This is one of the first videos of Factum Arte’s work I had seen after originally watching an interview with the studio’s Adam Lowe on Euromaxx. The video captures a small part of their work of document and reproduce a facsimile of the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings as part of the Desert Valley Project.
Imagine knowing a place so intimately that you could recreate every details. To create a copy that gives he visitor an indistinguishable experance. The work raises interesting questions about the nature originality and our experance with objects we identify as “original.” For the technical artist their is a fascination with process. The use of 3D scanners, panoramic imaging, 3D routing, layered printing. The tools that allow these artists to produce a work that captures the minute surface details that give an “authentic” sense of history to an object.
In this instance Factum Arte only reproduced sections of the tomb removed in the nineteenth century by the British, French, Americans and Italians. Latter they would go on to reproduce entire tomb of Tutankhamun.