Bio

Atiq Hashmi has been working in the realm of digital heritage since the past ten years. After completing a master degree in electrical engineering from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) Pakistan around 2015, he started working as a research assistant in the Technology for People Initiative (TPI) lab of the same university on the projects that revolved around digital heritage. Around the same time, TPI got a funded project from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to digitally preserve the crumbling heritage sites of Pakistan. The list of sites included Mosques, Buddhist temples, Hindu temple, and forts. The highlight of the project was the latest 3D laser technology that was able to document very fine details of heritage sites with very high accuracy. He worked on this project as a technical team lead and lead a team of around 16 young archaeologists and computer scientists for almost one year.
After the completion of this project, Atiq started working with the leading archaeological organizations and museums in Pakistan to introduce them the terrestrial laser technology and the usage of digital technologies in the field of museology respectively.
In 2017 Atiq decided to move to Europe because of its strong cultural background. He was awarded the prestegious Erasmus-Mundus scholarship for his MA in Media Arts and Cultures studies. This program offered him a very good chance to think about the broader perspectives of digital humanities. He travelled to Austria for his first semester, for the second semester he went to Denmark and his third semester was in Hong Kong. This mobility offered him a very beautiful opportunity to not only learn about the history of arts and cultures but provided him a chance to explore the contemporary European and Asian cultures as well. He attended lectures delivered by the renowned media artists and art historians including Andrew Broeckmann, Chris Salter and Oliver Grau to name a few and got a chance to work with renowned media artists like Professor Jeffrey Shaw and Prof. Sarah Kenderdine in Hong Kong. He defended his MA thesis under the supervision of Prof. Jeffrey Shah and Prof. Sarah Kenderdine in 2019 on 360-degrees 3D visualizations . After the completion of his Erasmus-Mundus program he continued working with both of these professors until the start of 2021 when he moved back to Pakistan. Since the early 2021 he is working on the digital documentation and preservation of Petroglyphs and Inscriptions along the Indus river and one of the famous old Silk Routes in the northern areas of Pakistan.