The Odeon Theater (Continued): Commemorative Virtual Heritage with SketchUp

Select images above to view the model with an audience & side-by-side comparisons to historical photos.

Double-click to activate the interactive model; click and drag to rotate;
click the arrow on the right side for more navigation tools.

"The past did not happen in 2D and that it cannot be effectively studied or taught as a series of disconnected static images that, for the most part, represent incomplete remains." – Donald H. Sanders, "Why Do Virtual Heritage?"

Did you know that this year marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the first queer political protest in the world? Surprisingly, most people do not. What would you say if I offered you the chance to relive that historic moment – when, in 1867, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs took to the stage of the Grand Hall of the Odeon Theater in Munich to protest anti-sodomy laws in front of the five-hundred-member Association of German Jurists? He did so on the basis of a new, communal, queer political identity of which he alone had conceived. He was eventually shouted down, but his efforts inspired generations of queer activists – a lineage that can be traced to the modern LGBT rights movement.

As I previously proposed, virtual heritage makes available that which no longer exists or that which is not easily accessible for all. Three-dimensional modeling recreates spaces in which history was lived, enacted, and experienced. Exploring such recreations is a means of engaging our senses. Visualizing history helps us attach imperfection, emotion and memory to events, contrary to claiming "objectivities" and reciting "facts." This particular representation of the Odeon can help us, as public historians, to humanize and celebrate Ulrichs' activism, and to offer an alternative perspective to the narratives absent in history textbooks and our popular historical imagination.

Contrary to the idea that "virtual environments cause disembodiment, disorientation, discomfort, and social alienation" (Champion, 109), digital surrogates like the one I have created of the Odeon help us to both contextualize the spaces in which historic events took place and attempt to situate ourselves in the roles of the historical actors we study. Through a process of emulation, or approximation of lived experience, we can empathize with our historical subjects – thus improving our historiographies.

Rather than idolizing and, thus, objectifying the past – its significance and historical figures – how may we re-enact, bear witness to, and interpret it as human observers-cum-subjects? This project draws on disjointed fragments of information – synthesizing them into something that is not simply consumable (such as a text or tome), but something that is dynamic and interactive. To be clear, this project is not digital for the sake of being digital; "being impressed by technology is not the same as being inspired by it" (Champion, 109). Rather, this model reveals a version of the Grand Hall that no longer exists (having been bombed and reconstructed a level lower as a courtyard). Indeed, we may conceive of three-dimensional modeling (and other kinds of virtual heritage) as a form of preservation. We are creating large-scale digital records of our past. This project does not reveal historical information so much as it elucidates it. I started out with different pieces of a puzzle; SketchUp allowed me to put them together.

Still, we must be wary of accessibility issues that extend beyond breadth of circulation; the digital divide (issues of class and age that make technology a privilege, not the everyperson's tool), disability and learning style (future expansion of this project that keeps it from remaining exclusively visual), as well as questions of copyright, ownership, privatization and commercialization (of space, history and memory). Problems might arise from using a tool like SketchUp to draw from photographs, then upload the completed product to the 3D Warehouse – where anyone might access and even download it. Is that a wonderful, open source, informational free-for-all or a new frontier for plagiarism?