Rachel M. Ward is a Ph.D. candidate conducting anthropological research in artists’ studios and archives in New York City. Rachel’s work converges on digital anthropology and the creation of imaginative, artistic, and experiential technologies for cultural preservation.

How does one create a catalogue raisonné of media art? Would a born-digital artwork such as a capture from a virtual reality simulation appear in a catalogue as a screenshot? Are there any more authentic, immersive alternatives? These are questions I am exploring in my doctoral dissertation in 2021.

Prior to commencing a Ph.D. that is hybridizing art, anthropology, and technology, I completed my M.Sc. in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics. I sought to train in this historic department where the founders of the discipline matriculated: Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown, Firth, who were followed by Hortense Powdermaker, Phyllis Kaberry, Alfred Gell, Michael Taussig. The following year I received a fellowship to train in ethnographic filmmaking through a postgraduate degree in Visual Anthropology at the Australian National University. 

During those years, my fieldwork was conducted within Indigenous communities in Arnhem Land, Australia and Patagonia, Chile. In Arnhem Land, I collected pandanus leaves and wove baskets with the women, spoke with the male artists who painted the bark from those same trees, and documented millennia-old rock art motifs with an archaeological team from the university. In Patagonia, I lived on a Mapuche Reservation to learn from the machi (female shamans) — about spiritual worlds and the fluidity (or reassignment) of social gender. I also volunteered as an English teacher to learn from young Mapuche students why their Mapudungun language is thought to be lost in as little as one generation by UNESCO. I saw how technology is a double-edged sword that can both exacerbate and prevent cultural loss. 

After completing my master’s degrees, I worked at the American Museum of Natural History Anthropology Department, then attended the Smithsonian Summer Institute for Museum Anthropology (SIMA). Through SIMA, I was virtually introduced to Professor Kate Hennessy, a digital anthropologist who uses new digital technologies in the preservation of Indigenous cultural heritage. I immediately sought to work with Hennessy and her lab in Vancouver (the Making Culture Lab, School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University). I elected to conduct my research in New York City, where I also began freelance work with artists in building what could be viewed as autobiographical digital catalogues raisonnés. While I was cataloging or digitizing each artwork, I recorded the discussion for use in the collaborative writing of their autobiography. I came to realize that each art object (or non-object) came to represent an embodied memory — of time, place, or “making” — what Appadurai might call “the social life of things.” To complete the process, I have built websites that encompass each desired aspect of their oeuvre: artworks, ephemera, oral history, behind-the-scenes processes. As such, instead of ancient rock art escarpments in the Australian bush or valleys in the Andes, my “field” was the contemporary art world of New York City. Although the art world has “practices, rituals, and customs” that are unfamiliar, the methods generally remain the same: observation, interviews, and ethnographic writing. 

During this same period, my doctoral research began serendipitously as I met New York City artists Carolee Schneemann, Laurie Spiegel, and Dianne Blell, each respectively most known for electronic music, pre-Photoshop photomanipulation, and performance art, respectively. Over four years, I witnessed many poignant life experiences, such as a MoMA retrospective (Carolee, 2018), induction into the Women's Hall of Fame (Laurie, 2018), and the co-writing of autobiographies for the Smithsonian and Guggenheim (Dianne, 2019). I was honored to work with them — I admired their pioneering technological experimentation in an era when women’s voices were often stifled in both art history [1] and computing [2]. I view this as particularly important as many older women artists were ignored by the art world during their lifetime (Carmen Herrera was 101 before she got her first major museum exhibition). Even now, contemporary media artist Pamela Z has explained that many people assumed that she did not create the work herself or did so with the help of men [3]. In one of her most famous and divisive performances, Interior Scroll (1975), Carolee Schneemann read from an excerpt of her book Cezanne, She was a Great Painter [4]:

if you are a woman (and things are not utterly changed) they will almost never believe you really did it
(what you did do)

