We are happy to inform you that BMN is one of the partners in a three-year project titled AURORA – Artwork Unique RecognitiOn and tRacking through chemicAl encoded data, miniaturized devices and blockchain alliance led by the TECHEDGE SPA Italy and funded through HORIZON EU Research and Innovation Actions.

Photos: Kick-Off Meeting, 18th-19th January 2023, Budapest (Hungary)

Artifacts are constantly threatened by anthropogenic actions. Looting, smuggling, and illicit trade of cultural goods pose major risks to our cultural goods and our cultural identity. One of the major consequences of these illegal activities is the dissociation, meaning the loss of information associated with an object, such as provenance, identification, or location information, without which the object loses significance or is lost.

Thus, art property marking and tracking are crucial to ensure the object identification, collection management and protection, while maintaining their state of conservation.

Several actions have been adopted during the years to strengthen the protection of cultural property and cultural heritage, but they often lack effectiveness.

The AURORA project wants to fill this gap by demonstrating how chemical marking, miniaturized device, art deep-scan technique, cloud and blockchain based platforms can be combined to create a cost-effective, non-destructive, and non-invasive countermeasure against illegal activities while preserving artifacts.

The technologies researched and implemented in AURORA will converge in a digital tool allowing relevant stakeholders, art dealers, curators, auction houses, logistic services, and enforcement agents, to easily verify artwork authenticity and provenance, enabling art piece movement tracking.

In close collaboration with relevant cultural institutions partners, AURORA will showcase real setting applications to validate the non-invasiveness, low cost, long-term stability, confidentiality, and data security features of the proposed solutions. In parallel, AURORA will foster technological democratization among cultural institutions, by creating a knowledge bridge between technical competencies and cultural heritage professionals. Specific awareness-raising activities will demonstrate how the AURORA solutions can be a means to preserve cultural identities mixtures through cultural heritage preservation.

• Project number: 101094245
• Project name: Artwork Unique RecognitiOn and tRacking through chemicAl encoded data, miniaturized devices and
  blockchain alliance
• Project acronym: AURORA
• Call: HORIZON-CL2-2022-HERITAGE-01
• Topic: HORIZON-CL2-2022-HERITAGE-01-07
• Type of action: HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions

AURORA SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES

• To develop a non-destructive anti-counterfeiting marker based on advanced chemical and spectroscopy technologies to uniquely identify cultural heritage art pieces, preventing illegal trafficking.
• To provide a miniaturized device pathfinder enabling the traceability of cultural goods artworks using wireless sensor network technology.
• To deliver a robust and simple artwork authenticity verification digital tool exploiting blockchain based solution to prevent unintentional or illegal artwork digital identity data alteration.
• To validate the AURORA protection, identification, and traceability innovation package on real artworks
• To increase awareness among stakeholders on methods and tools to prevent artworks illicit trafficking, stealing and destruction, tackling cultural heritage identity memory destruction