School Chair at NTU, Singapore
Michael J K Walsh is Professor of Art History at Nanyang Technological University Singapore. He successfully nominated Famagusta twice for inclusion in the World Monuments Fund Watch List of endangered heritage sites, then went on to organise four international conferences on the history, art and architecture of the walled city. From these meetings in Paris, Budapest, Bern and Padua five edited collections on Famagusta have been published. They are: Walsh, M., N. Coureas, P. Edbury (eds.), Medieval and Renaissance Famagusta: Studies in Art, Architecture and History (Ashgate Press, 2012); Walsh, M, N. Coureas, and T. Kiss (eds.), Crusader to Venetian Famagusta: ‘The Harbour of all this Sea and Realm’ (Central European University Press, 2014); Walsh, M. (ed.),City of Empires: Ottoman and British Famagusta 1571 – 1960 (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2015); Walsh, M. (ed.), The Armenian Church of Famagusta and the Complexity of Cypriot Heritage: Prayers Long Silent (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017); and most recently Walsh, M. (Ed), Famagusta Maritima: Mariners, Merchants and Mercenaries (Brill, 2019). His most recent work is concerned with the digital modelling of the city’s extant ecclesiastical structures with particular attention to music.
Session: Digital Heritage
‘Digital Technologies for Heritage Protection: The Case of Famagusta’
Digital models can be built that are accurate to within a few millimetres. Interactive spaces can be navigated by learners in real time at any point on the planet. Heritage can come alive with the music and sounds of the era. Speculative reconstructions can be attempted and location within 4D curated spaces can be determined by the user (including flight). Such experiments have been conducted over the past decade in Famagusta, in particular in the Armenian Church, St. Anne’s, and St. George of the Greeks. This paper shares the results of this research in the hope that digital modelling, harnessed to hastening developments in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, might stimulate further research in and on the historic city of Famagusta.
Learning outcomes:
- Medieval Art, Music and Architectural History in Cyprus
- Alternative pedagogies
- Trans-disciplinary investigation
- International Collaboration
Additional information and programme of International Conference on Digital Decisions in Cultural and Scientific Heritage – here
