Browse Exhibits (2 total)
Digitization and Textiles in Archives
“Digitization and Textiles in Archives” is an exhibition about how we interact with textiles in archives both online and in-person. Specifically, the exhibition seeks for viewers to question what information they can learn through textile objects and their description. There are extensive debates over the value of providing digital images of items, particularly textiles, which complicate digitization due to their dimension and texture. Furthermore, users of textile collections in archives might gain different insights from handling a physical object at an archive versus viewing one on a screen. Several archives have sought to increase the use of textile archives and collect data on the benefits of this use for the learning experience. Alternatively, many studies are seeking ways to make these collections more widely available for use via digitization. Researchers might argue that this allows for expanded access to archival materials, and in some cases can be important to preserving items. With digitization arises a range of complicated questions. What information might be lost in the digitization process? How can digitization efforts ensure that they protect the cultural heritage of materials? How can items be accurately described with metadata? How should metadata standards evolve? Concerns around metadata, description, preservation, ownership, and provenance, are all problems that researchers have examined surrounding digitization and textiles. These questions and concerns are essential to conducting digitization projects ethically and carefully. Some researchers have proposed the idea of digitization efforts as a complementary device to in-person viewing experiences rather than a replacement for in-person experiences, suggesting the ways that digitization technology can encourage viewers to examine textile artifacts thoughtfully and analytically (Idacavage & McAndrews, Eastop). When exploring this exhibition, viewers are encouraged to examine, question, and critique the images they see, as well as considering the access and information that digitization can provide.
How to Make Come!Unity
An exhibition that explores the printed works of the Come!Unity Press, a print shop that operated as a collective and a "free space" supporting myriad organizations within the 1960s–1970s social movements, including New Left groups, feminist organizations, gay rights organizations, and more. Despite a vast difference in ideological disposition, their publications maintain a consistent “house style” resulting from the preferences of the main trainers and administrators as well as the materials they had available including the photo offset process, standard cliches, and stock type. I hope this press can be an example of how a print counterculture is physically produced. In the age of the almighty algorithm, we ought to think more deeply about the ways in which their sphere of attention is shaped esthetically by people and technology that actually produce it. This is obscured in the way all production processes are obscured by their products, but even more intensely in a world no longer dominated by print culture, rather by algorithmic content. I hope viewing this comparatively simple example of how a coherent counter-public sphere was created will enable people to think more deeply about how their own lives are being produced and who is doing the producing. By understanding how this small group of people were able to build a print counterculture, visitors may start to think about how they can exert their own influence on the world. I think hosting this digitally offers the possibility to think about the possibility of counter-algorithmic public spheres.