Anthropology

“Mukurtu is an open access collections management system that was developed by American anthropologist Kim Christen (now Kim Christen Withey) and colleagues out of her work with Warumungu Aboriginal communities in Tennant Creek, Australia. Starting as a digital project to think through the protocols around knowledge access in that specific community, Mukurtu now presents itself as ‘a grassroots project aiming to empower communities to manage, share, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways’. Local Context is an offshoot of Mukurtu led by Christen and Jane Anderson. A hack of Creative Commons (itself a hack of copyright), Local Context produces licenses and labels that facilitate both public awareness about, and allow for, the management of a community protocols in a relation to access and circulation of cultural expressions and knowledge. Labels such as TK Women Restricted, TK Attribution, TK Secret/Sacred and TK Commercial allow communities to appropriate representational, political and economic authority around the circulation of digital and digitised culture.
These projects each demonstrate the ways in which digital tools allow communities to re-imagine museum protocols of knowledge management and circulation, redefining the social relations of entitlement and obligation that constitute archival property and propriety. They implicitly recognise the complicity of digital technologies within broader projects of colonial appropriation, in which archives have become vehicles of dispossession, and a space in which to negotiate sovereignty. As projects of resistance, then, these projects knowingly connect to broader discourses that frame the digital as open to remix and mastering, and link these to questions of accessibility and accountability. […]”

Haidy Geismar: Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age (2018), S. 26.

“In the wake of Nefertiti 2.0, a series of enquiries raised by technologists and journalists raised the question of whether or not it would have been possible for the handheld scanners used by Al-Badri and Nelles to have captured the data released by the artists. Journalists traced a probable source of the data to a much higher- resolution scan commissioned by the Neues Museum itself, made by a private company, which has not been made available to the public. The website of this company presents a scan of Nefertiti that is uncannily like the image released by Al- Badri and Nelles. The artists responded by claiming that they had no specialist technical knowledge and were using data and resources managed by hackers whom they refused to name. If the sceptics are right, then the project is in fact a double hack: drawing attention to museum hoarding not just of ancient collections but of their digital doubles and using the tools of data collection and presentation to undo the regimes of authority and property over which the museum still asserts sovereignty, mocking the redemptive claims of so- called ‘digital repatriation’.”

Haidy Geismar: Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age (2018), S. 112.

“For every digital utopianist who celebrates the capacity of digital technologies to liberate us from inequalities of access to knowledge, forging new communities unstratified by class, race, gender, there is a digital dystopianist who emphasises the entanglement or corporate projects of monetisation and state projects of surveillance now reaching into our most intimate moments. We know that digital infrastructures perpetuate existing inequalities of access and ownership as much as they disrupt them, and that for every grand project to digitise the world’s books there are at least a million images of cats.”

Haidy Geismar: Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age (2018), S. 17.