0000000000088481
AUTHOR
Mar Gaitán
Recovering Sicilian Silk Heritage through Digital Technologies: The Case of Piraino’s Collection
Textile conservation has given rise to small and medium-sized museums, usually with scarce resources. In Sicily, the little evidence that remains of silk production and opulent imports by the rich and powerful local aristocracy is kept in museums, parishes, and other cultural institutions. The documentation, dissemination, and enhancement of such a fragile heritage is today possible by means of technological tools that provide novel means to preserve, analyze, and exploit digital information. In this paper, we present some outcomes of the SILKNOW project, a project that applies computing research to the needs of diverse users (museums, educational institutions, the tourism industry, creativ…
Interactive Tools for the Visualization of Tangible and Intangible Silk Heritage Emerging from an Interdisciplinary Work
Silk is a unique example of heritage where memory, identity, creativity and knowledge can be found in just one piece. It is a multifaceted, living heritage, as it consists of more than the fabrics themselves, but also the techniques associated with them, historical buildings, trades, festivities, etc. Therefore, designers, weavers, painters, sellers and users are involved in it. However, it is also a fragile heritage, alive in the few industries that still weave with historical looms. Additionally, the COVID19 pandemic has put the entire artisanal and small industrial sector of European silk in risk of disappearing. In this, paper we show some results of the SILKNOW project, whose main obje…
SILKNOW. Designing a thesaurus about historical silk for small and medium-sized textile museums
El ámbito del patrimonio cultural en general, y el de los textiles de seda en particular, se caracterizan por conjuntos de datos amplios, ricos y heterogéneos. El vocabulario del patrimonio de la seda procede de múltiples fuentes que se han mezclado a través del tiempo y el espacio. Esto ha llevado a la utilización de diferentes terminología en organizaciones especializadas para describir sus artefactos. Esto hace que los datos interoperabilidad de los datos entre catálogos independientes. Además, el nivel de interacción de los recursos existentes es bajo, la mayoría de las consultas complejas no son posibles y los resultados se muestran de forma deficiente. En En este sentido, un reciente …
Interactive Tools for the Preservation, Dissemination and Study of Silk Heritage—An Introduction to the SILKNOW Project
Silk was a major factor for progress in Europe, mostly along the Western Silk Road’s network of production and market centers. The silk trade also allowed for the exchange of ideas and innovations, having impacts at economic, technical, functional, cultural and symbolic levels. However, silk has today become a seriously endangered heritage. Although many European specialized museums are devoted to its preservation, they usually lack the size and resources to take advantage of state-of-the-art digital technologies. The aim of this paper is twofold; firstly, we introduce SILKNOW, an interdisciplinary project that has been recently funded by the H2020 Programme of the European Union in order t…
Techonological tools for the conservation of silk Heritage: Improving the conservation of European religious textile cultural Heritage
This paper presents the interdisciplinary H2020 SILKNOW project coordinated by the Universitat de València with researchers from the ICT and SSH fields. SILKNOW is a three-year project funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 Programme under the two-stage call SC6-CULT-COOP-09 'European cultural heritage, access and analysis for a richer interpretation of the past'. The consortium has a total of nine partners from six different European countries (Spain, France, Germany, Slovenia, Poland and Italy). There are a total of three universities, two SMEs, one international institution, and three research institutes. In this paper, we introduce SILKNOW which has as a goal to promote, conserve and dissemina…
El hilo de la historia: del patrimonio mueble al intangible. Rescatando el patrimonio textil sedero
[EN] Silk heritage belongs to the so-called integral heritage type, which means that tangible and intangible elements can be found in one piece. Moreover, silk is a living heritage strongly connected with its community. It is paradigmatic case, where its intangible elements go from literature, to mulberry farming, or traditional weaving techniques. Also, activities surrounding silk trade have left an imprint on various cities in monuments and even marking their town planning. Nowadays, silk is a living heritage in various communities and constitutes an element of creativity that can be appreciated in the current fashion trends. This paper addresses the main results of the SILKNOW project, f…
Weaving words for textile museums: the development of the linked SILKNOW thesaurus.
