Culture Capture 001(2018)

The looped work Culture Capture 001 takes place within the same museum as seen in NRO’s previous video. We come to recognize the masked figures observing Native American objects held inside the collection cases as accomplices of the public secret society. They diligently photograph, scan, and record these objects through smartphones, transferring the images and dimensional information of them into data to potentially be reconstituted and liberated from these settings. Though these objects are presented within the museum’s framings as static, historical, and fixed in the past, they are in fact lively and dynamic, entities within an embodied present. The “Culture Capture” project is introduced through demonstration as one of the potential processes that accomplices in the anticolonial struggle can undertake, toward liberating, reconfiguring, and transforming institutions towards reparative ends. – Herb Shellenberger