Almost all the artifacts that we value as a society were made by or at the order of men.
Debbie Chachra, “Beyond Making,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentry Sayers, Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
This particular passage stems true to me. Every time I go to a museum, I see beautiful sculptures and paintings from the BCE to the present and it always surprised me on how creative humans are. I remember going to the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) and seeing furnitures from 19th century China, big heads of the buddha, a portrait of a 16th century French noblemen’s wife, and so on. Some of the sculptures have cracks, and some even have missing noses; paintings might also have cracks from the old finishes. All of these issues will happen with age, but I think this is where digital arts and humanities comes in and help so that present people viewing these artifacts could see how it was originally intended.
I think an element of my current interest that it kindle was the idea of seeing all the art pieces in its original form: what if the statue of this Roman emperor still has its nose? and so on. But I’m also interested in creating things that can actually help in one’s day to day life: maybe designing a 3D model for cable management in MIA so that there won’t be a shadow of a cable hanging projected on a painting, etc. This makes it so that people can view the artifacts without getting distracted by non-intended mistakes. And so making useful things that also supports the viewing of artifacts is very intriguing to me.
I am mostly eager to use 3D modeling technology this term. During my sophomore winter break, I bought a couple 45rpm records to add to my vinyl collection, but I realized that I do not have an adapter for them on my record player. So I went to the Maker Space and 3D printed an adapter. To give context, 33rpm records are normal album records that you usually find in Target or Walmart or the record shop in downtown Northfield. 45rpm records are singles–meaning that it only has one song per side instead of a full album–with a too-wide hollow hole in the middle, which needs an adapter to be played on a normal record player. Making an adapter is just one of many useful things 3D modeling has been useful to me, and I hope to work with it more during the term.
