Object or Text? Or Neither???

I never considered writing as part of my professional career. I was aware I had to do it, but only well enough to manifest my thoughts onto paper, or to name Illustrator files with the correct wording letting me know its the ACTUAL final. I never considered the need for my writing to be eloquent and efficient at communicating my thoughts.

I started my undergrad degree as a Communication Design student at UNT. During the semester I was taking the foundation communication design courses, I realized I had an inclination towards logos and type rather than illustrations. Looking back, I didn't really think about it my inclination. I just dwelled on the fact that I could not illustrate. I couldn’t come up with multiple whimsical versions of the same illustration. I had too many questions that stopped me, and it was really hard for me to visually imagine something that doesn’t exist. Some people develop a style of illustrating personal to their own and then they just filter everything through themselves, but my illustration style was non existent at the time. I enjoyed typography thoroughly. I enjoyed the fact that you can alter a letter slightly enough to give it multiple uses. To be able to use type flexibly to convey as many messages as I want. I am good words, so good I enjoy playing with just one letter.

The letter was my object. The digital typeface was my first object of study. There is a need in art history to study the object, I have never quite understood this. My interactions with objects is digitally. The digital object is not a copy. It is simply digital. It is its own entity because it exists in a world that is not the physical world we inhabit. It becomes physical to us by means of an object, but it is never really a physical form. Then, we have the 3D printer and the 3D scanner, technologies that have altered our relationships with objects. How does the role of the historian function in the digitized world we are transitioning our thinking to? I consider myself to be a digital age historian, my relationships with objects and artifacts is different from a historian who thought of objects as exclusively in the physical world. I work with virtual and physical objects to make exhibitions for living humans. As a historian and maybe a curator, my best actual subjects to build from reliably is living humans. To find stories and objects that resonates with humans alive today which reminds them of their eternal connection through time on this earth. To generate new ways of seeing how we are connected and the adventures we have been on as a society to have things such as 3D printing and wifi. The evolution of human creativity and ingenuity is a history that belongs to all.

Transitioning this way of viewing objects and history to my work at the Texas Fashion Collection has made me realize how lacking my relationship with the written word and the physical object is. Part of the fashion collection is currently being digitized to be made accessible on a digital library through the University of North Texas. I used to think that digitizing the object was removing a layer of meaning and adding another, but the digital object is sometimes more informative than the physical object now. You can’t always see stitching without holding it close to your face, but with a digital file, you can zoom in so close you can see the individual threads of the stitching. What does history have to gain from looking at our objects of creative ingenuity through time in that way? It is as if we are looking at everything from a microscope. Prior to the microscope, we only knew our human bodies from what we can dissect and physically open up, through technologies we were allowed to peer into ourselves from a removed point of view and it has allowed us to understand our bodies on a different level, how do technologies allow us to study art in a way that illuminates our ingenuity? What might we gain  from that? How can I use my physical access to the Fashion Collection to create a digital interpretations which might allow others to learn something from the same physical object in a way physical access cannot?