REMAKING THE MUSEUM:
ANTHROPOLOGY, ART, and SCIENCE

Objects hold stories—through their materials, journeys of exchange, and the evolving meanings they acquire in new contexts. As an artist and anthropologist exploring science and technology, I study how materials are made to matter. With over two decades in science museums as an exhibit curator, designer, and researcher, I have interviewed scientists, created exhibits, and made art inspired by encounters with collections of objects and scientific cultures. My work centers on translation and transformation—synthesizing complex scientific ideas and distilling them into words, images, and experiences that engage audiences in the narratives objects hold.

In my art practice, I curate a collection of interpretive replicas, exploring the blurred lines between originals and copies to reveal the layered histories each object holds. By recontextualizing scientific artifacts from collections into the public space of exhibits, I invite audiences to reflect on the relationships between originals and replicas, art and artifact, and collectors and the collected. Each object becomes a lens through which to view the collaborative process of knowledge creation and the ongoing dialogues between cultural histories, scientific advancements, and contemporary values.

My art projects have explored science, history, and art through reimagined objects. In Objectivity, I recreated Galileo’s prototype telescope in Rome, allowing viewers to gaze at the same stars Galileo saw in 1611—now from a modern, heliocentric perspective. In Microdot Micrographia, I condensed the pages of Robert Hooke’s 1665 microscopy book into microdots on 200 microscope slides, returning the iconic flea to its original scale. In Cargo, I crafted porcelain casts from 3D-scanned natural history specimens, merging two types of 17th-18th century cargo—the Dutch East India Company’s export ceramics and exotic specimens—to examine nature’s commodification.

Collections are not merely accumulated objects but dynamic assemblages of people, places, and ideas. They reflect the lives of those who made, used, and collected the objects, embodying shifting cultural perspectives and memories. My work with material culture connects objects with the broader social and cultural networks that give them meaning, from the histories embedded in their forms to the geographic and cultural borders they cross.

In both art and anthropology, I explore how technologies reshape our understanding of life and non-life alike. Through hands-on practices like crafting replicas, I examine how we construct our identities through the scientific instruments and digital tools that populate museum and laboratory spaces. Drawing on scholarship that considers the biographical paths of objects, I examine how scientific instruments and their digital counterparts shape perceptions of nature, objectivity, and place. My art and anthropology practices are informed by these encounters with the evolving visions and imagined futures of science, each encounter revealing new facets of our entangled histories.

Adrian Van Allen, October 2024