BIOGRAPHY: 
Olivia MENAGUALE is an art historian and archaeologist, whose lifelong passion in her studies and career, over the last 30 years, has been to improve the communications and access to Cultural Heritage and Tourism in Europe and the US, working alongside experts in technology from digital photo-archives to the financial art world, from audio-video guides to 3D reconstructions. She has worked alongside national and local governments, superintendencies, art experts, archaeologists, collectors and auction houses, and in projects for museums to historical and archaeological sites, from theme parks to government committees, from art exhibitions to world expos. She is Chair of IEEE IoT for Tourism and Cultural Heritage.
Olivia Menaguale received a Doctorate in Modern Literature, with a specialisation in Art History at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan (Italy), with 1st class honours 110/110 Cum Laude.
Merging her knowledge and skills in art history and archaeology with technology, she has developed projects to research and provide access to art, both onsite and virtually offsite. She started in the early 1990s, with the development and management of a financial photographic database on works of art that pass at auction called “I-on-Art”. It was commercialised and used by art collectors, auction houses and museums, internationally. This led to two pioneering digitisation projects, in London and New York, for the world’s two largest art history photo-archives of a total of more than 3.5 million annotated photos held at the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute (London, UK) and the at Frick Museum & Art Reference Library (New York, NY, USA).
Since then, Olivia Menaguale has led and been involved in other digital projects, including the 3D reconstruction of ancient Rome – in collaboration with the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA, USA), UCLA (Los Angeles, CA, USA), and the Italian Ministry of Culture. This remains the largest 3D model of any historical site. In 2008, Google Inc. (Mountainview, CA, USA) partnered the project, and together launched the first historical city, “Ancient Rome” on Google Earth which could be flown over in 24 languages and was explored by 78 million people worldwide in the first week of going public.
Some other projects she has led, include the creation of a mini theme park on the Colosseum called “Rewind Rome” for tourists visiting the City of Rome; and a 3D CAVE inside the historical site of Pompeii offering the 2.5 visiting visitors with a 360° fully immersive reconstruction of a bustling street in 64 A.D. before the eruption.
Olivia also led the team to create and manage the world’s first audio-video guide for a historical site, at the Colosseum in 2006. This service, providing over 100 minutes of videos, photographic explanatory materials and narration, is still offered to the 4 million visitors to the site today, available in 9 languages.
Due to her unique knowledge and experience in bringing together the very differing worlds of technology with art history and archaeology, she has represented her home country Italy, in state missions, such as to the Middle East with the former Italian President, On. Napolitano, and in curating an Old Master Exhibition on Italian Art at the 2015 World Expo in Milan (Italy). She has also taught a series of lectures on art and technology at the Università di Roma La Sapienza in Rome (Italy), called “I mestieri dell’arte” (“The jobs of the art world” which was then published under Electa (Mondadori).
ABSTRACT: Non-Fungible Token (NFT) and digital twins
A country’s Cultural Heritage has the power to stimulate the emotions of those experiencing it and this is why it has always sparked the universal desire to pass it on by narrating it and reproducing it.
Through time, the desire to reproduce Cultural Heritage pieces was fulfilled in different ways: from drawings to casts, from photographs to postcards. Today this desire/need to create twin copies is done digitally, since computers have become the language of our time and are opening a multitude of scenarios and opportunities well beyond the mere reproduction of works of art.
Step by step, and with some delays compared to other fields, the latest technologies are being applied to the Cultural Heritage world and today this world is finally acquiring digital twins: exact copies of physical objects and settings resulting from the Internet of Things. Thanks to the Internet of Things in fact, creating digital twins has become more accessible and financially attainable.
We are going to see what digital twin means in the world of art and explore the new field of the non-fungible token (NFT). A new type of work of art, the NFT has emerged successfully on the art market scene. But what do we mean by an NFT work of art? How can we assign a value? How are we going to collect and display the NFT? Is a new type of relationship between the Information Technology (IT) and the Cultural Heritage (CH) fields rising?
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