The work of the miniature in the age of digital reproduction

There are multiple factors that significantly affect the way we perceive digital heritage data, which in turn flavours our perception of what is being represented. Specifically in this chapter I will look at 3D datasets, most frequently presented via AR/XR or fully immersive environments. Many of that qualities of the digital that are incongruous with analogue material have been examined in depth, such as their imperviousness to aging, an inability to acquire ‘pastness’, their innate untouchability and their unlocatability (our inability to locate them precisely at any given time and the necessity of mediating technology for them to be conjured into being). Similarly, economic and social factors that make them distinct from the physical, such as modes of authorship, ownership and their (apparent) transience has been noted, and examined in relation to the objects reception. Despite the acknowledgement of these issues we cannot say that a vernacular has yet developed that allows their consequences to be understood and mitigated for by broad audiences. In comparison to many media, such as the visual arts and cinema, where a vernacular is well developed, the lack of vernacular remains highly problematic for 3D content (including Digital Heritage Objects), primarily because this has the effect of drawing much of the focus of the audience away from the content and towards the means by which that content is delivered. This in turn obfuscates avenues for subtle messaging as well as making it impossible to ‘play with the conventions’ with all the richness that might imply, essentially because these conventions currently don’t yet exist. There are two important points here, one is that conventions are developing in the games and gaming domain and that these often frequently borrow from cinema and secondly, the vernacular of cinema developed over a very long period of time and it is possible that there is no shortcutting this process. This last point would mean that experimentations in trying to define standards or universally understood modes of presentation, may be only bear fruit in the long-run as some unarticulated process of audience preference and selection takes place such that a vernacular emerges, rather than being imposed. In short, the creator of a digital object can experiment to find the best and most meaningful way, or most easily understood way, of presenting that to audience through AR/VR/XR, but it will continue to require the conscious attention of the audience to understand it until a vernacular emerges and how that happens, and whether it can be influenced, is not well understood in the digital heritage domain. For this chapter I will examine the one particular aspect of our relationship with DHOs, scale, and how the digital media allows us to respond to a site of object by changing our scale in response. The size of things in the real world is always meaningful, here I will discuss one particular aspect of the relationship between viewer and representation that a translation to digital imaging disrupts across creative and heritage domains. I examine the issues of scale, or more precisely how scale in digital content (especially immersive content) transforms from a fixed function of our experience, loaded as it is with meaning, to a fluid and dynamic aspect of our interaction. I will consider how this transformation obfuscates a traditional avenue of communication whilst simultaneously opening up new modes of interaction where control of scale is consciously deployed by the viewer – as a direct response to the content on offer. This apparent dichotomy will be explored through multiple examples looking at some of the ways size and scale have been deployed in the physical world; how this has operated in the past, including in the powerful form of physical miniatures; how and why digital/analogue representations of the past utilise scale (again particularly through miniatures); how this encourages imagined journeys through a representation (e.g. the Daming Palace scale model in Xi’an); how this feature has begun to be exploited in creative digital immersives, such as the Hieronymus Bosch focused “Eye of the Owl; and how liberating the user from a fixed scale allows them to respond to work through disrupting the power relations implicit in scale differentials (e.g. Moon Modes unreleased Child/Parent game). Through these examples this chapter will make explicit how embodiment (or the lack of it) interferes with scale as signifier and the ways in which this can be can be leveraged to challenge what Wilsher calls VR’s patriarchal mode of experience or to subvert a pre-existing sets of power structures (e.g. the multimedia artwork “Heritage Site”). This chapter will explore issues of scale in depth and ultimately situate scalability alongside other key qualities of the digital which are acknowledged as incongruous with the analogue; imperviousness to decay; untouchability; unlocatability; and transience in the world.