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January 30, 2012 by diana

Objects in the Age of their Digital Reproducibility

Walter Benjamin’s influential essay on the work of art in the age of “its technological reproducibility”, argues that, while art has always been theoretically reproducible, the “here and now of the original”, its “authenticity”, its “aura” and its “unique existence”, are obliterated with “mechanical reproduction”. Yet Benjamin also notes that mechanical reproduction enables new kinds of “existences” and encounters, as well as new kinds of human perceptions:

“First, technological reproduction is more independent of the original than is manual reproduction. For example, in photography technological reproduction can bring out aspects of the original that are accessible only to the lens . . . but not to the human eye; or it can use certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, to record images which escape natural optics altogether . . . Second, technological reproduction can place the copy of the original in situations to which the original itself cannot attain. Above all, it enables the original to meet the recipient halfway, whether in the form of a photograph or in that of a gramophone record.” (Benjamin 2010, 14 [my emphasis])

For Benjamin, these qualities, while novel, were destructive, involving the “liquidation of the value of tradition”, substituting a “mass existence for a unique existence”, and potential weapons for political powers (Benjamin 2010, 14; 35). Yet these new qualities of mechanical reproduction, here relating to photography and film, were also used as productive elements in early filmic experiments. Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera is one example:

In the midst of a scene showing the group in the motorcar, Vertov shows stills of the action, close-ups of people’s faces, reels of negatives and their contents, as well as the process of piecing reels together to create the film itself. Details of things and behaviors in the world, and the process of image-making itself, are revealed by cinematic techniques. As Benjamin writes, “It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious” (2010, 30).

Today, Benjamin’s observations about 1) how new technologies (both positively and negatively) transform collective perceptions and 2) the various ways new technologies both conceal their histories and (re-)production and reveal otherwise unseen or “unconscious” elements in the world are echoed in much of the literature surrounding new digital technologies.

1) On Shifts in Collective Perception
Jeff Malpas’s chapter in New Heritage, following Benjamin, argues that peoples’ perceptions are being further detached from the real (both material and in space/place/time), which in turn changes the way “we understand, experience, and interpret ourselves” (Malpas 2008, 19). In a different vein, Gwyneira Isaac’s paper on the ways new media has become the new museum object shows how new technologies have changed the experience of viewing in museums: “The interplay between . . . digital images and their material referents, has initiated new ways of responding to and experiencing museum objects” (Isaac 2008, 297). Likewise, in Srinivasan et al’s (2010) paper on the digital museum as ‘contact zone’, the attachment of narratives, originating contexts, and diverse knowledges to the audience encounter with an object activates more complex understandings of objects’ meaning.

2) On the Concealing or Revealing of Objects’ Qualities & Contexts
Malpas’ paper also sticks with Benjamin on the topic of objects’ contexts. Malpas argues that digital technologies “dissolve the presence of the thing in its place” (2008, 19). A quality of digital technologies is “not only their capacity for endless reproduction . . . but also their capacity to transform the elements that they reproduce, to produce new such elements, and to juxtapose those elements in new arrangements and forms of connection” (Malpas 2008, 20). His final call to action—to find “ways to deploy new media in ways that maintain, and do not obscure or dissolve, a sense of place” (2008, 26)—is in many ways answered by papers by Srinivasan et. al. and Kimberly Christen (2011). In Srinivas et. al’s perspective, digital technologies’ juxtapositions and digital objects’ “extensionality” and “mutability” in fact reveal “cultural threads” and narratives. Contemporary digital heritage projects like the Museum of Anthropology’s Reciprocal Research Network (Rowley 2010) and the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal (Christen 2011) illustrate the ways digital objects can be seen in the context of “the processes and relationships that ground information systems within larger cultural logics and historical events” (Christen 2011, 190) as well as otherwise distant peoples, places, and other things, while maintaining “cultural protocols aimed at maintaining specific types of knowledge” (Christen 2011, 191).
At the same time, Isaac also notes that in digital reproduction, the “copying” of complex codes becomes another form of “technological enchantment”, using Alfred Gell’s terminology. Like the notion of Benjamin’s “aura”, Gell’s notion of “enchantment” involves the idea that a thing is produced in an irreproducible moment of human creativity. When symbols and numbers are copied and reformatted “’the numbers are read and inscribed anew each time’ . . . so that ‘each copy . .. is still an “original” inscription of information’” (Isaac citing Binkley 1997). However, unlike a painter envying another painter’s piece, I wonder whether code experts are equally “enchanted” by these technologies.

