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ART ON VIEW however, the limits of looking become apparent as one comes to understand a complex set of relationships between features that link objects to one another, a task that outstrips the capacities of the human eye and mind. Cloth arrived at the same conclusion many years ago, prompting him to write an algorithm that revealed various points of connection in his database of 2,000 Kota objects and enabled him to discern exciting new insights about the history of this artistic tradition. In collaboration with game developers Rampant Interactive and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, where he and I co-organized the 2015 exhibition Kota: Digital Excavations in African Art, Cloth helped make his research tool available to museum audiences in “Kota Data Cloud,” an interactive touch screen reprised for Look Again.7 Visitors are invited to group the objects on view and test their conclusions about how objects are related against Cloth’s algorithm-driven search engine. Look Again and the forthcoming reinstallation of the African collection at the Penn Museum are a testament to the dynamic, elastic, and fraught nature of African art in Western museums and, as a result, the gazes of Western viewers. While these objects will remain mute in response to many questions—details about their provenance, for example—we might pose to them, they offer us clues about how they were created and used both in their makers’ marks and subsequent signs of wear, affection, 100 FIG. 12 (left): Armlet. Edo culture, Kingdom of Benin, Nigeria. 16th century. Ivory. L: 12.9 cm. Penn Museum, Philadelphia, inv. 29-93-2. Purchased from the estate of George Byron Gordon. Photo courtesy of the Penn Museum. or neglect by their users. As the diverse contexts of the PMA and Penn Museum make clear, these objects are amenable to art historical as well as anthropological questions, and as Cloth’s research shows us, they are also open to ones posed by fi elds as distant as computer science. The more diverse the questions that are asked of them, the richer our understanding of African objects becomes and the more precious we realize collections like the Penn Museum’s are. Digital and scientifi c tools will continue to help us see African objects in new ways, whether it be at the level of big data or at the molecular level of material analysis, but none of these tools will advance our understanding of these works without doing the basic work of looking and looking again. Look Again: Contemporary Perspectives on African Art Through 4 December 2016 Philadelphia Museum of Art philamuseum.org FIG. 13 (below): Installation view of Look Again showing Benin royal heads. Photo courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photograph by Timothy Tiebout, 2016.


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