Abstract The cultural heritage domain in general and silk textiles, in particular, are characterized by large, rich and heterogeneous data sets. Silk heritage vocabulary comes from multiple sources that have been mixed up across time and space. This has led to the use of different terminology in specialized organizations in order to describe their artefacts. This makes data interoperability between independent catalogues very difficult. To address these issues, SILKNOW created a multilingual thesaurus related to silk textiles. It was carried out by experts in textile terminology and art historians and computationally implemented by experts in text mining, multi-/cross-linguality and semanti…
Towards the Preservation and Dissemination of Historical Silk Weaving Techniques in the Digital Era
Historical weaving techniques have evolved in time and space giving as result more or less fabrics with different aesthetical characteristics. These techniques were transferred along the main silk production centers, thanks to the European Silk Road and creating a common European Frame on themes and techniques. These had made it complicated to determine whether a fabric corresponds to one century or another. Moreover, in order to understand their creation, it is necessary to determine the number of weaves and interlacements that each textile has, therefore, mathematical models can be extracted from these layers. In this sense, three dimensional (3D) virtual representations of the internal s…
SPANISH RELIGIOUS TEXTILES FROM THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES THE GARÍN CASE
Clothes and textiles make up a very relevant part or religious cultural heritage. This paper presents a selection of liturgical textiles from the 18th and 19th centuries. They were created by Garín, a Spanish factory still active today. The designs and weaving techniques employed in them have provided the starting point for a research project, SILKNOW, in operation between 2018 and 2021. It aims to apply cutting-edge computing technologies to textile heritage, including the religious and liturgical, and thus establish new historical and artistic connections. The research leading to these results is carried out within the SILKNOW project (¿Silk heritage in the Knowledge Society: from punched…
SILKNOW, weaving our past into the future
La historia europea está tejida en seda. Aunque se suele asociar la Ruta de la Seda a sus orígenes asiáticos, sus ramificaciones europeas fueron fundamentales para la construcción de la Europa actual gracias a los numerosos intercambios comerciales derivados de dichas rutas. La herencia de estas rutas ha dejado un legado incalculable: un ejemplo único de patrimonio donde la memoria, la identidad, la creatividad y el conocimiento confluyen en una única pieza. Es además un patrimonio vivo, multifacético en el que tradición y artesanía perviven.
Innovación social en patrimonio cultural y museos de la seda en Europa: una mirada conectada con las industrias creativas
Esta contribución se enmarca dentro del proyecto H2020 Silknow que coordina la Universitat de València a través de un equipo multidisplicinar conformado por investigadores de las TIC y del ámbito de las humanidades y de las ciencias sociales. Hoy el concepto de patrimonio cultural está más que nunca ligado al presente, como punto de partida que nos vincula con nuestro pasado cultural a través del acto consciente de preservar y legar a las generaciones futuras, convirtiendo a la sociedad en custodia. Este acto emerge con la ambición de permanecer en un mundo cada vez más cambiante y mutable, pero en medio de esta corriente surge cada vez con más presencia la apreciación del patrimonio no sol…
From Historical Silk Fabrics to Their Interactive Virtual Representation and 3D Printing
The documentation, dissemination, and enhancement of Cultural Heritage is of great relevance. To that end, technological tools and interactive solutions (e.g., 3D models) have become increasingly popular. Historical silk fabrics are nearly flat objects, very fragile and with complex internal geometries, related to different weaving techniques and types of yarns. These characteristics make it difficult to properly document them, at the yarn level, with current technologies. In this paper, we bring a new methodology to virtually represent such heritage and produce 3D printouts, also making it highly interactive through the tool Virtual Loom. Our work involves sustainability from different per…
Rereadings: Highlighting the Gender Perspective Through Hypermedia
In this text, we present the contributions of the Spain-based project Rereadings. Museum Itineraries from a Gender Perspective, which aims to present to the public the collections of 11 Valencian museums, of various kinds and under different types of ownership, from a gender and queer perspective. Rereadings uses virtual itineraries and QR codes to contribute to the study of gender. Thus, technology is used as a basis for information dissemination, analysis, and debate. The struggle against androcentrism and heteropatriarchy has generated a greater inclusion of women, other genders, and diverse sexualities in traditional museum discourse. New technologies function as one of the fundamental …
Applying Axial Symmetries to Historical Silk Fabrics: SILKNOW’s Virtual Loom
Symmetry is part of textile art in patterns and motifs that decorate fabrics, which are made by the interlacement of warp and wefts. Moreover, the 3D representation of fabrics have already been studied by some authors
Design Archives: Sustainable Solutions for Young Designers in Valencia, Spain
Design education is practical and theoretical; however, it does not usually include the study of cultural heritage. Nonetheless, relations with academia have been strong since the 18th century, when the need to educate designers spread across the continent to improve design and make it competitive in the market. In this paper, we recover that spirit and act as mediators between heritage and young people to create links and preserve cultural heritage. A case study was conducted at the Public Valencian Design School with 31 product design students. The methodology applied was based on iterative processes that allowed students to discover design and silk heritage when they proposed innovative …