Grave Goods / Objetos funerarios

How does the construction of knowledge relate to haptic experience? How does material or information pass through the generations? As affect, as engram, as copy: mediated by the technologies of its reproduction? Our imperative in the projects we will describe here was to address and understand how as artists we might work with new 3D visualization technologies. We have applied post-epistemological technology to prehistoric artifacts, a kind of historiography with energies aimed at the future. In order to better understand recently acquired 3D scanning and printing equipment we unpicked some historical precedents including an ancestor of 3D fabrication technology: an 1863 device for turning photographs into sculpture. It provides a genealogy not for the moving image but for the information model. As a collective of students and staff we figured out how to hack and build a bastard apparatus. In so doing we found that we were generating paradata: exploring the systems of the institution, the building of discipline and the vectors of control. ‘We tried a type of… performance that could influence the thinking of all the people engaged in it. It was, so to speak, art for the producer, not art for the consumer.’ (Brecht, 1964