An Algorithm for Preserving Art

Paolo Dionisi Vici's life's work is preserving aging art made from wood. He gets misty-eyed encountering rare artifacts from his hometown in Tuscany. He looks strikingly like Frank Zappa.

In other words, Dionisi Vici seems an unlikely person to get excited about the wireless sensors that are typically used to monitor the temperature of busy computers packed into IBM data servers. But that's exactly what he was excited about on April 6 in the busy halls of the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's upper Manhattan branch, which contains some 3,000 medieval works.

With technical assistance from IBM, Dionisi Vici, an associate research scientist for the Met, has deployed 120 low-power temperature and humidity sensors there since June of last year in his quest to determine the ideal environmental conditions for priceless wood works.

Click here to read this article from Technology Review

See also our profile of The Cloisters