Metadata: Relating to images at Central Saint Martins
Early last year there was a small furore in the art and museum worlds around 3D scanning. Two artists, Nora Al-Badri and Nikolai Nelles, secretly 3D scanned the famous bust of Nefertiti in the Neues Museum in Berlin (a favourite museum of mine), and printed an exact replica to donate to a museum in Cairo. They called it Nefertiti Hack. While their action was a protest against foreign artefacts held in Western museums, questions around widening digital access to collections through digitisation - both 2D and 3D - have long been in debate in the museum sector. The tricky part, often, is the complex metadata that needs preparing to accompany all such digital copies.
Having heard so much about the 3D Nefertiti, I was delighted to find myself face-to-face with her last week at a new exhibition in Central Saint Martins' Lethaby Gallery. ‘METADATA: How We Relate to Images’ is a collaborative exhibition with the research group Bilderfahrzeuge, a phrase coined by influential art historian Aby Warburg that translates as 'image vehicles'. The exhibition seeks to change how we think about the concept of 'metadata' by highlighting how images and objects are themselves representatives of this: they contain information about other data. One goal is to look imaginatively at Central Saint Martins’ own Museum and Study Collection, which looks a treasure trove.
Likewise, we might think about 'data' as a fundamentally modern and digital concept, but the objects here range from Morris & Co. wallpaper designs, and a 19th-century plaster cast of a Renaissance bust, to Henrietta Simson's silk parachute printed with digital images of Giotto's fresco cycle in the Arena chapel in Padua and Sarah Craske's work reading the biological metadata left by generations of readers on a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Each object is easy to glance at and move on, but a thought to the metadata leaves you helplessly absorbed.
Indeed the exhibition works on its own system of metadata. While initially a little confusing, the simple system of large paper numbers next to each object takes you to the exhibition guide, which offers a way into each object through the lens of metadata. Without visible hierarchies of text panels, you are left to roam the exhibition as your eye leads you and make your own connections between the exhibits. One journey last week took me to the objects above, as well as a contemporary cross-stitched version of the Ambassadors' famous anamorphic skull by Lauren Jetty, and plaster casts of Mayan monuments in Palenque made by British archaeologist Alfred Maudslay in the 1890s. But on my next visit I look forward to a completely different trip through the metadata.