So, what are the impacts of new digital technologies on ‘objects’ and our engagements with them? Responses to this question, as with Benjamin’s generation, teeter between fear and optimism. At the same time that new technologies release objects from their original contexts or moments of human creation, they have a potential to enable new productive connections, juxtapositions and encounters that reveal otherwise obscured networks they are a part of or layered knowledges embedded in them.

A Few Questions:
-How are digital technologies changing perceptions or practices of engaging with objects? If digital media are themselves new kinds of objects, as Isaac argues, are there differences between physical objects and digital objects? And what are they?

-How do digital technologies obscure or reveal cultural practices, traditions and histories? Is restricting kinds of access enough to ensure that cultural values are maintained?

-What are the exciting and/or dangerous potentialities for the new contexts and connections digital objects encounter? Can audiences still “misread” objects from their own contexts or worldviews?

-Returning to our discussion last week, why do we feel uneasy when we think of the computerized reproduction of a carving, but perhaps not of a photograph? What qualities of human production are still held sacred?

These were some streams and questions I found interesting, but I’d be interested in other ways you engaged with this topic!

Cited:
Benjamin, W. 2010. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducability” [First Version]. Grey Room 39, pp. 11-37.

Christen, K. 2011. “Opening Archives: Respectful Repatriation. American Archivist 74, pp. 185-210.

Isaac, G. 2008. “Technology Becomes the Object: The Use of Electronic Media at the National Museum of the American Indian. Journal of Material Culture 13(3), pp. 287-310.

Malpas, J. 2008. “Cultural Heritage in the Age of New Media” in New Heritage. New York: Routledge, pp. 13-26.

Srinivasan, R. et al. 2010. “Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum. Science, Technology & Human Values 35(5), pp. 735-768.

Rowley, S. et al. 2010 “Building an On-Line Research Community: The Reciprocal Research Network”, www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2010/papers/rowley/rowley.html.

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January 26, 2012 by bardia

Using Story Telling Release Cultural Anxiety

I found these set of documentaries in CBC very interesting, and related to the  topic of  following paper : ” Indigenous Exhibition in the Age of Cultural Property”:

8thfire : http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/8thfire/

The same issues discussed in paper such as Trust, Power factors in negotiations with first nation communities have been outlined and depicted using media narrative techniques very well,

There was a challenge introduced in paper about prioritizing the first nations stories, art, music, and sacred objects based on what museums and tourist industry are looking for versus what first nation are aiming. I personally think, ignoring, and misbehaving these communities over years and generations has created a cultural anxiety between them, which most of conflicts presented in paper are based on that factor, and narration of these stories to a right audience (new generation), will release this cultural stress, and madness, which needs to be considered as an important factor while dealing with these communities, I believe even new techniques in documentary creations are good approaches which can help to better narrates these cultural pains, and cure this ignorance.

