Overview
Augmented Curiosities: Virtual Play in African Pasts and Futures (2023–2024) is an experimental exhibition that investigates how immersive technologies can transform audience engagement with African material culture.
The project integrates photogrammetry, virtual and augmented reality, and interactive media to create affective and empathetic encounters between viewers and digitized artifacts. Rather than presenting objects as static displays, the exhibition positions immersive experience as a legitimate form of scholarly interpretation, inviting curiosity, reflection, and relational understanding.
Technologies inspire the creation of new subjectivities, changing our points of perspective and augmenting the ways in which we perceive. Through ever-expanding applications of innovation, humans recontextualize realities. We use the tools of the present to formulate our visions of the future and our understandings of the past. Along these explorations of meaning, we apply interfaces of magic upon the seemingly mundane to educate and entertain.
Augmented Curiosities engages our technological entanglements through the emerging, immersive, and experiential visualization techniques of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Critiquing the colonial dynamics of the “cabinets of curiosity” that significantly influenced Western museum practices, Augmented Curiosities provides opportunities for intimate and playful interactions with African material culture from the Herskovits Library Collection. Through this digitally tactile experience, the exhibition presents synergies of the technical and the tangible as a community-oriented framework for future museum curation.
