The Digital Cast Courts

On the 1st December 2018, The Victoria and Albert Museum’s prestigious Cast Courts were reopened to the public. A new central corridor, ‘The Interpretation Gallery’, explores the art of copying and its techniques past, present and future, with two 3D printed objects from Scan the World’s own collection of copies placed on permanent display.

There are very few places in the world that can compare to The Cast Courts. Home to facsimiles of Trajan’s Column and Michelangelo’s David it is a testament to the triumph of Victorian manufacture and democratised knowledge, its origins stemming from a partnership between ruling families across Europe. Coined by the museum’s founding director Henry Cole, the partnership’s resulting convention drawn up in 1867 promoted the sharing of reproductions of artworks around the world to further encourage the dissemination of accessibility and research. 
 

Scan the World’s Digital Cast Courts can be interpreted as the 21st Century’s response to the galleries. The project echoes Henry Cole’s drive for accessibility as well as the convention’s core ideologies of open knowledge, bringing together a global community of enthusiasts, art lovers and academics alike. The democratised, crowd-sourced archive is built to be contributed to and accessed by anyone around the world, all in the wider context of a meaningful contribution to education, accessibility and increased cultural identity in an ever-growing digital landscape.    

“The knowledge of (…) monuments is necessary to the progress of art, and the reproductions of them would be of a high value to all museums for public instruction.”

— Convention for promoting universally reproductions of works of art for the benefit of museums of all countries, 1867.  

Choosing two objects from Scan the World’s collection of over 16,000 artefacts was not easy, so it was decided that we would display facsimiles of sculptures which are also in The V&A as well as to highlight two common types of digitisation.  

The two objects are freely available to download from Scan the World, which serves as an important step in encouraging cultural institutions to openly share their digitised collections, as well as 3D models of cultural artefacts, online. There is still a long way to go for national museums to officially open their collections online, so in the meantime Scan the World has been doing it for them.  

The inclusion of 3D printed facsimiles in the Cast Courts highlight the importance and relevance digital technologies have in the age of reproduction, standing as a modern alternative to traditional techniques of casting.

In the case of Scan the World, the democratised ability to allow anyone to make a copy of an artefact without the need of a foundry or traditional skills allows for anyone to connect with art. We’re mature enough to know that digital technologies won’t replace the original techniques, but what can it mean for the future of appreciating and engaging with culture when it’s freely available to copy and consume?