In the cool shadowy interiors of houses whose owners died almost 2,000 years ago in one of the most famous disasters in history, the first contemporary art works, created by the German artist Catrin Huber with a team from Newcastle University, have just been installed in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Every centimetre of surviving original material is precious in the World Heritage sites that attract millions of visitors every year. Any damage, such as recent collapses at Pompeii, creates world headlines.

The towns were destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD, when thousands of the residents died in lava flows, choking clouds of poison gas or showers of ash that left them buried many metres deep, preserving the foods they ate and the tables they ate off, the brilliantly painted walls of their homes, the rude slogans and the shop prices they scrawled on street corners and, hauntingly, their own petrified bodies, to be rediscovered in the 18th century.

The rooms were laser-scanned to ensure that Catrin Huber’s panels would fit without damaging the walls. Photograph: Newcastle University

It took three years from Huber’s first idea of taking an artist’s eye into the heart of the sites to win consent from the Italian authorities for the Expanded Interiors project and to work out how to realise it, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The panels were built and painted in Newcastle, which is pioneering collaboration between arts, sciences, fine arts and engineering departments. The team had to install them by carrying the sections through narrow, steep streets where using machinery is hazardous, and cramped interiors rich in original painted plaster.

The rooms in Pompeii and Herculaeneum were laser-scanned by Alex Turner, of the university’s archaeology department, to ensure that Huber’s brilliantly coloured aluminium panels would fit into the spaces without any risk of damage to the beautiful but faded, painted Roman walls. The measurements and engineering of the panels were so precise that their feet stand on modern cement repairs rather than original floor surfaces.

“These fantastic paintings have been studied by archaeologists and art historians, but I am responding to them as an artist,” said Huber, who is now based at the university. “To me they mean something else – they are not just wall coverings or statements of wealth and prestige. They are full of wit and imagination, they are playing with colour and temperature, literary references, with the idea of spaces, tricky perspectives, interiors and exteriors, arches and openings.”

The painted panels were installed in the cryptoporticus of a sumptuous house in Pompeii. Photograph: Newcastle University

At Pompeii, she has taken over what was once a sumptuous house, built on five levels, with two rare features in the crowded city. One is an opulent private bathhouse, the other a cryptoporticus, an interior hall painted to look like an exterior colonnade, deep in the coolest levels of the house – a space for walking and talking protected from the fierce heat. By the time of the eruption that destroyed the city, however, the beautiful painted rooms had already been severely damaged by an earthquake in 62AD, and had been used as storerooms.

Her paintings echo the ominously confusing spaces and dark painted windows, doors and arches of her Roman predecessors – features some have suggested were seen as portals to the shadowy world of the ancestors.

But she has also tried to put back some of the jokes. The Herculaneum installation, in a room in the House of the Beautiful Courtyard – once used for a museum display by Amedeo Maiuri, legendary director of both sites for almost four decades up to 1961 – incorporates the words “ciao bella”, hidden in the panels: a few startled visitors have already deciphered it.

Original objects were laser-scanned and 3D-printed for a display in the House of the Beautiful Courtyard in Herculaneum. Photograph: Newcastle University

The response to Huber’s work pleases the director, Francesco Sirano, who only took over last year and is determined to make Herculaneum and all the work being carried out there more open and more connected to the modern town, whose washing lines hang over the cliff edge of the ruins. “It is a work of art, but it is also a way of translating the past for the present,” he said.

Turner has also laser-scanned precious original objects chosen by Huber from the site stores, and 3D-printed them to incorporate in the installations. At Herculaneum these include a haunting silver head of Empress Livia, immaculate from behind but the face so damaged that it appears to be screaming at the fate of the town.

It would be impossible to incorporate the fragile originals, but in Pompeii a small boy suddenly spotted and reached out to touch one of the recreated objects – a little cup with an absurd human face, puff cheeked and sticking its tongue out. He may have missed the layered history of the battered Roman walls, but he knew a joke when he saw one and snorted with laughter, to Huber’s delight.