Brief

1) How can digital technologies be mobilized to address collective forms of resistance against colonial violence through building techno-heritage?

2) How can the digital archive truthfully acknowledge colonial narratives and portray the complexities of colonial legacies?

Keywords: decolonising knowledge, techno-heritage, digital archive, speculative prototype, gamification, animism.

Museums in the Global North are built out of bricks cemented on Imperial ideas. They do not convey the truthful story, but a story of exoticism and othering. ‘aRCHIVED’ critically examines the Western museum collection, proposing an alternative method of digital archiving in the form of an open-world game. The proposal aims to generate techno-heritage as a practice of resistance against colonial violence, where the emancipatory potential of digital technologies will be utilised to re-center knowledge towards the Global South.

Building on the concept of animism - the belief that seemingly inanimate beings and objects all possess a distinct spiritual essence, the project will utilise the West African craft of mask-making as a subject of study.

In Western museums and private collections, masks are viewed as artistic objects mainly appreciated for their aesthetic value, and are stripped bare of their original meaning and function. Historically, African masks played a crucial role in traditional ceremonies and rituals; namely addressing tribal needs in times of war, ensuring a good harvest, or summoning spiritual presences in burial or initiation practices. Hence, masks were therefore not just symbolic; they were seen as “spirit traps” that contained the soul for the benefits of the living.

Some masks represent the spirits of deceased ancestors and the wearer of the mask is often believed to be able to communicate to the being symbolized by it, or to be possessed by who or what the mask represents.

The cycle of life, death and afterlife is explored through the lens of the African Mask, where The Body is seen as materialised through the physical object, with its corresponding tangible qualities (materiality, technique, aesthetic etc). The Mind is the craft and knowledge of its Maker, imprinted in the artefact, while The Soul is the object’s spiritual essence, the other-than-human entity embodied within.

I will start by analysing existing archival material not only as a repository of documents, but as a regime of political operations within which media play a crucial role. Digital technologies such as photogrammetry and 3D reconstruction will be compiled with archival and found footage in the game engine to build a repertoire of experiments to be displayed at Arebyte. The gallery space will constitute a physical counterpart to the open-world game through a series of props - in the form of dioramas, with the aim to recontextualize the origin of the artefacts, specifically how the mask makers performed their craft and engaged with their cultural practices.

I believe that issues of representation ethics and bias need to be renegotiated in the digital archive, since the museum as an institution is a place of privilege; as artefacts are looted and displaced from their space of origin, they are deemed inaccessible to most people. I argue that by digitising museum artefacts, one is performing an act of restoration - essentially, an exercise in worldbuilding.

To be human in the digital age is to be able to engage in collective forms of knowledge production. This research contests the institutional erasure of colonial artefacts which constitute the museum archive; as a digital artist, I seek to challenge the balance of distribution of power in the process of archiving.