Please check the coming episode:

http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/8thfire//2011/11/whose-land-is-it-anyway.html

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January 24, 2012 by diana

Musings on Theoretical Cocktails

Problematic and predictable “rhetorical strategies” of postcolonial museum scholarship, as described by Michael Brown (2009):

Comb the archives for objectionable, racist declarations by long-dead museum employees, mix in a bit of authorial hand wringing about a troubling exhibit label or two, flavor with a dollop of Foucault and a dash of Gramsci, shake vigorously, serve. (Brown 2009, 148)

OK, so it’s a bad cocktail. But, as Brown also shows, the realities of museum work and, let’s be honest, of much more current rhetoric surrounding contemporary moves toward “community museums”, “collaboration”, and “digital repatriation” is no less diluted (am I a pun-ster or what?). While these now-catchphrases in the museum often suggest a simplistic reversal of colonial processes, their realizations are often incredibly complex; the creation of the RRN at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC (Rowley 2010), and Brown’s examples from the NMAI show a few examples. Who constitutes community authority? Or, as NMAI curator Paul Chaat Smith aptly put it: “You go out into one of ‘the communities’ and ask people who’d never thought twice about museum exhibitry to design exhibits.” Further, what powers are negotiated in collaborative efforts? And as Clifford shows in his essay, often museum “contact zones”, while being productive encounters, involve unequal reciprocities or “power imbalances of contact relations” (Clifford 1997, 193). Meanwhile digital heritage and archives become complex as they negotiate both local and national imaginaries, or different levels of “comradeship” (as defined in Anderson 1991). And, albeit facetiously, to respond to Claude’s earlier link (on the Met curator speaking about George Washington Crossing the Delaware on the Colbert Report), we see that the sacredness of accepted knowledges and ideologies is challenged by open access information. Indeed, there may be some hazards in blighting nationalist imaginaries with access to information (“that was painted in Germany?”). Wikipedia’s reaction to impending US Congress bills is perhaps more poignant.

In any case, this weeks readings encourage us to be cautious of cheap cocktails.

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January 23, 2012 by claude

The Human Fish : the history of exotic displays…

Clifford (1997) mentions “the long history of ‘exotic’ displays in the West. This history provides a context of enduring power imbalance within and against which the contact work of travel, exhibition, and interpretation occurs. An ongoing ideological matrix governs the understanding of ‘primitive’ people in ‘civilized’ places.” (p. 197). He then describes the famous pseudo-exotic performances by CoCo Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

When I was collecting data for my M.A. thesis, I found the following newspapers clipping which serve as evidence that the “long history of ‘exotic’ displays in the West” has been part and parcel of everyday life and popular culture too. Not only high-art or museum discourse. I have posted the two 1897 newspaper clippings but since they are a bit hard to read, I also transcribed them below. Enjoy.

Published in the Vancouver Daily World, July 20, 1897, p. 8:

THE HUMAN FISH

The Strange Amphibian From the Southern Coast Reaches Town.

The remarkable amphibian so fully described in recent press dispatches, has reached town. Capt / Robt. Beasley, its custodian, is en route to the east with his strange charge, which is attracting the curious wherever exhibited.  In formation it strikingly resembles the analomy of a female human in the working in the upper half of its anatomy. From the waist downward the extremity is that of an ordinary fish. Showing the scales, dorsal and candal fans. It was captured alive in the Gulf of California by native fisherman and is now attracting crowds of visitors to the Boulder block, on Cordova street, where it is being exhibited.

Published in the Vancouver Daily World, August 2, 1897, p. 8:

The human fish, which was on exhibition here, was taken a few days ago to Steveston. It was not too well patronized there and the spieler made some remarks about the deadness of the town. Just to show that they were alive a couple of Stevestonites carried off the human fish and it cost the owner $20 to get it back again.

