Augmented Curiosities: Virtual Play in African Pasts and Futures

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Futures through a Virtual Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Technologies inspire the creation of new subjectivities - changing our points of perspective and augmenting the ways in which we perceive. Through our ever-expanding applications of innovation, humans recontextualize realities. We use the tools of the present to formulate our visions of the future and our understandings of the past. Along these explorations of meaning, we apply interfaces of magic upon the seemingly mundane to educate and entertain. Augmented Curiosities engages our technological entanglements through the emerging, immersive, and experiential visualization techniques of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). Critiquing the colonial dynamics of the “cabinets of curiosity,” which significantly influenced Western museum practices, Augmented Curiosities provides opportunities for intimate and playful interactions with African material culture from Northwestern University’s Herskovits Library of African Studies Collection. Through this digitally tactile experience, we exhibit synergies of the technical and the tangible as a community-oriented framework for future museum curation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeological Futures through a Virtual Past   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39291.0