Raised Eyebrows

I'm standing in front of a ‘painting’ by Niki de Saint Phalle called ‘Green Sky’. It happens that I'm standing in front of it in Tokyo where the intense nihon-spectral activity on my eu-retina might indeed make the sky green. Authored commentary paper

How to accommodate grief in your life

This artists’ text examines the relationship between photographic images and Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) environments. We note that such scripted image worlds necessitate a fundamental reconsideration of the capacities of image, its formation, reproduction, storage and circulation. As an archaeologist would document an excavation, extending conventional methods through 3D visualization technology to work in new ways with the archaeological record, we chose to document a world built and razed digitally by a now dormant group of anonymous gamers called the Yung Cum Bois (YCBs). We turn to some definitions of griefer as a subcultural phenomenon within online culture to attempt to contextualize our involvement some more, thinking through the forms of image-gathering that grief play has generated, such as scripted object attacks where image-objects spawn and self-replicate, continually spurting out copies of themselves, lagging the region, slowing down frame rates, consuming land resources. Here we witness images blockading network logistics. This was active fieldwork. We got involved. We applied visualization technology learnt from archaeological computing research to the avatars, temporary structures and abandoned ruins of an online world, Second Life (SL). We patched together a kind of virtual photogrammetry, enabling the monumentalization of avatars, objects and scenarios, recompiling these into new configurations and uploading them freely to be reused, detourned and weaponized by our virtual friends. We situate this endeavour within a cobbled history of imaging technology, the networked self and its pathologies, riffling through our own image dump. Here

Agents of Deterioration

When applying risk management strategies to museum collections, risk is broken down according to ten agents of deterioration that pose threats to collections. Nine of these risks are physical (physical forces, fire, water, criminals, pests, pollutants, light, incorrect temperature, and incorrect humidity) and the tenth is custodial neglect, for example where a collection item may be disassociated from provenance. Museums generally suspend objects from use, touch and intervention in order to freeze or hold things in a state of torpor, preventing interactions in order to preserve. Many Indigenous peoples challenge the idea of preservation as a greater good, instead affirming the right to renew and use, enliven and care for objects as part of community life. The Prisoners of Love (PoL) project aims to connect UK collection items with their trans-national home peoples and bring emerging artists from in the UK, curators and researchers into conversation, to work responsively with complex histories and material practices. The group have been working with the Economic Botany Collection at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew; Horniman Museum and Gardens and Compound 13 Lab in Mumbai; India; Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and the Department of Archaeology at the University of Ghana in Accra; Hastings Museum and Art Gallery and the Mootookakio’ssin project on Blackfoot homelands at the ULethbridge, Alberta, Canada. In September this year UK project participants shared a residency at OPENing, the Art Programme artist-led space in Bank. The OST residency exhibition was documented as a 25min video by Helen Robertson and produced OSTzine with essays by Lennon Mhishi and Esi Eshun. Work developed at OPENing was subsequently exhibited at the Hess Gallery, University of Lethbridge, Canada. The exhibition Mootookakio’ssin: Creating in Spacetime, was developed in partnership with the Indigenous Art Program at UoL. This current exhibition invited contributions from all project participants

Parts and Holes

Commentary Paper for: Images in the Making: Art, Process, Archaeology. Ing-Marie Back Danielsson and Andrew Meirion Jones Eds. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Developed from sessions at TAG, Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference 2016 and Art, Materiality Representation: Royal Anthropological Institute Conference 2018

