Adrian Van Allen is an artist, designer, and anthropologist who has created exhibits and web sites for the Exploratorium, NASA, the Smithsonian, UC Berkeley, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. During this presentation she’ll explore how collaboration has emerged in recent decades as a key concern for a broad range of academic disciplines and cultural institutions. As anthropology and public museums have searched for methods to integrate different kinds of knowledge from their source communities into exhibits and collections, the forms of collaboration and the kinds of representations they produce have correspondingly shifted. A similar shift from “display” to “dialogue” can also be charted within a series of institutional multimedia projects she created between 2006 and 2014. Case studies presented will include ‘Evidence: How Do We Know What We Know?’ for the Exploratorium, ‘Digital Nineveh Archives’ with UC Berkeley and the Iraqi Department of Antiquities, ‘Ars Synthetica’ with the Synthetic Biology Research Center (SynBerc) and Paul Rabinow, and ‘Crafting Nature’ a collaboration between Van Allen and scientists at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History during her dissertation fieldwork. Across these projects she’ll examine how collaboration is conceptualized by participants, how the roles of stakeholders change through the development, design, and production processes, and how different perspectives can be leveraged to provide insight into the production of scientific knowledge such as archeological histories, narratives of human origins, and emerging synthetic biology techniques. The lecture is free and open to the public and part of the Cultural Heritage Informatics lecture series, organized in conjunction with the joint Digital Infrastructure Planning for OVPR Cultural Heritage Collections project of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures and the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, with support from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Indiana University.

Cost: Free

For more information contact:

Mathers Musuem
(812)855-6873
[email protected]