Media Augmentations of the Permanent Collection of Scientific Objects

Scientific objects have a particular way of inhabiting the space of the Putnam Gallery. Contained in glass cases and accessible only to the eyes, these objects are placed at a distance in order to be preserved, each displaying own narratives of truth and permanency. However, beneath the gallery lies a different world of things-the depository space that houses 13,000 objects. Most of them rarely make it to the dis play case, and only the objects there are the privileged few. Our media interventions explore the possibilities opened when dormant objects are able to speak out, suggesting other narrative paths. They approach the relationship between the selected physical objects on display and the process of de-framing these objects. By superimposing the hidden archive space on to the permanent gallery, we wish to create a dynamic relation, where the physical and the projected objects animate one another and take them out of their original context.


We aimed at materializing these ideas in a gallery space that would offer to a visitor both subjective and open-ended storytelling. In order to do so, it seemed relevant to mobilize two different scaled projections of the archive. On the one hand, the space of the depository erupts through the windows through large scale images that either surface or are projected onto the 12 windows of the Putnam Gallery. These were filmed by rotating the shelves that exist in the depository space, creating the feeling that only one plane of objects, the one on the foreground, is being mobilized in the visitor's direction, while the background plane lies still.


Meanwhile, object-based and non-linear narratives of selected objects in the gallery, created on Zeega, are accessible through small screens or mobile devices. They narrate a story of each object operating in and influencing various cultural, scientific, social fields. [QR codes + ipad + screens.]

We aim to temporarily displace the permanent collection gallery and appropriate the concept of Thinking Things as a generative process that can be constantly on its making by playing with dualities between material and virtual space, object and image. [wunderkammer + comment on material + medial.]



* This exhibition could not have been possible without the support of many organizations and individuals. We wish to specially acknowledge Dan Borelli and the Office of Exhibitions at the Graduate School of Design, the Dean of the Graduate School of Design Mohsen Mostafavi, Edward Lloyd and the Office of Exhibitions at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Jesse Shapins, James Burns, and the metaLAB [at] Harvard, Samantha Van Gerbig, Juan Andres Leon, Sara Schechner, Marty Richardson, Judith Lajoie, Richard Wright, and our colleagues in the Critical History seminar, for their kind and generous support.