Exhibition: 23 (Sat.) – 31 Jan(Sun.), 2016 Workshop: 23 Jan (Sat.), 2016 2-5pm
Opening: 23 Jan (Sat.), 2016 5-7pm Venue: Taipei Contemporary Art Center, No. 11, Lane 49, Baoan Street, Taipei (MRT: Daqiaotou Station)
“In physical anthropology, protoculture is the passing of behaviours from one generation to another among non-human primates. These cultures are very rudimentary, and do not exhibit complex cultural technology.” — via Wikipedia
Protocultural is a new series of events creating encounters between archaeological exploration, contemporary art and research, and modern digital practices of 3D modeling, visualizations, mapping, and distributed code and data repositories. Protocultural has held events around the world, including in Paris, Dubai, and Hong Kong, gathering the energy and knowledge of software developers, archaeologists, artists, and entrepreneurs; and has helped realize topical cultural projects such as #NEWPALMYRA, an online community platform and data repository dedicated to the capture, preservation, sharing, and creative reuse of data about the ancient city of Palmyra, which is now threatened by modern conflict.
Protocultural Taipei will bring together overseas and local participants to augment foreign and native cultures of the past with technologies of the present and future.
This could be using the 3D models of the #NEWPALMYRA project or other public domain cultural seeds from Taipei.
About #NEWPALMYRA
The #NEWPALMYRA project is an online community platform and data repository dedicated to the capture, preservation, sharing, and creative reuse of data about the ancient city of Palmyra.
#NEWPALMYRA has been started by Bassel Khartabil, a beloved technologist and Internet volunteer detained in Syria since March 15, 2012. He is today in urgent danger, please visit freebassel.org and sign the petition.
Proposed Challenges
#TAIPEI
Need some inspiration here.
#NEWPALMYRA
3D Model development (Blender)
Generative 3D modeling based on existing 3D meshes (Blender)
Data mining and automated reconstruction of plans from satellite maps and drone images for 3D creation (Pandas, Open Street Maps)
VR environment using web technologies (WebGL, Three.js) and mobile devices (low-cost VR with phones ala Google Cardboard)
Web visualizations for easy browsing of the data rep structure and contents (Image Plot, d3.js, Processing)
Researching sources of photographic and video images of Palmyra
Release of clean datasets from partners, sharing data under the Creative Commons Zero license (experimenting with Data and data versioning)