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The technology has also brought about an added benefit: For years, museums have largely ignored the religious teachings that form a large part of their art collections. Three-dimensional scanning allows viewers to explore it once more.
The process “allowed me to see way more detail on the surface, which is also encouraging me to go back to the sutras themselves,” Wilson said, referring to the texts that form the basis of Buddhist-wisdom teachings. “You can see the decisions that illustrators have made in how to represent a story and its basic moral.”
Wilson believes the statue was created to be a teaching tool. So, he created a virtual tour of the model explaining what some of the scenes depict.
The whole process brought home the potential innate in the sculpture and reminded him how religious art once served as visual learning experience.
Over the past few centuries, Western society began separating religion from art, said Eileen Daily, director of the Doctor of Ministry in Transformational Leadership at Boston University. Mostly, she said, this came as a result of generalized literacy.
“Before that, religion was always involved with music, and statues, and paintings and dramas,” she said. ” … It just was part of one’s religious expression for a long time in most places. So it’s almost like we’re the ones who want to separate everything.”
Technology is now allowing museums to reunite the two — the artistic qualities of the work as well as its religious meaning and purpose.
For example, in 2011 Daily created an app, which users can take to museums or churches to learn about the history and religious significance of the artwork around them.
Daily originally planned to write a book to help the average person understand religious art, but she soon realized there was a smarter approach.
“What it boiled down to is, no one is gonna bring a book to the museum,” she said. “So what one thing are people going to have in the museum? They’re going to have their phones.”
The app exclusively covers Christian art and is available only through Google Play for now.
That constant access to cellphones and technology also means works such as the Cosmic Buddha are no longer exclusive to museums. Thanks to the internet, believers and scholars across the world can access its 3D model from the comfort of their homes or as part of classroom instruction.
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Wilson sees the prospect of more uses for 3D imaging in studying Buddhist history and religion. For example, he said, curators and scholars can order up scans of all the objects in a Buddhist temple and re-create the space virtually, even if the pieces lie scattered in collections across the world.
Overall, Morgan said, technology and museums are changing each other for the better.
“Traditional museum practice tended to be to isolate the object, to put it on a plain-white pedestal in an airless cubic space because the focus was on the object as an object, not on the object as part of a ritual process,” he said.
“So I think if you look at museum practice universally now, you’re seeing a very important shift that wants to move to try to understand objects as interactive. These 3D technologies allow that.”
This article originally appeared in Religion News Service. The interactive “Body of Devotion” exhibit will close July 9, but the Cosmic Buddha will return to the Freer on Oct. 14.[lz_pagination]
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