OST

We are ghOSTed. Reflectance Transformation Imaging makes visible the timespace of the erased and overlooked. We are haunted in this old underground bank at the heart of the City of London by hOSTs of ghOSTs. The building is a shell holding itself up by memory, being prepared for regeneration. Lost rivers echo in the basement. Traces of past occupation point to the future, divining by acronym: Open Source Threat, Outer Space Treaty, Observed Survival Time. For the past year we have been working and talking, thinking about material culture, cultural capital, power and estrangement. We’ve visited with entities in museum stores, jumped time zones and calibrated calendars to make connections. We present here actions, images, sounds and objects On Second Thoughts.. Original Sound Track… OST is a project developed by participants in the Prisoners of Love project. Prisoners of Love: Affect, containment and alternative futures [funded by the AHRC GCRF project Imagining Futures] aims to connect UK museum collection items with their trans-national home peoples and bring emerging artists from diasporic communities in the UK, curators and researchers into conversation, to work responsively with complex histories and material practices, opening out extra-institutional art and archival practices in the form of artwork, story and theory. We have been working with the Horniman Museum and Gardens and Compound 13 Lab in Mumbai, India; Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and the Department of Archaeology at the University of Ghana in Accra; Hastings Museum and Art Gallery and the Mootookakio’ssin project based on Blackfoot homelands at the University of Lethbridge, Canada. This exhibition contains responses from Ghana, the UK team, partners on Blackfoot Territory and Compound 13 Lab in Mumbai, India and works towards further collaborations

A is for front line

Artist project with Louisa Minkin. We are thinking about plate designs and motifs. We are interested in modes of communication and contagion. We wish to display a number of designs and works-in-progress of plates and associated tableware. We ask whether pictures are windows or objects, we wonder about the relation between taste and morality. Objects of thought or taste, pictures as windows onto another way of living. We are interested in the notion of a taste for life; an inclination and a penchant — 'a leaning, an attraction' — that informs our thinking, our acting and our living. We include in this issue plans for the production of ceramic objects that pose some issues on a plate or a cup; such as the forced choice between commodities and counselling or the lived relation between anomie and agony. Morals to eat from, situations to drink down

‘Concepts have teeth’: capacities and transfers in the digital modelling of Blackfoot material culture

Remarking on the way that colonial encounters produced complex entangled networks between indigenous communities and Euro-Americans, the Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson (2007, 69) writes that ‘concepts have teeth and teeth that bite through time’.She is writing about the differential power of one account over another in establishing the terms of being seen or being present.This paper explores the way in which these kinds of concepts and encounters produce certain kinds of affective capacities. This paper introduces an archaeology-art project concerned with digitally modelling Blackfoot material culture in UK museum collections, using photogrammetry and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI). Blackfoot sacred artefacts, such as medicine bundles, are involved in a series of complex exchanges and transfers (Lokensgard 2010). In this paper we argue that the transfer and exchange of medicine bundles offers a paradigm for thinking about material encounters. What capacities are revealed by the various exchanges involved in the project? The project is based on a series of exchanges: between academics and members of an indigenous community; between Canadian and UK institutions; between Universities and museums; and between academic disciplines and their associated practices and techniques.How do the series of encounters involved in these exchanges make a difference to the outcomes and trajectories of the project; how do capacities emerge and extend through the networks established and created by the project? References Lokensgard, K.H. 2010 Blackfoot religion and the consequences of cultural commoditization. London: Routledge. Simpson, A. 2007 On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’and Colonial Citizenship, Junctures 9, 67-80

