E.5.1 The Curatorial Conundrum: Collecting and Care of Unique Digital Material

• Kat Lewis, University of Washington Libraries Special Collections

Keeping and providing access to historical records has been the unabashed goal of special collections, archival and print material alike, since at least the 18th century. Although definitively converse to leather bound codicies and pristine gray archival boxes, librarians and archivists have found themselves accepting, collecting, and curating born digital material. And who could resist the temptation? Artists, writers, and academics are producing creative, innovative work worthy of critical examination for generations to come. In addition, these ephemeral digital fragments are the material and records we are leaving for the future. Cue the conundrum: digital media is the most fragile media to date, so how should we allocate already scarce resources to collecting knowing it is challenging to display, consult, and the format will be obsolete in mere decades? The emergence and ubiquity of digital record and art is forcing librarians and archivists to reconsider our standard procedures for collecting and care. Digital and multimedia objects are asking us to question our knowledge structures and cultural memory. My paper will examine how several unique objects answer these questions and inform the future of library and archival stewardship. Through the comparison of one-of-a-kind dream journals by Genie Shenk, the ephemeral, complex narratives of the 1990s hypertexts, and the multi-media work of Rick Myers, the paper will find there is peace in the ambiguity and instability these objects present. History and memory are subjective, use does not equal value, and there is beauty in our finitude.

keywords: digital art, hypertext, multimedia, digital preservation, curating, collecting, multi-media art, cultural memory

E.5.2 HANDS-ON: Subverting Museum's untouchability through digital

• Laura Vigo, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
• Lindsay Corbett, McGill University

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, one of the oldest institutional collections in Canada, holds more than 44,000 artworks dating from the Neolithic times to today, from all corners of the world. The Asian art collection, in particular, was mostly built through important private donations during the first half of the 20th century. As such, it reflects the tastes and prerogatives of a small group of local collectors who gazed at Asia from afar, mostly purchasing and “consuming” exotica, whose small size and relative market value allowed for rapid consumption and fast circulation through a consolidate network of self-taught dealers and conoisseurs. For these early collectors, Japanese art (and culture) was thus conflated through small sculptures carved in the round, handled with care and manipulated for their texture, relative size and peculiar surface decoration. In their hands, these tiny vestiges represented the essence of a distant Japan and helped bringing it home. But the tactile experience, which brought this exotic world into our collection, is hard to replicate in a museum’s context where objects are often kept untouched and encased.

A recent digital initiative at the MMFA seeks, on one side, to mimic the lost pleasure of tactility, on the other, to address the physical limitations surrounding the display of miniature objects in a museum and subvert the canonical museum hierarchy by rendering visible the often-invisible. The development of a web-progressive application integrating responsive technologies, such as three-dimensional photogrammetry and touch, allows for viewers to engage with small-scale items in closer detail and even “handle” them. This paper will examine the first iteration of a larger project, concentrating on our collection of Japanese netsuke, small ivory sculptures originally used as cord-stoppers (toggles) during the Edo period. It will explore how the use of responsive interfaces sheds light on netsuke’s important qualities such as their tactility, materiality, and fine craftsmanship.

keywords: digital art, virtual gallery engagement, critical theory, multi-media storytelling

E.5.3 Re-Imagining Presence in a Pandemic: Exhibitionary Spaces and the Digital

Julian Jason Haladyn, OCAD University

“The noisy city is silent, the schools are closed, the theatres closed. No students around, no tourists. Travel agencies are cancelling entire regions from the map.” In this description of February 28 from his “Diary of the psycho-deflation,” the contemporary Italian theorist Bifo outlines the unnerving quietness of life in Italy during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. His account is reminiscent of many such narratives of absence, in which spaces around the world are emptied of their previous human activities. Museums and galleries were a special case of absence, not properly being “necessary” yet their emptiness, the lack of physical access, was particularly significant because presence is vitally connected to function within the space of the gallery. This paper examines the ways digital spaces and technologies were used to address this cultural absence. Considering a series of strategies by galleries and museums, which include increased digitization of collections, the creation of ‘viewing rooms’ and the application of ‘telepresence’ devices, the goal of this presentation is to address the role of the digital in re-imagining exhibitionary spaces at a time when presence was not possible.

keywords: museum, galleries, exhibition, space, digital