Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Wednesday, October 3, 2018 in Conferences, Digital Humanities, Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Lectures, News, Technology, Vanderbilt University, VRC.

With the rise of new technologies, the definition of objects is changing along with our understanding of collecting. Collectibles are no longer limited to their material shape but also appear on screen, retrieved from source codes and algorithms. The simultaneity of actual and virtual objects is transforming our cultural memory. Concepts of our past and projections of our future increasingly rely on “collections” of data to preserve, protect, and produce memory. Traditionally considered a form of human self-understanding, the social practice of collecting today serves to memorialize culture in ways that exceed the capacities of museums and archives. Indeed, the technological achievements of the past two decades necessitate a redefinition of the concept of collecting as a whole.

Vanderbilt’s Department of History of Art, Fine Arts Gallery, Department of Art, and Department of German, Russian & East European Studies are among the many sponsors of a four-day international conference addressing “Memorizing the Future: Collecting in the 21st Century” held October 4-7 at various venues. Mireille Lee, assistant professor of history of art, will serve on a panel on Saturday, October 6, from 8:30 to 10:00 a.m. in the Central Library Community Room. Her paper is entitled “Modern Collections of Ancient Greek Mirrors: Appropriating the Past, Reflecting the Present, Imag(in)ing the Future.”

Lee is a specialist in the art and archaeology of ancient Greece, with a special interest in constructions of gender in ancient Greek society. Her first book, Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece was published by Cambridge University in 2015. She is now writing a monograph on ancient Greek mirrors for Oxford University Press. She has won fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, and the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, among others. She has a special interest in cultural heritage issues, and the potential of technology to protect and preserve the remains of the past for the future.

The conference’s goal is to lay the foundation for a new theory of collecting in the light of both the most recent and anticipated technological innovations. It aims to facilitate dialogues between scholars from different academic fields, artists, archivists, curators, and IT experts; to reassess our traditional understanding of cultural memory in light of technological advances; to examine how the private and public spheres of collection are merging or diverging, and identify how both collecting institutions and individual collectors are reaching out to their virtual and actual visitors and followers; and to determine the common interests that academia, institutions, and businesses as well as private collectors share in a market of collecting.