Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions

Bard Graduate Center’s Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions (DH/DX) initiative is a comprehensive curricular approach to decorative arts, design history, and material culture studies that leverages emerging digital tools and methodologies to support new modes of scholarship in the human sciences.

Each year, Jesse Merandy, director of DH/DX, and Julie Fuller, educational technologist, organize a salon at which students present digital projects that they have created for a variety of courses and in support of BGC exhibitions. This year, students presented virtual exhibition demonstrations created for professor Deborah L. Krohn’s Curatorial Thinking course and Merandy’s Game Design course; Object Interventions, a new website created by students in Approaches to the Object, a course required of every first-year student; web-based projects created in Meredith Linn and Caspar Meyer’s Digital Archaeological Heritage course; and 3D-printed objects created to support tours of the exhibition Sonia Delaunay: Living Art Students explained the digital resources they used, their sources of design inspiration, challenges they faced in completing their projects, and most importantly, how the projects could be used “in real life.”

The “real life” application of the 3D-printed objects was especially evident. Students who work in the Digital Media Lab created a replica of a wooden printing block used in the fabrication of Sonia Delaunay’s textiles, which appears under glass in the exhibition. According to mary adeogun (MA ’22), BGC’s lead gallery educator, the 3D-printed model is an important component of the exhibition tours that she and BGC students ofer to the public. Adeogun said, “It helps visitors visualize how much labor goes into woodblock printing. Each color in Delaunay’s woodblock-printed textile designs had its own block. There is a textile in the exhibition that includes at least two colors—black and rust orange—but we only have the original woodblock for the black portion of the print. The DH/DX team printed a second woodblock that reconstructed what the rust orange portion of the print might have looked like. Holding two woodblocks in my hands as I talk through the woodblock printing process better represents for visitors just how many steps were involved.”

In the future, Merandy, Fuller, and the students hope to continue collaborating with faculty, curators, and visitor services staf on projects that incorporate 3D-printed objects, searching for opportunities to push the technology in service of learning and accessibility. Merandy said, “We have been developing prototypes that could be used by visitors with low vision or blindness.” The ability to hold and touch a 3D model might ofer a new way to understand an object’s dimensions, shapes, and contours, and printed textures may be able to represent its colors or materials. According to Merandy, “We are just at the beginning, but already we are seeing the unique potential that 3D printing ofers our community.”