After those four years, I saw that the raw ethnographic (im)materials that I collected in my work with Carolee, Laurie, and Dianne (memories, code, files, 3D object scans) seemed to fall into three categories: Artist, Art, and Things. Within the Artist category, I consider the original audio recordings from my interview with Carolee prior to her death (March 2019) in which she asks me to write about lesser-known aspects of her work Fresh Blood (1981-86). Regarding original Art data, I envision the thousands of decaying floppy disks in Laurie’s loft, such as her original (born-digital) music that was sent into outer space on the Voyager Golden Record in 1977. In Dianne’s case, we often spoke of Things of sentimental value in her studio such as the miniature glass vases from her 1992 Syria photography expedition. Using consumer-grade equipment, we scanned her studio and miniature Syrian vases while co-creating a virtual reality documentary [5]. I presented this work to the American Anthropological Association in 2016 as a new form of visual ethnography. I further suggested that anthropologists could add small 360-degree cameras to their fieldwork toolkits.  

Once it was time to begin the writing process, I didn’t know where to begin. From a theoretical framework of visual ethnography, how could I share what was invisible? I began to sketch the “invisible” digital archives I had built, and the objects it contained. I drew three circles around those words: Artist, Artwork, Things. They soon began to look like Pods that could be encapsulated and stored. An Archive Capsule. Not unlike Warhol’s infamous Time Capsules (albeit those were cardboard boxes). Everything I understood about my project began to emerge from this singular Archive Capsule drawing. Yet what good is a drawing if the fruits of my research lived in a “dark archive” or on a museum server? How could it be “Ported” and seen? In 2016, I built two prototype art installations that allowed for the digital remixing of my fieldwork audiovisual materials using haptic and audio interaction from the user [6]— but it is now February 2021 and technology is emerging with competitiveness and alacrity. Could artists’ memories, studios, and media artworks be preserved, seen, and touched using new forms of volumetric filmmaking and haptic hologram technologies? 

The Capsule proved very useful in providing “something to think with” [7] in how Carolee, Laurie, and Dianne’s intangible biographies, ephemera, and art data could be “ported” into existing models of interactive virtual archives; or even directly into compatible U/X infrastructures [8]. Yet when COVID-19 shuttered 90% of museums worldwide, I saw that my speculative Capsule might also be of service as an imaginary design-prototype tool for collection management and interoperability between museums, researchers, and users at home. This is what UNESCO says that we need right now — that urgent innovations in digital collection access “are among the top priorities that need to be addressed” [9].

Although a far-fetched design, my hope is that my Archive Capsule blueprint could become — as is the process in the field of Speculative Design — a concrete starting point for scientists and technologists who can actually build something that serves the same destiny [10]. If more COVID lockdowns ensue, Memory Institutions will continue to suffer, potentially with permanent irreparability as it is possible that 1 in 3 museums may never reopen [11]. I view this urgent rebuilding process as a supreme opportunity in the remodeling of memory institutions’ infrastructures that could allow for immersive and captivating (“edutainment”) remote access to exhibitions, archives, and artists’ lives and artworks. Particularly valuable will be the experiences that allow for never-before seen components of the archive such as those from women artists or incorporeal born-digital artworks. Unavoidably and for better or worse, “the pandemic is a portal” as “a gateway between one world and the next” [12].

For scholars and creators striving to create catalogues raisonnés of media artists’ work, this could provide an opportunity for the early adoption of emerging technologies that can contribute to the future of documentation as a new form of experiential preservation. The goal being to circumvent ongoing loss due to access, foreclosure, digital corruption, physical decay, or gendered archival visibility. That is, to give the public a chance to “see” the intangible — simulated art data, working studios, ephemeral objects, and transmodal memories. In other words, re-enlivening obsolescing artworks and fading legacies for a sustained life beyond the depths of the museum server. For what is seen in the archive becomes our social memory: a self-replicating cycle of selective preservation or sustained forgetting in terms of contributions to art history and shared human heritage. I hope that 2021 will inspire innovations in new forms of virtual access that will allow for remote learning students — as during the current pandemic — to glimpse into the lives of Carolee, Laurie, and Dianne, who very much impacted my own.

Rachel M. Ward rachelmward.com