Re-enactors

Visiting the city of Bath, England today, the home of historical beautiful people from the Roman era to the age of Romanticism, I had an opportunity to reflect on the difference between analog and digital reconstruction. Although they did have an amusingly outdated collection of pre-Google web statistics, the Jane Austen Centre largely emphasized simulations that used dolls, film costumes, and live re-enactors to represent and make manifest the historical past.

In contrast, the Roman Baths of Bath, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, used computer models on the television monitors in almost every room to provide three-dimensional representations of the baths as they would be occupied by modestly posed and yet frequently naked computer-generated humans splashing around in the shimmeringly rendered water.