Mark Mudge, President and Chairman of the Board

Mark Mudge is President and co-founder of Cultural Heritage Imaging (CHI) and the current Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Mark’s academic training was in philosophy and sculpture. He worked as a professional bronze sculptor for a decade, casting his own work. His bronze work led him to digital 3D modeling environments and the laser-scanning capture tools that were just emerging in the late 1980s. Since then, for over 20 years, Mark has worked in 3D information capture environments and digital photography.

From 1993 to 2001, Mark taught advanced computer graphic modeling and animation techniques to more than 800 students in the San Francisco Bay area at both the Academy of Art University and the Expression College for Digital Arts.

Technology Innovation

Mark is a co-inventor, with Tom Malzbender of HP Labs, of the computational photography technique called Highlight Reflectance Transformation Imaging. Mark has published many articles and book chapters related to imaging scientific and cultural heritage materials, and he serves on several international committees, including the International Council of Museum (ICOM) Documentation Committee (CIDOC).

In 1990, Mark became a certified operator of Cyberware laser scanning systems and has subsequently scanned more than a thousand subjects.

To make CHI’s vision of the democratization of technology and the long-term preservation of knowledge a reality, Mark works to foster the adoption of robust and practical digital techniques. His work for CHI is focused on the ease of use, cost-effectiveness, and self-documentation of digital imaging techniques through new equipment designs, open source software, and methodology enhancements. His most recent efforts have been on enhancing the trustworthiness of “born archival” images, building up the semantic richness of metadata records about digital representations, and easing the burdens of sustainable, long-term digital archiving.