Museum x Machine x Me Practice Research Displays

Be immersed in installations exploring how museums collect and care for collections, how people, artworks and objects gain or lose recognition, and the potential role of new technologies in unearthing these stories.  

Christina Peake
The Faith, Spirits and Testimonies of Granny Lowe and the Bajan Sea

Peake presents an archipelago of imagined objects that appear to have been taken from marine environments in the Caribbean, including Wayfinding Shells – Exodus, ‘the Maroons’ Diadem – Soul Bonded, Divination Bowl – The Last Mangrove, Graeme Hall Sanctuary, and Submerged Mothers – Ancestral Reef Regeneration. Animated by underwater footage captured off the coast of Cornwall, and accompanied by speculative narratives, these artefacts become living entities evoking the spirit of the communities, individuals, and multiple worlds they may have come from. The artefacts are joined together via the coral island, to show the connection between collections and cosmologies, histories, and futures.

Erika Tan
Ancestral (r)Evocations

Through a series of sonic and visual elements, Tan uses sound as a way of recalling a feeling, memory or image that might be considered invisible, silent, or inert. Focusing on items relating to ‘Southeast Asia’ in the Tate and Wellcome collections, Tan works between art and medical history. Data gathered from these collections is fed through a ‘Diagnostic Instrument’, triggering sounds made from fragmented instruments from the region, that reverberate sound through the physical buildings of these institutions.  This work is a search for kinship, as well as an interrogation into the depths of museum collections, their processes and current states of ‘health and wellbeing’.

Yu-Chen Wang
How We Are Where We Are

Wang investigates the visual tropes used by museums founded in nineteenth-century Britain, a period marked by industrial development, economic progress and imperial expansion. The artist has researched the social relations and power dynamics that shaped institutions in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and London. She focusses on museum spaces, both the physical architecture and intangible systems of collecting and interpreting, and how these museums represent the relationship between art, industry and empire. Moving through the installation, suggestive of a theatre set, the audience is encouraged to seek new perspectives, and reflect on how we perceive museum collections and narratives.

Museum x Machine x Me

Curated by susan pui san lok and Mark Miller, the Museum x Machine x Me programme aims to share some of the practice research insights and findings generated by the 3-year project, Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage, led by the University of the Arts London (UAL) Decolonising Arts Institute and Creative Computing Institute with Tate, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Learn more about the artists and their work.