Long Road

I have a number of presentations coming up that I am very excited about. Margo Smith the Director and Curator of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virgina invited me to give a talk about the Mukurtu project. They have a whole line up in April that began on April 1st with the opening of the “Virtuosity: the Evolution of Painting at Papunya Tula” exhibition curated by Fred Myers. Fred will be giving a talk, “Perceiving the Landscape in/through Western Desert Acrylic Paintings” on April 10th. I will be there a few weeks later on April 25 to give a talk, “A Safe Keeping Place: Shifting Museum Spaces and Embedded Aboriginal Cultural Protocols.” As part of my visit to UVA I will also be giving a talk at the Scholar’s Lab at UVA entitled “Culture at the Interface: Digital Archives and ‘Social’ Rights Management in Aboriginal Australia” earlier in the day of the 25th. It will be a long day for sure, but I am really looking forward to it. The two venues provide really nice settings to discuss the many features of the archive and its extensions in terms of both digital rhetorics/protocols and museum protocols and settings.

Then after I fly back across the country I’ll be home for a few days and then off to the University of British Colombia in Vancouver. Kate Hennessy (who was part of the team that created the Dane Wajich project as part of the Virtual Museum of Canada effort) invited me to be a part of a seminar she is co-organizing with Mike Ananny called “The Future of Public Institutions: New Media, the Press and the Museum.” The session she put together is “New Media and the Museum” and my talk is “Museums 2.0: Virtual Repatriation and Indigenous Digital Archives.”

As part of my trip to Vancouver I will also be meeting with Peter Brand from First Voices about the Mukurtu archive and some possiibilities for partnerships.

Whew! It should be fun, and then I come back to teach summer school