Academic Blog — The Bright Continent

Remember Minority Report? No, not the concept that criminals could be rooted out before they committed a crime, but just the sight of Tom Cruise waving his hands in the air and manipulating data. On Sept. 1, I had a similar experience at Boise State University’s Luminary, the Art Department’s state-of-the-art digital showcase. The occasion was a guest lecture for Lisa Hunt’s course "Non-Western Art in Global Museums," and I felt like a magician as I blew up screens into details, transitioned from the Pitt-Rivers interior to individual pieces, and felt the enthusiasm from the students.

The Luminary’s technology is based on open-source coding in use at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which I’ve seen and enjoyed, but this was custom work geared toward a look at Benin art that was either Creative Commons or public domain. The students’ projects will feature a digital exhibition, and I envy them their ability to play and learn the intricacies of the system, whose basics are quite intuitive.

I was in Boise for the nearby Surel’s Place residency in Garden City, a one-month opportunity to write fiction (see my Palmlands page). As I was working on the second of my Benin Kingdom mysteries and fine-tuning my academic manuscript about Oba Esigie, everything worked well together. But will the classroom’s ordinary digital projections ever seem standard again? I’ve got a year of sabbatical to forget this splendor!