How can the latest digital technologies help people to understand, protect and promote old and traditional crafts? To answer that question, Euronews dived into the Mingei project to learn about the innovative ideas that engage today’s youth with past traditions.
“Mingei is aiming to capture the motion and tool usage of heritage crafts practitioners, from living human treasures and archive documentaries, in order to preserve and illustrate skill and tool manipulation,” Euronews explains.[1] In the video, Xenophon Zabulis and Nikolaos Partarakis, computer scientists at FORTH in Greece, show how they create 3D scans of the tools that are used in traditional cheesemaking and weaving.
After digitization, the information will then be available through compelling presentations, using storytelling and educational applications, based on AR and MR and the Internet. In a second video, they showcase some interactive installations in a museum setting, that are engaging people with the crafts.
For example, they show an interactive comicbook that describes and shows people how glassmaking was done in France years ago. Another example is an old dial-up telephone that allows the museum visitors to hear the traditional songs that were sang during the mastic harvest at Chios.
“In order to maintain the traditional crafts, we must draw the interest of people in different ways. We have to modernize the stories,” Xenophon tells. Digital tools can help with that goal.
The videos are also available in French and German.
References
[1] Gomez, Julian. 2020. “Technology helping to preserve European Heritage”, on Euronews.com.