This talk overviews how recent advance in artificial intelligence technology — ingesting such multi-dimensional datasets — can inform art investigation, conservation, and presentation.

The cultural heritage sector is experiencing a digital revolution driven by the growing adoption of non-invasive, non-destructive imaging and analytical approaches generating multi-dimensional data from entire artworks. The ability to interrogate this wealth of data is essential to reveal an artist’s creative process, the works’ restoration history, inform strategies for its conservation and preservation and, importantly, present artwork in new ways to the public.

However, the availability of such rich datasets poses a major challenge: traditional approaches are not adequate to inspect the currently available wealth of data, so there is a strong drive and need to explore and adopt automated tools to interrogate these emerging large multi-dimensional datasets.

This talk overviews how recent advance in artificial intelligence technology — ingesting such multi-dimensional datasets — can inform art investigation, conservation, and presentation. A series a case-studies — including our recent work on the Ghent Altarpiece — will also be discussed throughout the seminar.