‘The Biscuit Town’: Digital Practice, Spatiality and Discoverability in Reading’s Heritage Sector

Teresa Murjas

doi:10.16995/bst.337

Abstract

This paper focuses on two artistic research projects created in collaboration with museums in Reading, UK; the hybrid-media installation The First World War in Biscuits (2014), shown in a ‘white cube’ gallery in Reading Museum and the online resource War Child: Meditating on an Archive (2016): www.war-child-archive.com.The paper analyses approaches taken during the projects’ development to matters of spatial and digital curation. It considers how they engaged with the idea of collaboratively-produced ‘histories from below’ and with the cultural heritage sector priority of discoverability. It concludes by noting some emerging questions connected with the projects’ longer-term physical and virtual materialisation.

Highlights

Artistic Research and ‘Histories from Below’Histories from below are facilitated when archivists, curators and researchers see archiving [...] as [...] a shared [...] participatory process [involving] broadening definitions of sources and evidence [...]. [This] will require [...] developing archiving practices from below. (Myers & Grosvenor 2018: 29)This paper focuses on two archive-based artistic research projects created in collaboration with local museums in Reading, UK, for which, as a practitioner working outside the heritage sector, I developed histories and archiving practices ‘from below’.1Murjas: ‘The Biscuit Town’The political and ideological implications of telling histories ‘from below’ can be gauged by invoking the tradition’s emphasis on democratising history’s subject matter, both through sustained re-evaluation of what constitutes source material and of how it is understood
This paper focuses on two artistic research projects created in collaboration with museums in Reading, UK; the hybrid-media installation The First World War in Biscuits (2014), shown in a ‘white cube’ gallery in Reading Museum and the online resource War Child: Meditating on an Archive (2016): www.war-child-archive.com
Both First World War in Biscuits (FWWB) and War Child: Meditating on an Archive (WCMI) have engendered new modes of collaborative curatorial practice in specific heritage sector contexts located in one town – the ‘Biscuit Town’, as it has sometimes been known

Summary

Introduction

Histories from below are facilitated when archivists, curators and researchers see archiving [...] as [...] a shared [...] participatory process [involving] broadening definitions of sources and evidence [...]. [This] will require [...] developing archiving practices from below. (Myers & Grosvenor 2018: 29). Histories from below are facilitated when archivists, curators and researchers see archiving [...] as [...] a shared [...] participatory process [involving] broadening definitions of sources and evidence [...]. [This] will require [...] developing archiving practices from below. (Myers & Grosvenor 2018: 29). This paper focuses on two archive-based artistic research projects created in collaboration with local museums in Reading, UK, for which, as a practitioner working outside the heritage sector, I developed histories and archiving practices ‘from below’.1

My creative team for these projects comprised

Conclusion