Reflective Blog Post – Archive Project Part 1

When we started this process, I thought, “I’m so thankful we didn’t have to model these in fusion”! I find that there’s a certain level of intricacy and detail that is noticed when modeling something versus passively viewing an object in a museum. When looking at a model, we sometimes fail to realize that each and every little nook and cranny that you see was intentionally added by someone (or maybe something) that took pains to reflect the original image down to those minute details. If you’re modeling something that you truly care about, you may not notice, but you often pay so much more attention to those little things that you’d otherwise glance over. Comparing this process specifically to viewing one in an exhibition, I can’t say that there is a significant difference since the app is doing most of the work. There is extra care to capture every angle, but as compared to modeling by hand, the object’s itself isn’t studied in too much detail otherwise.

Going a step further than merely observing a part of history has made me think not only about the passion archivist and those who model, record, and preserve history have for the subject, but also about the importance of objectivity in those fields, especially when both art and history are already so subjective, somewhat by nature. Again, especially with modeling, you need to choose what to include, and what’s important. Tying this back into what we did earlier, a lot of us didn’t get the bottom of the image because there was “nothing interesting there”. Often times these choices have to be made on what and what not to include for a variety of reasons, but at the end of the day, those data points we leave out are effectively hidden and completely unknown to our audience. Despite the controversy around being intentional about what we present, it is often a rather unavoidable step in this line of work, sometimes due to technological limitations, censorship, or for the sake of generalizability to a larger audience. Being an active modeler has made me think more about how various publics are communicated to about art and history. It’s no longer restricted to museums and textbooks. We can open an online archive and browse to our hearts content! This doesn’t mean that everything piece of art and historical media we consume is presented in a way that reveals the intentions of the original work, or the reality of the historical era, but it does highlight and influence what to cut.