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January 23, 2012 by kate

Week 3: Digital Return

I just came home from an excellent workshop at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History called “After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge“. In our seminar this week I will be talking about some of the themes and debates that emerged as we explored a spectrum of digital projects that have, at their core, a deep social and technological interest in using digital media to “return” heritage to originating communities. Some of these include:

  • the status and significance of the “digital” heritage object: replicas, reproductions, copies, and control
  • ownership of cultural heritage in the digital age, and Indigenous claims for intellectual property and copyright
  • the role of intangible cultural heritage in the museum and its representation with digital technologies in real and virtual/cyber museum environments
  • cultural protocols and Indigenous ontologies, and their translations into digital databases
  • opportunities for re-mediation of cultural heritage facilitated by digitization
  • participatory research methodologies and research ethics
  • the shifting role of the museum as a public institution

I will talk about some of the projects that were presented in the course of the workshop; in advance of the class you may want to look at a few of them–all listed on the Digital Return Website. I will talk in particular about the Reciprocal Research Network, and you will be reading Rowley et. al’s 2010 paper about the RRN (I encourage you to sign up for an account at http://www.rrnpilot.org). Our discussions will be undercut with our attempt to understand Anderson’s notion of the “imagined community” and the role of museum (along with the census, and the map) as an instrument through which “the colonial state imagined its dominion––the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry” (Anderson 1991:243). Building on last week’s discussion of shifting curatorial authority in the museum and public expectations of access to cultural knowledge, I’ll suggest that projects like those featured in the Digital Return workshop provide us with insight into cultural, political, and institutional contexts where national ideologies (including First Nations, Aboriginal and Tribal nationalisms) and relations of power are being contested and reinscribed.

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January 22, 2012 by kate

Seminar and Tour at Museum of Vancouver

For our second seminar of the semester, we visited the Museum of Vancouver for a discussion and tour of the Neon Vancouver | Ugly Vancouver exhibit, with Curator Joan Seidl, and Curator of Public Engagement and Dialogue, Hanna Cho, who is leading the production of the museum’s virtual exhibit and mobile walking tour ‘The Visible City: Illuminating Vancouver’s Neon’. I want to thank Joan and Hanna for taking the time to give us a very detailed and inspiring introduction to their work at the museum and for raising many intriguing questions about the role of new media in the museum’s everyday practices and exhibitions.

We also had the opportunity to walk with Joan through the collections storage facility, which was very helpful for us in better understanding the scope of the museum’s collections and its current goals as Vancouver’s memory institution. After a week of reading Fiona Cameron’s work on the socially constructed nature of museum databases and Peter Walsh’s essay on “The Unassailable Voice”, it was very productive to be able to see for ourselves the challenges inherent in managing such an extensive collection and to think about the role of digital media in organizing, classifying, and locating collections and objects in this particular institution. I am looking forward to seeing where this initial visit and the questions that it raised take us as the term moves along…

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January 21, 2012 by claude

MOMA in The Colbert Report

I just finished reading “Museum as Contact Zones” and later watched The Colbert Report  in which Carrie Rebora Barratt, the Associate Director for Collections and Administration at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, discusses historical American art.

What she shows, discusses and says seems to me directly related to the issues in Clifford’s article. Notice that she explains how the painting they are looking at was painted in Germany and then brought back to America (interesting detail that perhaps would have been left out before the 1990s). I find it ironic that scholars such as Clifford expose the rhetoric in the tradition of critical realism, and suggest that this will help start a dialogue to slowly make things change and then fifteen years later, this is what we here the Associate Director for Collections at the MOMA say…

CLICK THIS LINK FOR:  Carrie Rebora Barratt interview

To me, the more things change, the more they stay the same…or maybe you disagree with me??? Please disagree with me…

 

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January 13, 2012 by kate

Class at the Museum of Vancouver, Jan 17 2012

Reminder to class participants: We wil be meeting at the Museum of Vancouver this week for an introduction the Neon Vancouver | Ugly Vancouver exhibit, and to the emerging virtual exhibit and mobile walking tour The Visible City: Illuminating Vancouver’s Neon. Come with questions and your notebooks, prepared to engage in a discussion with the exhibition curators. In advance of our visit, you may want to spend a few minutes familiarizing yourself with the MOV’s collections at OpenMOV.

Time: 2:30 PM
Location: Museum of Vancouver, 1100 Chestnut Street
(Vanier Park).

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