I'm the first to admit that my visual conceptions of the ancient world have been formed by cheesy sources like Hollywood gladiator epics and hours spent sipping drinks delivered by toga-clad babes while hemorrhaging money in the splendor of Las Vegas's Caesar's Palace. Today it doesn't even seem possible to capture the magnificence and unparalleled excesses of the real thing. Political enlightenment, at least on the surface, keeps the massive class distinctions of old at bay, while contemporary contractors don't build those colonnaded villas with gold-leafed vaulted ceilings, vibrant mosaic floors, and freshly carved embellishments because of their astronomical price tags.
Of course, us late-20th-century folk have our own brand of architectural and engineering dazzle, but it usually comes in digital form. At the recently opened Getty Center in Los Angeles, itself an architectural marvel, visitors get a sense of ancient Roman splendors the virtual way. A joint project with the Getty Museum, the Getty Education Institute for the Arts, and UCLA's School of Architecture and Urban Planning brings us a computer-generated version of the Forum of the Emperor Trajan, a sprawling public center that ancient Romans once used to celebrate military victories and other civic shindigs.
The virtual reconstruction of this site was made using military flight simulators and VR technology, and rendered on Silicon Graphics equipment. It's the same technology used to help rethink parts of LA after the 1992 riots, but for this scholarly project, the architectural details are historically accurate enough to impress on their own.
As part of Beyond Beauty: Antiquities as Evidence, the Forum is presented in large-screen video form, along with marble fragments and statuary that provide a better sense of what this amazing place looked like. The show explores how technology is encoded in ancient objects, and the virtual model presents the flip side - how technology can piece together the past. According to Getty antiquities curators, it does so more flexibly and less expensively than a conventional wooden model. It's also convincing and glitzy enough to have me rethinking my deep attachment to the Vegas version.
STREET CRED
Smooth in the Crud Speedpass Gas
Digital Palace
