Organised by
Asia House and Iran Heritage Foundation
Date
Tuesday 4th November 2015, 6.30pm
Location
Cavendish Conference Centre, 22 Duchess Mews, London W1G 9DT
Description
3-D reconstructions of the past are excellent tools for informing and educating the public, but one of the primary challenges facing historical reconstruction is how to recreate the past and demonstrate the results, when the surviving remains are so fragmentary? How can we reconstruct what has been lost, understand what has been found, and represent it accurately?
Over the past 12 years, Farzin Rezaeian has tried to address this challenge by remoulding surviving information through a long and difficult process, which attempts to portray many ancient and ruined historical sites in Iran. He has achieved this by combining three important elements that together form the process by which we can reconstruct the past: science, art, and imagination.
New technology allows us to see ancient sites and landscapes in ways that were never before possible. But technological innovations also have their limits, so we need to use what we know from other sites, artefacts, or textual records to develop a composite image of a landscape, a building, or even an individual person from thousands of years ago.
In this talk, Rezaeian will demonstrate how he has tried to employ science, art and imagination in his reconstructions, so that hopefully, in the words of Dr. Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute: “some of our reconstructions of the ancient Middle East may be guesses, but they are highly educated guesses”.
Over the past 12 years, Farzin Rezaeian has tried to address this challenge by remoulding surviving information through a long and difficult process, which attempts to portray many ancient and ruined historical sites in Iran. He has achieved this by combining three important elements that together form the process by which we can reconstruct the past: science, art, and imagination.
New technology allows us to see ancient sites and landscapes in ways that were never before possible. But technological innovations also have their limits, so we need to use what we know from other sites, artefacts, or textual records to develop a composite image of a landscape, a building, or even an individual person from thousands of years ago.
In this talk, Rezaeian will demonstrate how he has tried to employ science, art and imagination in his reconstructions, so that hopefully, in the words of Dr. Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute: “some of our reconstructions of the ancient Middle East may be guesses, but they are highly educated guesses”.
Biography
Farzin Rezaeian is an award-winning documentary and educational film producer and director. He studied sociology, political science and communications at the University of Illinois in Chicago and then continued his studies in Iranian arts and civilization. For the past twenty years, Dr Rezaeian has researched and written for many educational and documentary films that he has produced or directed at Sunrise Visual Innovations. His historical reconstruction works include: Persepolis Recreated; Iran: Seven Faces of a Civilization; Recreating Pasargadae; and Discovering the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Iran.
