995, p. 573-575.

� Stephen Poole, “Timescape : Journey to Pompeii Review”, http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/timescape-journey-to-pompeii-review/1900-2678110/

� Victoria C. Gardner Coates, “On the cutting Edge. Pompeii and the new technology” Decadence, Apocalypse, Ressurection, J. P. Getty, LA 2012, 44-51.

� Richard Coyne, Technoromanticism. Digital narrative, holism, and the romance of the real

Bibliography III

� P. Milgram, F. Kishino, “A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays”, IEICE Trans. Information Systems, vol. E77-D, no. 12, 1994, pp. 1321-1329

� R. Azuma, Y. Baillot, R. Behringer, S. Feiner, S. Julier, B. MacIntyre, “Recent Advances in Augmented Reality”, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, November/December 2001

� H. Tamura, H. Yamamoto, A. Katayama, “Mixed reality: Future dreams seen at the border between real and virtual worlds”, Computer Graphics and Applications, vol.21, no.6, pp.64-70. 2001

� Nandi A., Marichal X., Transfiction, proceedings of Virtual Reality International Conference, Laval May 2000.

� G. Papagiannakis, S. Schertenleib, B. O’Kennedy , M. Poizat, N.Magnenat-Thalmann, A. Stoddart, D.Thalmann, "Mixing Virtual and Real scenes in the site of ancient Pompeii", Journal of CAVW, pp. 11-24, Volume 16, Issue 1, John Wiley and Sons Ltd, February 2005

� G. Papagiannakis and N. Magnenat-Thalmann, “Mobile Augmented Heritage: Enabling Human Life in ancient Pompeii,” The International Journal of Architectural Computing, Multi-Science Publishing, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 395–415, 2007.

� Mo ́nica Ann Walker Vadillo, Salome, mawalk01@ghis.ucm.es

� C. P. Cavafy in Tokyo, http://tokyo.cavafy.eu/en/project