Exhibition Digitalisation

DIGITAL CULTURAL HERITAGE

Thousands of objects preserved in the archives of the Salzburg Marionette Theatre document more than a century of artistic development. These include puppet and stage designs, models, sound recordings, video recordings, librettos, musical scores, posters, programmes and press material. At the heart of the collection, however, are approximately 2,500 handcrafted marionettes from more than 150 productions.

As part of the Digital Cultural Heritage funding programme of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport (BMWKMS), more than 350 marionettes have been digitally documented using photogrammetry since 2024. For each individual marionette, a high-resolution three-dimensional digital model was created from up to 600 photographs. Extensive processing and refinement were required to accurately reproduce the distinctive characteristics of the marionettes and their costumes, including material qualities, surface texture, fabric, colour and transparency.

The resulting digital models are published as Open Data under a CC BY-NC-SA licence on the Salzburg Marionette Theatre's website (www.marionetten.at/collection) and on Kulturpool, Austria's central online portal for digitised cultural heritage collections. In a subsequent step, the models will also be made available through the European platform Europeana.

For the Salzburg Marionette Theatre, digitally preserving and cataloguing these invaluable "performers" in their current condition is of vital importance. The digital models will also enable individual body parts and heads to be reproduced by means of 3D printing whenever required. In the future, computer animation may even make it possible to bring exceptionally fragile historic marionettes back to life in digital form.

PREPARATION

  • Since 2019: photographic cataloguing and inventorying of approximately 2,500 marionettes, including the creation of metadata (inventory number, character name, production, year, height, weight, etc.)
  • From 2024: participation in the "Digital Cultural Heritage" funding programme of the Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport (BMWKMS)
  • Selection of 330 marionettes from different productions and decades for three-dimensional digitisation
  • Research into the technical feasibility of the project and development of an appropriate methodology
  • Preparation and submission of the funding application
  • Approval of the funding application
  • Procurement of the required hardware (camera, motorised dolly, computer, storage media, and a suspension system for the marionettes)
  • Acquisition, configuration and customisation of a professional digital collections management system to meet the specific requirements of the Salzburg Marionette Theatre
  • Recruitment of specialist staff (Salzburg University of Applied Sciences and University of Arts Linz) and training of staff at the Salzburg Marionette Theatre
  • Rental of premises from the Mozarteum University Salzburg for several months to carry out the project


CREATION OF THE 3D DIGITAL MODEL

  • Positioning and lighting each marionette in a suitable pose
  • Use of a motorised camera dolly that completes three to six rotations around the marionette while capturing up to 600 individual photographs (approximately 30 minutes per object)
  • Documentation of the capture process and assignment of the image set to the corresponding object
  • Digital post-processing of the photographs (including exposure correction)
  • Generation of a 3D model and creation of a working copy using the software RealityScan
  • Editing of the working copy in ZBrush (Maxon) to produce a clean display model; polygon count reduced to 100,000
  • Texturing of the processed display model in RealityScan
  • Export of the display model in GLB format

FINALISATION AND PUBLICATION

  • Development of a dedicated website with an interface for transferring data from the BeeCollect digital collections management system and integration with the Kulturpool
  • Review, correction and enrichment of the metadata
  • Upload of the final display models to the collections management system
  • Design and implementation of a clear, user-friendly website, including the logical organisation and presentation of the digital models
  • Preparation of a comprehensive project report
  • Publication of the digital models on the Austrian Kulturpool platform

PROJECT TEAM

Project proposal: Franziska Wizany
Technical expertise: Simon Hochleitner
Photogrammetric image capture and creation of the 3D digital models: Johannes Eder, Simon Hochleitner, Samuel Stallybrass
Collection website design: Stefan Prosch
BeeCollect collections management system: Solvatec
Exhibition design: wir sind artisten
Project implementation at the Salzburg Marionette Theatre: Philippe Brunner, Pierre Droin, Christine Gropper, Heidi Hölzl, Philipp Schmidt, Günther Schöllbauer, Susanne Tiefenbacher
Austrian Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport (BMWKMS): Sofie Kokas, Doris Wolfslehner
Kulturpool: Lukas Graf