Phased Transmission

Concepts & Methods Unit 3

Within UWA II’s overall attempt to enrich the study of WAs as material objects by highlighting their flexibility and adaptability, CMU 3 will develop an analytic framework for understanding the life cycles of WAs in terms of content, materiality and context.

Dynamic processes of recontextualisation, reappropriation and reconfiguration are inherent parts of a WA’s life cycle following its initial production phase. Transmission of WAs can thus be understood as a series of – often transformative – events and phases that leave their traces on the WA and create layers of material, significance and context. What a WA is considered to ‘be’ at different moments of its existence is determined by its previous transmission. A comprehensive approach to a WA, its biography and its accumulated cultural significance hence necessitates attempts to trace and reconstruct those (material) marks of transmission that have become an integral part of the object.

Accordingly, CMU 3 will conceptualise the biographical phases of WAs, with special attention to moments of change. We will put centre stage 1) the various forms of caring for WAs in their subsequent life cycles; 2) phenomena of destruction or degradation; 3) and the scholarly retrieval, de- and recontextualisation, and examination which leave their own traces on the object and/or within its context.