Re/materialising the imaginary artefact: exploring the role of digitisation, visualisation and materialisation in object-based art practice.

Re/materialising the imaginary artefact: exploring the role of digitisation, visualisation and materialisation in object-based art practice.Capturing digital versions of material things creates possibilities beyond the visualisation or reproduction of objects, allowing them to become a kind of 'hyper-material' for art practice (Bolter & Grusin 1999). Already able to act as the virtual embodiment of their sources in VR and animation, these 'digital doubles' can also be re-imagined and re-materialised to create new art objects able to call on the significance of their sources to generate new meanings in things.Across the disciplines of art, archaeology and anthropology, meaning is embodied in the object itself: where materiality, form and apparent function help to constitute its identity, alongside the stories and evidence of its making, and the histories and traces of its place, status and use. The art practice at the core of this project will draw on parallel approaches to the reconstructions of 'experimental archaeology' (Coles 1979) and explore the increasing role of the 'immaterial' in the production of knowledge around material culture (Buchli 2015). The resulting artwork will extend the traditional anthropological role of artefacts as 'remote sensors' able to report back across territories and through time, and implicate them in more unreliable forms of narration; conflating truth and fable, allegory and documentary, auto/biography and history.The project will call on philosophical thinking around materiality (Simon 2013) and the evolving ontology of objects (Harman 2002) to reflect on the nature of things; from the everyday objects of our lives (Heidegger 1971), into their role in helping to mediate our human, social and political interrelations (Latour 2005), and to constitute the inner realities of subjectivity, identity, emotion and belief (Scarry 1985). It will explore the status of specific types of objects as narrators of human experience, seeking to ultimately embody these relations in artworks as 'imaginary artefacts' that are able to slip back into the real.