Mootookakio'ssin: Creating in Space Time

This exhibition explores creating in relationship to historical cultural material that is housed in British museums and features physical and digital artwork by uLethbridge students as well as artists living in the UK and in Ghana. Expanding from the Mootookakio’ssin research project, the exhibition spans the gap in space and time between contemporary artists and historical cultural material that is separated from homelands. Mootookakio’ssin: Creating in Spacetime bridges temporal gaps between historical cultural material housed in museums and living contemporary artists. For the past few years, Blackfoot Elders, artists, scholars, and museum professionals living on Blackfoot Territory and in Britain have been working together, talking, and thinking about material culture, cultural capital, power, and estrangement. We’ve visited with historical cultural material in museum collections, survived the pandemic, jumped time zones, and calibrated calendars to make connections. Always guided by the Blackfoot principle that we have a responsibility to share and to care for knowledge, teaching and learning is at the core of our work. Mootookakio’ssin: Creating in Spacetime is an exhibition as process, an exhibition that experiments with what an art gallery can be, and whom it serves. Students enrolled in Indigenous Art Studio (Fall 2024) at ULethbridge created their works in the gallery space, transforming the gallery into a Collective Studio. Over several weeks of discussion, self-reflection, study, and consultation, Indigenous Art Studio students chose projects that were personally meaningful to them. Critique of museum practices, healing from generational trauma, reimagining of culturally important stories and materials, the search for comfort and interactivity in the art gallery: these among others are topics which the Indigenous Art Studio classroom has taken on in this exhibition. While these themes are not always easy to engage with, it is the hope that by creating in spacetime around these stories, we can bring knowledge and healing to our many communities. Students expanded their project ideas from this with the support of the ULethbridge Art Gallery staff and visiting artist Louisa Minkin. We were open to the public as we created the exhibition and people were invited to drop by and visit with the artists. This is an exhibition as conversation. Minkin brought artworks from students at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London who have been working together on the Prisoners of Love project. Prisoners of Love: Affect, containment and alternative futures aims to connect UK museum collection items with their trans-national home peoples and bring emerging artists from diasporic communities in the UK, curators and researchers into conversation, to work responsively with complex histories and material practices. We have been working with the Economic Botany Collection and the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, Horniman Museum and Gardens and Compound 13 Lab in Mumbai, India; Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and the Department of Archaeology at the University of Ghana in Accra; Hastings Museum and Art Gallery and the Mootookakio’ssin project based on Blackfoot homelands at the University of Lethbridge. The travelling works shown here were put together during OST, our project residency in a derelict bank in the heart of the City of London this September. Please be advised that the works in this exhibit touch upon subjects which visitors may find upsetting, and may bring up unexpected feelings, memories, and responses. While the works are intended to encourage reflection and conversation, it is important for visitors to be mindful of their own preparation to engage with topics having to do with the lasting effects of colonialism on Indigenous communities around the world, past and present

Pictures Not Homes

The project Pictures not Homes is the result of the partial excavation of Taplow House, a South East London estate block earmarked for renewal and ‘bettering’. This is a documentary project using contemporary archaeological recording practices; photogrammetry, reflectance transformation imaging [RTI] and 3D laser scanning. Pictures not Homes is material documentation of the urban regeneration process enabled by new-imaging technologies; the wreckage of place salvaged as file types. The title is a reversal of the slogan ‘HOMES NOT PICTURES’ daubed by protesters across ‘social’ artwork on a demolition site hoarding. This work wanders about appearance and dwelling, through pictures and homes, divisions and productions, data-sets and concrete abstractions. It is also a way to frame questions of what pictures do: questions of capacities, anxiety and ambivalence. It evokes an environment of barricades, sandbags, file types and data as ruin

Multiple Viewpoints and Other Digital Collaborators

Collaboration is a process in which different perspectives matter. Who, what, why, where, when, and how, are a few registers indicating the diffractive possibilities surrounding the notion of collaboration. These imbricated factors, over which some actants have disproportionate impact, responsibility, and authority, fundamentally affect the direction projects and other matters of importance will take. Here, we endeavour to extend the knowledge derived from collaborations into a much richer multivocality, surrounding two artefact assemblages, both held in institutional settings with restricted access. One is a carved stone, called the Nessglyph, currently lodging in the University of Southampton. The other is a distributed assemblage of Blackfoot belongings held by several UK Museums. We helped make both these collections available to invested collaborators via remote viewings employing in the first case an open crowdsourced collaboration model, and in the second we consider some of the dynamics of a closed collaborative group. We conclude that both collaborations require an openness that is only afforded through constant work and constant re-working as the artefacts and images in these projects constantly fold into their own omissions so that the work can respond to the politics and ethics of image making