Exhibitors: Elizabeth Murphy (elizabeth_murphy@brown.edu), Krysta Ryzewski (Krysta_Ryzewski@brown.edu), and others.

High-resolution data are necessary for understanding the intricacies of craft technologies, but these complexities often only become visible when archaeologists are willing to move beyond traditional comfort zones and engage experimentally with a broad range of scientific instruments, aesthetic forms, theoretical approaches, and representations/presentations.

This exhibit presents large-format, 2-D pictures and accompanying dialogue/chat boxes that illustrate microscopic details of archaeological metals, glass, and ceramics. The images were collected and manipulated by a group of archaeologists whose research blends archaeological theory with materials science, but who are also admittedly situated in different locations along the science-humanities / method-theory spectrum. Taken with a range of optical, electron, and other microscopes, the images began as familiar, conventional archaeometric documents of the crafted materials’ properties, performance, and structure. In their larger-scale format, however, the aesthetic and artistic potential of both images and crafted objects are exploited in an intentional play with otherwise invisible microscopic views of production. Written response cards will be provided for the audience in order to facilitate audience-artist dialogue that will subsequently be posted on an exhibit wiki page.

These images are deliberate manipulations of scale, materiality, and production; they are designed to act as intersections of multiple theoretical conversations and they are poised to expose, interrogate, and disrupt sets of established relationships and assumptions pervasive in the practice and theory of archaeology. As co-produced and re-produced modes of engagement, the images are simultaneously art forms (the picture) and records of craft processes (the constituents) captured in the materials’ microscale features. The outcome is a co-production rooted in the archaeological assemblage, but then reassembled through the re-production of large-format imagery. The series of mediations that produced these images, and which these images produce, move away from descriptions and towards more transformative, non-traditional practices of representation. These particular snapshots offer a basis for exploring topics that are difficult, if not impossible, to grasp in other formats. The exhibit invites archaeologists to engage these images and to operate outside of sub-disciplinary comfort zones by drawing theoretical attention to:

• Issues of scale
• Production of images
• Divisions between the hard sciences and the humanities or creative arts
• Disparities between art and craft
• Embodied engagements and notions of co-presence and sensory experience
• Tensions in production and re-production processes; from crafting objects, to scientific instrumentation as mediators, to creation of aesthetic imagery
• Discomfort with science and unfamiliar structures of objects
• Heterogeneous networks of human-material interactions

Underlying these art-craft presentations are two recognitions: first, that the heterogeneity and complex relationships between material and human actors are as much present in the process of manufacture as they are in the produced object, and second, that experiences (with art, craft, and materials) are simultaneously mediated by the human body, material culture, and multimedia through these aesthetic modes of engagement.