Making and Made: Time and Virtual Material Action as Empowerment of Cultural Heritage Curation Institutions

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Cultural repositories struggle with competing missions of wide access and preservation. To release this tension, we created the Virtual Reality Global Library (VRGL), a shareable, immersive VR headset experience that provokes presence through real-time virtual reading of ancient manuscripts with parchment simulation.

Informed by experts and experimental archaeology, we focus on de-aging strategies that prompt awareness of the use-life and biographies of ancient, fragile objects. Conservators and curators both urged us forward and toward caution. Thus, we emphasize transparency in constitutive exclusions of de-aging and renewing parchment. These prompt renewed awareness of the socio-material entanglements of use and ageing, of people touching, kissing, crying, and smearing, or reading the manuscript by candlelight. This use-cost by devoted adherents to the Christian faith is accessible to us, bridging divides of time, space, and experience in a virtual realm.

We argue that enhanced transparency results for those who use this project when practitioners engage this work personally by yielding insights about material change, materiality, and concepts lively in discourses of New Materialism. We offer concrete examples of multi-directional intra-action and discuss interjections of decision making, and hence of subjectivities, in gestural and procedural work as 2D images transform into 3D parchment simulations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39528.0